32 Hostages Are Dead

I spent the first few days of my trip to Israel last month inside the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. It should have been a terrible place to be, owing to the reasons people were there, their loved ones having been taken hostage and brought to Gaza on October 7. But it wasn’t only terrible; it often felt like a buzzing colony, everyone working at capacity and in their areas of expertise, the lawyers, the filmmakers, the pizza chefs, the psychologists, and most tirelessly, the parents; they would speak to everyone about their missing children, they would not go home, they would live in a tent outside of the forum so the world not have the opportunity to forget that their children were still missing.

Ideology makes people blind, makes them tweet at me, regarding the young people grabbed from the Nova music festival, “Well, were they active IDF or not?” The insinuation being that, if they were of military age it doesn’t matter if they were on-duty or at a festival or washing their hair or having their gallbladder removed, they are fair game to be snatched up, shoved in cars, beaten, kept in tunnels and, as the world has just now learned, murdered, the Israeli military reporting that at least 32 of the hostages are dead and likely have been since October 7.

The anguish this must bring to the families is overwhelming; to realize that all the hope and effort and begging of fate and railing at the gods and prayer were, it turns out, for you. But what else can they do? If you do not stay active, if you do not hold onto hope and incant so hard you imagine you are building the rope to your child, if you let go of that, you have nothing in your hands. There is very little room today for anything but sorrow.

But I am also angry. How do you watch the below video, the mother of Romi Gonen explaining that, in what she thought might be the last moments of her daughter’s life, she sought to comfort her over the phone, and have your burning question be whether Romi was currently serving in the IDF?

I have no idea yet whether the parents I spoke with received horrible news today. I am trying to find out more now. I told the people I interviewed that I would not let their loved ones names be forgotten: Omer Shem Tov. Romi Gonen. Oded Lifshitz.

Additional writing on the hostages:

“Dispatch from Israel: Inside the Hope Machine.”

“Bring Them Home Now: Omer Shem Tov, age 21.”

“Bring Them Home Now: Romi Gonen, 23.”

“The grandson of two people taken from Nir Oz Kibbutz tells the story of their survival, death, and resurrection.”

“On the Missing, the Dead, My Dad and Bari Weiss.”