Every day for a week hostages got out of Gaza until, all of a sudden, they didn’t.
This is a segment from The “Kids Out, Kids In” Edition.
And now it is time for our first discussion.
So Linda, what a strange thing it was that week of hostage release and ceasefire, and what a terrible thing when it ended, right?
Yes, it really was.
And as you said last Friday, the daily return of hostages ended after a week, seemingly all at once, seemingly without warning.
And it was a shock.
The deal had called for up to 10 days of hostage returns, and many people expected that when the 10 days ended, the deal would in any case be extended.
But on Thursday night, Hamas did not issue a list of hostages to be released on the following day, and eventually we understood that none would.
Days later, we learned that through intermediaries, Hamas offered to release elderly men it is holding hostage instead of the children and women that the original deal said would be released first.
And Israeli negotiators insisted on sticking to the original deal.
After that, we learned from U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller that Hamas is not releasing the women it is holding captive because, quote, “They don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody, meaning rape and other sexual violence.
” Israeli sources said one of the reasons they insisted that the women be released first was because they knew that some of the women hostages are suffering torture and sexual violence.
The shock of the abrupt collapse of the hostage release deal followed a week of what you can maybe call the rolling shock of the hostages release.
Herb Kanan, senior editor and diplomacy expert at the Jerusalem Post, wrote a piece headlined “Hostage Release Deal Led to a Week Like No Other in Israeli History” that argued that though Israelis have seen in the past hostages taken and hostages released, they’ve never experienced a week like this.
And this is from the piece.
“It was a week of watching, day after day, videos of daughters running into the arms of fathers and mothers gently stroking the faces of sons not seen for more than 30 days.
Yet it was also a week of listening to grandparents heartbreaking pleas that their grandchildren be on the next day’s list of people to be let go, and grandchildren begging that their grandfathers be released or at least be provided with medication.
It was a week of reading about the cruel ordeals the hostages faced in Hamas captivity, a week of listening to soul-crushing interviews of children returning whose parents were murdered, a week wondering whether the war would resume tomorrow, once again sending the country’s soldiers and reservists, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters back into harm’s way.
It was a week with an ordeal that never ended.
” Noah, what was the week like for you and as far as you can tell for us?
What if anything did you learn during the week from the week about the war, about the country, about the hostages and their families, about anything?
And what was it like for you and as far as you can tell for the rest of us when the week ended and suddenly we were back at war and the 138 people who remain in captivity remained in captivity?
I feel like I’m not learning nothing from nothing, and I don’t know exactly what I learned from that, but I really was eager to talk with you about this because I can’t make sense of that week and I couldn’t entirely make sense of it while it was happening.
It had some of the moments of greatest relief that I can remember in my entire life.
It was just filled with these incredible stories day after day, and everyone of the hostages looks like someone you know.
So it’s not hard to feel some connection, but we all have special connections, some of the people.
And one of my special connections was just to this family, a mother and two children who are cousins of my girl’s best friend, the Brodatz family.
And my girl’s best friend is Yael Brodatz, and the father was the first of the families of the hostages to protest.
He pulled out a lawn chair and he put it in front of the kiriya and said, “I’m just going to sit here until my loved ones are released.
” And the little girl, who’s maybe 10 years old, she looks just like Yael.
She looks just like Yael is 27 or something, but she looks just like a little younger version of her.
And when they came out, which was something like the seventh day or near the end, it just was impossible to stop crying.
It was just like the most overwhelming thing.
And so I would have, if I was trying to predict how I would feel in that week, I would have thought it was just this series of one relief after another, one joy after another.
But it was in fact torturesome the whole way through, even at the beginning when it was like, so the first day, I don’t know what, 15, some larger number were released.
And all we had to look forward to was another maybe three days, maybe week, maybe nine days, maybe more of people being released.
So you would have felt as though it was this moment when you could just feel the joy of it.
But the moment that the first kids and women were released, all I could think about were those poor soldiers who are there, who it was clear from just the way the deal was set up that every person who got released, the chances of them getting released went down.
So every joy was like a little tragedy or little movement towards a tragedy.
And so it was impossible to not, you saw these incredible things of people reunited and hugging and crying, and it was just incredible.
But it was so torturesome, even the happiest moments.
I mean, it was like breaking of the glass every moment.
It’s not just like we remember the sadness at the moments of joy.
It was completely inseparable.
And the relief was so profound for each of those people.
And each of them have their own lives.
And for each of those people, it was like a world restored, an entire world restored.
But you could not think of the other people.
I don’t know.
What was it like for you?
No, I agree.
It’s funny ’cause I have a slightly different kind of experience because the person who I know is Hirsch Goldberg-Polen, whose parents, Rachel and John are friends.
And who have been, Rachel has become kind of these, at least English language spokesperson for the hostages.
And Hirsch and Aner, his best friend are from our neighborhood.
Our kids were in Ghan together in nursery school.
And Aner, it turns out was an incredible hero.
They were at the music festival and they were hiding in one of these, Migunit, one of these little huts.
And when Hamas attacked and started throwing grenades, Aner who was in soldier, still in active duty, was catching the grenades and threw them back until the eighth time he didn’t catch the grenade and died.
And he’s up the street from us.
And my son burns hametz with, used to burn hametz with Aner every Pesach.
And in fact, one of the first things he did when he came home, which is our next discussion, is go to see Aner’s parents.
