For the families of Israeli hostages, a vigil turns to a protest movement

By Matthew Knott and Kate Geraghty

Posters of the faces of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 and signs on a wall in Tel Aviv, Israel.Credit: Kate Geraghty

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Tel Aviv: Cradling a photo of smiling family members, Adva Adar admits she is starting to lose hope. “I don’t know if we will ever be happy like this again,” she says, her voice quivering with a fear she cannot suppress.

Hamas terrorists took Adar’s 85-year-old grandmother Yaffa hostage on October 7 when they stormed into Nir Oz, the kibbutz where she had lived for the past 60 years. Adar describes the kibbutz in southern Israel as a magical place: peaceful, green, the air full of birdsong.

“It was heaven, and it became hell within hours,” Adar, 32, says.

Last week Hamas militants posted a video on social media of themselves driving Yaffa around Gaza in a golf cart. In the video, which went viral, her grandmother is smiling, leading some viewers to assume she must have dementia. It’s a suggestion that offends her relatives.

Adva Adar holds family photos, including one of her 85-year-old grandmother Yaffa Adar, who has been taken hostage by Hamas.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“She is very sharp-minded,” Adar says, explaining that her grandmother was active on Facebook and devoured books. “She’s the kind of person that will look them in the eye to let them know that she’s a person. They can kidnap her, but they won’t take her pride or humiliate her.”

She adds that her grandmother “really believed we should have a happy ending with our [Palestinian] neighbours”.

Israelis who live in kibbutzes – communities rooted in utopian, socialist philosophies of collective living – tend to be more left-leaning and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than in other parts of the country. Yet they suffered some of the worst atrocities on that day. Of the 400 people who lived in Nir Oz, an estimated 100 are believed to have been killed or abducted.

Israel says Hamas has kidnapped 199 of its citizens, making it one of the biggest mass hostage-taking events in history.

Yaffa’s husband is alive, but suffered severe smoke inhalation when terrorists set their house on fire. “It seems like he aged 100 years in a week,” Adar says of her grandfather. “He is not talking much and he’s very scared.”

As each day passes, she loses a bit more faith that she will ever see her grandmother alive again. Yaffa relies on a walking frame to get around and takes life-saving daily medication. But Adar has to believe that there is a chance a diplomatic solution could see her reunited with her grandmother. “I think that the international community pressure is critical right now,” she says. “Eighty-five-year-old women being kidnapped is not something the world can permit.”

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Long before the current crisis, long before he became prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu’s life was shaped by hostage-taking.

As a 23-year-old member of Israel’s elite special forces, he was part of a 16-person team that freed 90 airline passengers taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists in 1972. They did so by dressing up as aircraft technicians and convincing the terrorists that the grounded plane needed repair; when they got aboard they killed two kidnappers and captured two others.

Four years later, Netanyahu’s brother Yonatan led an effort to recover 106 people taken hostage during a flight from Israel to France. The mission was ultimately successful, but Yonatan was killed during the operation.

Now it is up to Netanyahu to try to devise a solution to get as many Israelis home alive as possible – and to do it while launching a ground invasion of Gaza aimed at wiping out Hamas’s leadership.

Tzachi Hanegbi, the head of Israel’s National Security Council, said last week that “Israel will not hold negotiations with an enemy that we have vowed to wipe from the face of the earth”.

A day later Israel’s powerful ultra-nationalist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded that the Israeli army “hit Hamas brutally and not take the matter of the captives into significant consideration”.

Both statements infuriated many family members of the kidnapped, who fear their loved ones will be sacrificed in Israel’s bid to take revenge on Hamas. It took Netanyahu eight days after the attacks to hold a meeting with families of the hostages.

In an effort to raise the profile of their plight, family members have formed a lobby group, enlisted pro bono public relations experts, and acquired a team of hostage negotiation experts. They have commandeered the floor of an office building in central Tel Aviv, where they hold regular press conferences.

“I think my government needs to put this top of their priorities in this operation,” says Yifat Zeiler, whose cousin and two children, aged four and nine months, were kidnapped.

Zeiler is barely sleeping, but when she closes her eyes she has visions of people running back across the border after being freed by Hamas.

Six members of Yifat Zailer’s family were kidnapped on October 7.Credit: Kate Geraghty

She believes the ground assault on Gaza will “create more chaos”, imperilling the prospect of a diplomatic breakthrough such as a prisoner swap arrangement.

“Things need to happen from above,” she says. “Qatar needs to be involved, Saudi Arabia needs to be involved.”

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Avihai Brodutch describes himself as the last person you’d imagine sparking a protest movement. Earlier this year when millions of Israelis hit the streets to oppose Netanyahu’s moves to weaken Israel’s judiciary, Broductch stayed at home in Kfar Aza, the kibbutz where he lives beside the border with Gaza. A pineapple farmer who had a midlife crisis at 40 and decided to become a nurse, he’s never been politically active before.

“I like staying at home drinking with my friends,” he says, including a date liquor he makes himself. His wife Hagar was the organised one in the family.

Avihai Brodutch’s wife and three children were kidnapped from Kfar. He started the daily vigil pressuring the Israeli government to get the hostages home.Credit: Kate Gergahty

Then Hamas went on a rampage through his kibbutz, taking Hagar and their three children (aged four, eight and 10) hostage. Kfar Aza suffered one of the most brutal massacres of anywhere in the country, with dozens of people killed and homes burnt to the ground.

Feeling hopeless, he made a sign saying “My family is in Gaza” and took himself to the street outside the Ministry of Defence building in Tel Aviv. “I felt like people weren’t prioritising my wife and kids, but they are the most important thing to me,” he says.

Within days, hundreds of people had joined him at his protest spot – the relatives of other hostages, but also people without a personal connection who feel compelled to do something to help. As dusk fell over Tel Aviv this week, Stav Levi stood by the road waving a poster of her boyfriend, who was abducted after being a designated driver for his friends at a party. The couple was about to enter a new chapter in their lives together: they had just bought a dog and signed the lease for a new apartment. Now she doesn’t know if they will see each other again.

Stav Levi, the girlfriend of 28-year-old Idan Shtivi, at the Tel Aviv vigil.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Although staggered by the size of the protest movement he has inspired, Brodutch is pained by the lack of result.

“I have no feeling right now,” he says. “I thought it would only be a matter of days.” Keeping him going are the memories he and his family created together, including a year-long round-the-world holiday he took with Hagar. “I hope we can do that again.”

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