Amid tears, the last hostage body gives Israel a moment of hope

As I’m processing this news, I’m returned to October 13, 2025, the day the last 20 living hostages were returned. 

I woke before dawn that Monday to watch the live broadcast of the Israeli hostages returning home from Gaza. By eight in the morning, I was at the Hostage Families’ Tent in Jerusalem, a place that had been the location of a determined and anguished protest for two long years. More than a thousand people had taken the day off work to be there, joined in spirit by countless others watching from Hostage Square in Tel Aviv or from screenings across the country. The atmosphere was electric, like a World Cup final, only the stakes were infinitely higher.

Each time the camera revealed a familiar face, the crowd erupted. None of us had met these people, yet it felt as though our own sons and daughters were coming home. That’s what watching thousands of hours of footage about these people did to us. Whether we saw them on billboards, in newspapers, on TV or on our phones, a whole nation came to know the hostages’ parents, siblings, school friends, kindergarten teachers, and even their favourite football teams. They had become part of our extended national family. When they finally returned from the darkness, the joy and relief that swept through the country were those of a people reunited.

First came Eitan Mor, and the crowd burst into applause. Then came cheers for Gali and Ziv Berman, followed by an audible sigh of relief when Guy Gilboa Dalal appeared on screen. 

The loudest roar was reserved for the moment when Matan Zangauker fell into the arms of his lion-hearted mother, Einav. For two years, she had been the public face of the hostages’ struggle, blocking roads, giving thousands of interviews, and even locking herself in a cage suspended over a Tel Aviv highway to demand the government bring her son home. When she finally embraced him, she wept the words every Israeli longed to say: “Haim sheli, haim sheli, ein milchama” — “My life, my life, there is no more war.”

And so, on that day back in October when the last living hostages came home and again today when the last coffin was returned, our nation exhaled. The lesson was clear: empathy, our capacity to feel another’s pain and joy as our own, was the force that had unified us. And it’s also the force that can finally end this war. 

As I watched the news of Ran Givili’s body draped in an Israeli flag in Gaza, I was deeply moved by the soldiers singing Hatikvah as they saluted the coffin. At the same time, I noticed the buzzing of the drone overhead, a sound that accompanies so many of the videos I see from Gaza, which for Palestinians signals the fear of an imminent attack. Around the scene where the soldiers were singing in tears at Ran’s return, there were destroyed buildings as far as the eye can see. Ran’s body was found in a mass grave of 250 people in a Gaza City cemetery. Of the people buried there, I know none of their names, their hopes, dreams, or if the families who could mourn them are even alive. Yet I feel their pain.  

Acknowledging the presence of loss and grief from Gaza to Jerusalem is essential if we are ever to build a shared future. Humanisation is not a sentimental goal; it is a necessary, realistic tool for political survival.

The path to peace is brutal, demanding painful compromises on many core beliefs. No leader can ask their public to make such sacrifices without a fundamental shift in perception. That shift requires us to apply the same intense, personal lens we used for our hostages to the suffering of our homeless neighbours in Gaza and to those displaced by settler violence in the West Bank. 

When a critical mass of Israelis can internalise the immense, generation-deep loss of Palestinian families in Rafah and Khan Younis the same way we internalised the grief of Ran Gvili’s parents, nothing will be the same. For this to happen, Palestinians too must come to see the pain of Israelis, acknowledging that our fate is to till this soil, to grow the olives and harvest the strawberries of this land together.

The next step toward peace isn't hope; it's the difficult, necessary work of loving our neighbour as we do ourselves. Only this way can the memory of all who suffered so much be honoured in a manner that allows this land to be shared in peace.