And Hirsch also was in Ghan with my kids.
And Hirsch, as Rachel has said, his arm was blown off at the elbow, his left arm.
And he’s a lefty actually.
And she said on a podcast that I listened to that this surgery is a fairly simple surgery.
And so if the surgery was done in Gaza, then it’s possible that, and he got the antibiotics that he needed.
And we all saw the Hamas propaganda videos of Mia Sham getting there and then her being released.
So I agree with you.
I think for all of us who are parents, just seeing those kids come out, it was like this amazing reality show, but you’re part of it kind of.
You’re watching this reality show.
And even if you don’t know them, you know them.
There was a Facebook thing going around.
I never knew I could miss people who I didn’t know so much, talking about the hostages.
And I think the hostages have been, the families have been extremely successful in making it very, very personal.
And their pictures are everywhere.
It’s not just these faceless people, besides the fact that Israel is a very small society.
And just like you know someone personally, I know someone personally.
And I think most Israelis know somebody personally, but they really are our kids and our daughters and our sisters and our mothers.
And so I think the fact that the children and at least the older women were released was except there’s one older woman who hasn’t been, were incredibly released.
And then of course, these two little red haired babies who I can’t stop thinking about the Bebas children who from everything we’ve seen apparently are not alive, but who knows.
In other words, it also, I think it just showed the, you know, Hamas was really kind of playing with us psychologically, with all of us.
And it worked.
Well, each day they were committed to giving a list of the people they would release by seven in the morning.
And then at 6.
58, you’re still waiting for that list.
And then the list would be put out and sometimes it wouldn’t be acceptable.
It would be people that weren’t in the right group and it wouldn’t be the people that they had said that they would give.
And so every element of it was torture, except that late at night, sometimes it was at 10 at night and sometimes it ended up being at two in the morning, you would be able to see the videos of the people coming or coming out of a helicopter or coming off of a bus and going to the hospitals.
And then you would see some videos the next day of the families in the hospital sometime.
And that girl who came out with her dog, who was with them the whole time.
That was incredible actually that she managed, you know, that her dog stayed alive and that she.
And then there was the older woman who said that Yehia Sanwar met with them in the tunnels.
And she said to him, “How are you not ashamed?
” And I saw a report, I haven’t done any research on it, I don’t really know, but that Hamas drugged the hostages before they were released so that they’d look happy.
And then as we get more and more about the psychological and sexual torture that people underwent and then you think about the people who were still there and it’s really heartbreaking.
And you think about the families of that, like this week was for me so torturesome for all that.
Probably if you just like added up the molecules of something like joyful relief, it might have been the most joyful relieved week of my entire life.
But it was the most torturesome week that I’ve ever experienced.
Can you imagine what it is like to be the parent of, first of all, the parent of somebody scrutinizing the list as they come out at seven in the morning each morning to see is my person on them, or to be the parent of somebody who you know is not going to be on the list because they were a soldier and or because they’re just not the right age.
They’re a 35 year old man.
And so they’re not going to be on the list.
And I just, I just can’t imagine it.
And then when it ended all abruptly because I was about to say we all, I don’t know if that’s true.
I certainly expected it to go on at least until day 10 and then on Friday morning, just boom, you turn on the radio.
I heard it while I was running.
Okay, I guess this is over.
Now we’re going back to war.
And that was also a kind of torture.
It’s just like just all different kinds of torture.
Yeah, no, it’s true.
It’s true.
And it’s a real relief.
I keep thinking about that little boy, Ohad, the nine year old.
And I spoke to his aunt and she said that they told him he could invite two friends to the hospital the next day.
And he said to celebrate his birthday, which he had missed, you know, he had been in captivity.
And he said, “Oh, but you know, you have to let me invite more.
That’s not, I have a lot of friends.
I can’t invite just two.
” And he invited about 10 friends and they made a birthday party in the hospital.
And you know, what could be more normal than, you know, a birthday party for a little boy and yet it’s in a hospital and he had been kept in captivity.
And apparently there was another hostage who was also released, a boy, a teenager who had been held in a house and had had access to a TV.
And then they kept moving them around and shuffling them.
And when he met Ohad, he said to him, “Oh, happy birthday.
” And Ohad said, “How did you know it was my birthday?
” And he said, “Because your sports team, HaPoel Be’er Sheva, you know, made a big thing about your birthday.
” And he said, “I didn’t know anybody even knew I was here.
” You know, so that it just was heartbreaking.
And you thought of this little boy and of course the little American girl, Abigail.
And you, you know, you also wonder, you know, the little kids will probably be okay, but what is it going to take for them to, you know, get back to themselves?
And that, you know, there was stuff about how the kids were all whispering and, you know, they were afraid to say anything.
I actually was in a hotel in Kibbutz Malaya Hamisha.
I’m working on a story about evacuees and they’re from Nativa Asara.
And they set up a little gun in the hotel and the gun, and they had a house like built out of cardboard.
And the Ganenetz said that the kids go into the house, they cover the windows with blankets and they curl up in the house and these are, you know, and they play “Let’s Hide From the Bad Guys.
” Yeah.
Also, have a look at the TikTok videos that some of the teenagers who’ve been released have put out, which are just a little bit the opposite of that, like a little bit enchanting, like just dancing to their freedom and being so much like Israeli teenagers in that they’re like beautiful and brash.
