Israeli hostage deaths spur fresh push to free Gaza captives

For eight months, families of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 have been imploring Israel’s government to strike whatever deal is needed to bring them home alive.

Their demands were given fresh and bitter urgency this week as Israel’s military confirmed that four more of the 124 captives still held in Gaza had died, underscoring the families’ argument that Israel’s military campaign alone will not save their loved ones.

“Tonight we got unequivocal proof of the result of military pressure,” Einav Zangauker — whose son Matan was kidnapped on October 7 from Kibbutz Nir Oz — told an impromptu protest on Monday evening outside the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces in Tel Aviv. “We get them back dead.”

The news on Monday capped a rollercoaster few days for the families of the hostages. On Friday evening, US President Joe Biden spelt out the details of what he said was an Israeli proposal for a three-stage deal to bring home the hostages and ultimately end the fighting.

But four days on, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has repeatedly insisted Israel will not end the war before Hamas is destroyed — has yet to issue an unequivocal response to Biden’s gambit, with far-right ministers threatening to topple his government if he accepts it.

Meanwhile, despite the best efforts of the hostage families, the protests demanding that Netanyahu agree to a deal have not yet reached a large enough scale to force the prime minister’s hand.

“There have been ups and downs through these eight months. It’s difficult to maintain intensive pressure. Sometimes more people come out and sometimes less,” said Malki Shem-Tov, whose son Omer was seized from the Nova festival and remains captive in Gaza.

But confirmation of the latest deaths “shows the urgency that this saga needs to end”, he added. “They don’t have time . . . every second over there is dangerous, whether from Hamas or IDF fire.”

Udi Goren, whose cousin Tal Haimi was killed on October 7 and his body taken to Gaza by Hamas, said there were multiple reasons why more people were not protesting, ranging from being engaged in reserve duty with the military, to having to deal with businesses destroyed by the war.

But he said that if the public spoke with a “strong voice” then the government would have to listen. “We say to the public: ‘What if it was your daughter, or father, or son in Gaza right now?’ We need mutual solidarity and responsibility here from all the public.”

Dahlia Scheindlin, a pollster and political analyst, said opinion surveys had consistently shown that a majority, or at least a plurality, of Israelis favoured a deal to bring the hostages home. But translating this into a broad enough public mobilisation to force Israel’s decision makers to agree to a hostage deal had been complicated by various factors.

The scale of Hamas’s hostage-taking on October 7 meant that Israel was always going to have to make very big concessions to bring all the captives home. The situation has been further complicated as more and more hostages have died in captivity. According to the Israeli authorities, at least 43 of the 124 hostages still in Gaza are no longer thought to be alive.

“Very consistently, throughout the war, more people support than oppose a hostage deal . . . but there’s often a big portion of respondents who don’t know, which is very striking. The Israelis are anguished, confused and feel that they’re being trapped into very bad options,” said Scheindlin.

Another factor, she said, was that many people “do not feel like demonstrating at [a] time of war is the right thing to do. They feel like it’s bad for the unity of the country. Or they’re just too exhausted and depressed.”

For now, Biden’s speech does not appear to have forced a breakthrough. The two ultraorthodox groups in Netanyahu’s five-party coalition both said they would back a deal, with Yitzhak Goldknopf, head of United Torah Judaism, saying there was “nothing greater than the value of life”.

Meanwhile, Benny Gantz, the opposition leader who joined the emergency government in the wake of the Hamas attack, said returning the hostages was currently the “supreme moral obligation” of the government.

But the two extreme-right parties in the coalition — Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism and Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power — have vehemently opposed the deal, with both men threatening to topple the government if Netanyahu agrees to end the fighting before Hamas is destroyed.

Despite the political dysfunction, the families of the hostages have not given up hope. Speaking after Biden’s speech, Ella Ben-Ami, whose father Ohad is among those still captive in Gaza, said the US president had expressed what the families had been saying since the start of the war.

“October 7 is happening again and again and again to our brothers and sisters in captivity,” she said, directing her gaze straight at the camera of the widely watched Channel 12 TV bulletin.

“I want to appeal here to all the citizens of Israel: this is the moment . . . If we vote with our feet, the government will act. So I call on everyone, in the coming days, go out from your homes, come stand with us in the streets, come yell with us to save our brothers.

“And dad, to you I say: ‘Our hug will arrive soon. Hold on’.”