The Bittersweet Homecoming of the Israeli Hostages

Finally, the last living hostages taken by Hamas were released today.  It is a moment millions of Israelis, and many more Jews around the world, have prayed for through two long years. Of the 251 people abducted into Gaza on October 7th 2023, the final 20 surviving hostages have now come home under the ceasefire deal. 

This morning, Hamas issued a list of those it intended to return—an agonising first confirmation for many families that their sons, fathers, and husbands were still alive. The releases unfolded in two phases: seven hostages were handed to the International Committee of the Red Cross, followed by the remaining 13 and their transfer to Israeli authorities. 

Amid the scenes of relief was 48-year-old Omri Miran, photographed embracing his wife, Lishay, at the reception point in southern Israel. Miran was abducted from his home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz on October 7th. Lishay last saw him being driven away in his own car. Today, they held each other again.

Many of those freed today were attendees of the Nova music festival—young people who had been expecting a weekend of fun and trance music in the Negev desert, and instead endured unimaginable horrors. 25-year-old Yosef-Chaim Ohana, for instance, was at the festival with a friend when Hamas attacked. The two stayed behind to try to help others escape before running, when Ohana was then seized by terrorists. Similarly, 25-year-old Eitan Mor was working as a security guard and, according to his father, put himself in danger to save dozens before he was kidnapped. Previously released hostages said Mor became a spokesman in captivity and “lifted everyone’s spirits.” Bar Kupershtein, 23, made the same instinctive choice to stay and treat the wounded. His family last heard from him when he promised he’d come home once the injured were safe—only for him to appear later in a hostage video. Rom Braslabski, just 21 and also working security, was taken while trying to carry an injured person to safety. In August, he appeared in a Palestinian Islamic Jihad video, crying and saying he had run out of food and water, could no longer walk or stand, and was “at death’s door.” Medical experts said he showed signs of “deliberate, prolonged, and systematic starvation.”

There has been grave concern surrounding the health of those newly released. Already, three of the first seven to be released—Alon Ohel, Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Omri Miran—had to be airlifted to hospital for further treatment. Ohel’s family had previously raised concerns that he may have gone blind in one eye. Ohel, a promising pianist, was taken captive at 22 and is now 24.  Earlier this year, europeanconservative.com’s Javier Villamor  spoke to Ohel’s mother in Israel. She explained that he had spent his time in captivity chained up and received very little food. At the time, she feared that Hamas would be “making him pay for the new attacks.”

The family of 36-year-old Elkana Bohbot—one of the Nova festival’s organisers—was told by a previously released hostage that Bohbot, who suffers from asthma, was being held in inhumane conditions and had developed a severe skin disease. He was reportedly chained, isolated, and starved. Twenty-four-year-old Evyatar David was likewise described as virtually emaciated—“a human skeleton,” his brother said, who “could be dead at any moment.”

Those who were chained up and tortured by Hamas will now be able to return to their families and start down the long road to recovery. Many others, however, will not come home. There are still 26 hostages in Gaza who were tragically murdered by Hamas or who died during captivity. Their bodies currently remain in Gaza. These include Inbar Hayman, the last female hostage, a 27-year-old art student who was taken from the Nova festival. Another was 85-year-old Amiram Cooper, one of the founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz. He and his wife, Nurit, were kidnapped from their home on October 7th and held together in Gaza, before Nurit was freed on October 23rd, 2023. In 2024, Hamas claimed that Amiram had been killed in Israeli airstrikes. The words of Inbar Hayman’s mother, Yifat Hayman, captures the kind of purgatory these families are currently living in: “I know I will never buy her a wedding dress, but at least I want to bury my daughter in a proper Jewish burial in the soil of Israel.” 

This limbo extends beyond Israel. The bodies of two Thai agricultural workers, 43-year-old Suthisak Rintalak and 30-year-old Sonthaya Akrasri, as well as 21-year-old Joshua Mollel, a Tanzanian agricultural intern, are also still being held by Hamas. Two more hostages who were previously thought to be alive—Nepalese agriculture student Bipin Joshi, 24, and IDF education officer Tamir Nimrodi, 20—did not appear on the list of surviving hostages provided by Hamas, deepening fears that they, too, died in captivity.

The mainstream Western media has often been reluctant to dwell on those kidnapped, tortured, and killed by Hamas on October 7th. It is worth remembering the scale and cruelty of what was done. In the UK, the trials and eventual release of British-Israeli national Emily Damari barely grazed many front pages. When she was freed last year—after 15 months held by antisemitic extremists, taken from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza—the response from much of the Left was muted. Nor did many self-described feminists say much as reports emerged of Islamist militants sexually assaulting female IDF soldiers and raping civilian women torn from their homes or abducted from the festival site. In London, posters of the missing were routinely torn down or defaced.

Perhaps no story captures the cruelty more starkly than that of the Bibas family. Parents Shiri and Yarden were abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz with their nine-month-old son, Kfir, and four-year-old, Ariel. In Hamas’s own video, Shiri clutches both boys to her chest as militants lead them away. Yarden was released during an earlier ceasefire, but the rest of his family did not survive. To add insult to injury, Hamas then turned the handover of their remains into a spectacle. The coffins of Shiri and her children were displayed beneath a vast image of Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, depicted with blood dripping from vampiric fangs. To make matters even worse, the remains presented as Shiri’s were later found to belong to someone else—possibly a Palestinian woman who had never been a hostage. Only the next day did Hamas return Shiri’s real body. The pain was prolonged and gratuitous. 

In the end, the moral reckoning is not only Hamas’s. Too many in the West averted their eyes, downplaying the kidnappings, tutting at the missing posters, and even blaming the victims themselves for daring to be Israeli and Jewish. The Israeli hostages, living and dead, should be household names. We should be forced to look at the images of little Kfir Bibas and the radiant Inbar Hayman and come to terms with the fact that this is the inevitable consequence of Islamism. 

The European Union in particular should be ashamed of itself. The continent that once vowed “never again” in the wake of the Holocaust has utterly failed to confront the next worse massacre of Jews. One by one, EU states fell like dominoes in recognising the state of Palestine, effectively rewarding Hamas for its murder and kidnapping spree. National governments have allowed antisemitism to fester, both within radical Muslim communities and from the Left, to the point where many Jewish people would rather brave missile attacks in Israel than continue to live in the European cities they once called home. 

Even now, despite the ceasefire, ‘pro-Palestine’ protestors continue to demonstrate across Europe, from London to Rome. What are they marching for, exactly? Many are no doubt motivated by the desire to see Israel disappear. They would do well to remember what “from the river to the sea” really means in practice. It means armies of antisemites mowing down innocent people who only wanted to enjoy a music festival. It means kidnapping children and the elderly from their bedrooms and their bomb shelters. It means raping and murdering young women, to be filmed and gloated over. History will not soon forget this moral cowardice.