Resumed fighting leaves remaining hostages even more vulnerable

The return of Israel to war with Hamas is intensifying fears among hostages’ families for the lives of their loved ones.

While the government insists that added military pressure can force Hamas to free the hostages, the consensus at protests on behalf of the 24 hostages still believed to be alive is that Israel’s shattering of the ceasefire could kill them.

Some worry that army bombing will strike their relatives. “Going back to war was our biggest fear,” said Macabit Mayer, the aunt of hostages Gali and Zivi Berman, twins who were seized from Kibbutz Nir Oz during the October 7 Hamas massacre. “The military pressure is liable to kill them, or their captors may harm them.

A month ago, the family was told by released hostages that the twins are alive but are being held separately. “We heard from hostages who returned what happens to hostages when the military pressure starts, and this makes us very worried. We think they can be saved only through a political agreement."

Moving into the second phase of the ceasefire deal the government signed would have brought home all the remaining hostages, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. It also would have obliged Israel to stop the war and pull its troops out of Gaza. Those are conditions short of the “total victory” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to achieve.

Critics of the Israeli government see ulterior motives at work. By going back to the fighting, Netanyahu has shored up his coalition. Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who pulled his Jewish Power party out of the government citing the ceasefire, has returned to the cabinet in advance of a crucial budget vote.  The move came right after Israeli aerial bombardments restarted the war. 

The stated goal of the fighting remains to eliminate Hamas leaders and functionaries, but the first strikes came just before dawn as families slept, contributing to a large number of child fatalities, according to reports from Gaza. 

Left-wing commentators believe there is much more to the military push than the budget. Netanyahu wants to maintain the country in a state of war because this makes it easier for him to remove checks on power and transform Israel into an authoritarian state, they argue. 

But resuming the fighting violates the state’s cardinal obligation to bring back the citizens withering and suffering in Hamas’ tunnels, in the eyes of supporters of the hostages’ families. Families of slain Israelis also want to see corpses in Gaza brought back to burial in Israel.

In a wave of street protests, the cause of the hostages has fused with the cause of stopping Netanyahu from ousting Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara – steps seen as endangering democracy. The protesters see themselves as affirming life by insisting on the return of the hostages, while their opponents depict them as harming an imperative to eradicate Hamas – if that is possible – and defying a democratically-elected government. 

Vicky Cohen, whose soldier son Nimrod was seized on October 7 with the rest of his tank crew, told The Jewish Independent that she has zero faith in the government’s intentions. “We really need the Jewish communities abroad to put as much pressure as possible on the government of Israel to do the right thing,” she said.

Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, has depicted the hostages’ families support for adhering to the ceasefire as endangering Israel’s security, saying in a post on X last month that it will embolden Hamas to abduct more Israelis and to make more demands. He wrote that “a responsible state that desires life is not run through their [the families’] lens and cannot let emotion overcome reason and endanger its existence.” 

Speaking on Friday near the Prime Minister’s residence to hundreds of supporters seated on plastic chairs amid a drizzle, Cohen summed up the sense of betrayal by the far-right coalition’s decision-makers.

“We educated our children to give everything to the state and to perform meaningful military service,” she said. 

“Nimrod joined the army out of a sense of mission and thought that if, God forbid, he falls prisoner, the state would do everything possible to bring him home. But this did not happen. He is still in a dark and dangerous place. What can he be thinking? Why doesn’t the state bring him back? Hostages who were with him have been released, but he’s still there. The state isn’t fighting for him or the other hostages. It’s fighting for other things.

“Those who are fighting are we: the families and the public. We won’t give up and we demand they bring back every one of them for the sake of all of us as a society. We will not be able to move forward and rebuild our lives without their return.” 

The Gaza offensive is still escalating. Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel predicts it will lead to re-occupation of the Strip and installation of a military government.  Israel is blocking humanitarian aid and Defense Minister Israel Katz is repeatedly raising the prospect of a “voluntary” departure of the Palestinian population, something critics say would amount to the crime of ethnic cleansing. 

For Lee Siegel, the brother of returned hostage Keith, who was starved and tortured in captivity, Netanyahu is choosing values which “are not values of life”.

“Those are not values I grew up on as an American Zionist Jew and they are not values I want my children and grandchildren and the next generation to live by. That’s not the Israel that’s going to provide a secure future for the Jewish people,” he told TJI. 

“War kills. It kills hostages, it does not save hostages’ lives. We’ve been doing this for 532 days and the results are the same. The framework is there, our government signed off on it. We agreed to three phases, now we’re not going even into the second phase. It’s not acceptable. We’re breaking our agreement.” 

Siegel added that it would be impossible for Keith to recover unless all the hostages came home. “Keith is good but the only thing that will allow him to return to some sort of normalcy, to start to do that, is bringing all the hostages home, [including] those that he was with some of the time. He knows what they are going through.” 

Mayer said her twin nephews, 27-year-old Gali and Zivi, are “guys who are full of life. They’re very attached to each other. They’ve never been separated. They have the same hobbies. They are fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv and Liverpool. They are very devoted and they took care of their father who has a severe disability. They love traveling and they worked in a company for amplifying and lighting [concerts]. They have loads and loads of friends and many people from the entertainment and culture world know them. They are good kids who just want to come home."

But Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s parties appear willing to “sacrifice Gali and Zivi”, she said. As for Netanyahu, Mayer chose her words carefully: “I want to think there aren’t political considerations and to hope that through his eyes he sees only one objective. Honestly, I don’t know. I only know that at this moment, the war is endangering them and the soldiers.” 

She urged the Jewish diaspora to take a stand: "My expectation of the Jews in the diaspora is that they will dominate the discourse, speak within their communities and influence world public opinion.

"They must understand that even if they don’t live in Israel, they are still Jews and Jews have to care about Jews regardless of where they are,” Mayer concluded.