‘There Will Probably Be a Cease-Fire. And Then They Will Just Be Names.’
Earlier this week, while walking through central Jerusalem, I heard a chant in the distance. War has driven away tourists, and in a tourist city without tourists, sounds carry far. The discernible portion of the chant was a single word in Hebrew, akshav—“now.” I followed the sound to Safra Square, where a crowd had gathered, yelling in sorrow and fury, to protest the kidnapping of more than 240 people, most of them Israelis, by Hamas.
Survivors from Kibbutz Nir Oz (which lost a quarter of its population in the October 7 pogrom) had taken over Safra Square and installed an exhibit consisting of beds, neatly made, for each of the hostages currently in Gaza. They were arranged in a grid. Some were queen beds. Others were singles. Some had books on nightstands nearby. Several were IKEA cribs, for the dozens of children among the captives. One didn’t need to know even that one word of Hebrew to figure out what the crowd was demanding—the return of the hostages, without delay—and what it was promising: the creation of a civic movement that will continue screaming at the Israeli government, in anger and recrimination, until the hostages are back.
[Graeme Wood: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]
I spoke with relatives of six of the Nir Oz hostages whose kidnappings were captured on video that spread within hours of the attack. The abductees are Shiri Silberman-Bibas, 32, who was kidnapped with her husband, Yarden, and two young children; Tamir Adar, 38, a young father last seen sealing his family into their safe room; and Yaffa Adar, 85. If you saw images of the kidnappings on the day of the attack, these were probably the people you saw. Silberman-Bibas is the distraught mom with two redheaded kids clutched to her chest. Yaffa Adar is the white-haired woman being taken to Gaza by golf cart.
Yifat Zaila is an architect in Herzliya and Shiri’s cousin. She told me that she talked with her uncle, Shiri’s father, at 7:30 on the morning of the attack. He lived in the kibbutz and said that they were in their safe room and that she shouldn’t worry. Her WhatsApp shows that he logged in for the last time that morning at 9:05. Zaila quickly determined that six members of her family were missing: Shiri’s family as well as her aunt and uncle, Margit and Yossi Silberman. The Silbermans’ house had been burned down, but their bodies were not in the ashes, so she held out hope that they were alive in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces told her they found her aunt’s keychain near the border. But last Friday, they informed her that their corpses had been recovered. The IDF told her that for security reasons, they would not say whether the bodies were in Gaza, at the border, or somewhere else.
“I don’t speak about it to the Israeli media,” Zaila told me. “I know it’s absurd. But if for some reason Shiri is watching television, I don’t want her to find out like this about her parents.”
She thinks about what it might be like for her nephew Kfir, who was nine months old when captured and is 10 months old now, to live in a dungeon. “How can a baby so young survive in these conditions?” she asked. “You’re supposed to learn how to clap, or see when a light goes on.” His brother, Ariel, 4, is energetic, “nonstop,” she said. “How can he sit in a room somewhere? I don’t know if they can even see the light of day.”
Zaila’s mother and grandparents came to Israel from Argentina in the 1970s, to escape the junta that assassinated leftists, in some cases by throwing them out of airplanes into the sea. The relatives of these “disappeared” have been tortured with uncertainty about what happened ever since. “My grandfather was very involved in politics, and he was scared to get the knock on the door,” she told me. “That’s why he came here.” Now the uncertainty has sought her out.
So have numerous Hamas enthusiasts, who have bombarded Zaila’s cellphone with taunting images. (She became internationally famous after going on CNN and making Anderson Cooper cry on the air.) “I receive a lot of hate messages telling me, ‘Hamas is taking care of your babies,’” she said. “It puzzles me. Our family, we’re left-wing.” They were peaceniks. “We never want to see anyone hurt. And now we find that they just wanted us dead. Not peace. Just dead.” She said she still has hope for the West Bank, which is run by the Palestinian Authority, a rival of Hamas. But Hamas, she said, made its views abundantly clear. “I was sure they were people just like me. They just want peace. It shook my entire existence.”
Adva Adar understands that the world will always think of her grandmother as the golf-cart woman. The footage was admittedly surreal: a granny surrounded by killers and being driven out of her kibbutz in her geriatric chariot, as if on the way to a communal meal or a session at a painting studio. Adva also realizes that the world was transfixed by her grandmother’s expression: an enigmatic smile, held for the whole video while she was carted off to an uncertain fate.
[Yair Rosenberg: ‘We’re going to die here’]
Yaffa Adar is a classic labor-lefty kibbutznik who has lived in Nir Oz for 60 years. She has three children, eight grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren, of whom Adva’s daughter is the youngest. When we spoke, the baby’s first birthday was five days away. “Ever since my child was born, it’s like she and my grandmother were connected,” Adva told me. “All day [my grandmother] would look at pictures of her. [My child] meant the world to [my grandmother]. And thinking of us celebrating her first year without my grandmother—that breaks my heart.
“The last message we got from her was around 9 a.m.,” Adva said. “We were texting in the family group since 6 o’clock. And around 9 a.m. she wrote that we wouldn’t believe it, but they had started to enter the houses.”
Elsewhere in the kibbutz, Yaffa’s ex-husband, Adva’s grandfather, was trapped in his house while Hamas set it on fire. “Thank God, he survived,” Adva told me. His wife was able to rescue him. “But, you know, his soul is dead. It was not his lungs. His soul is dead, and it is like he aged a hundred years from what they did to him.”
Adva’s cousin Tamir, 38, also lived on the kibbutz. He left his wife and two kids, 7 and 3, locked in their home and went out to engage the terrorists. “I won’t be back,” Adva says he told them. He was afraid the terrorists would force him to lure his family out. “No matter what, even if you hear me ask, don’t open the door.” His wife and children survived. Tamir is among the kidnapped.
About Yaffa’s fate, nothing is publicly known, except that the IDF confirmed to the family that she is one of the hostages. All of the footage from Hamas cameras and surveillance footage has been scoured for clues. “The elders that survived, each one was really attached to his golf cart,” Adva said, with a tiny laugh. “When the video came out, they tried to find whose golf cart it was.” Yifat Zaila told me that many of the golf carts had been stolen—someone had tried to link them up and bring them all, loaded with loot, into Gaza, but had abandoned the project halfway to the border.
It was left to those who know Yaffa to interpret her smile in the video. “People think she has dementia or Alzheimer’s, because it seems like she’s not getting the situation,” Adva told me. “But her mind is clear. She’s sharp.”
“She’s one of the people that established this country, who believe in living here, and who have pride. They can kidnap her, but they can’t kidnap her pride. And she would not let them see her suffering or hurt or scared.” This is what Adva sees in her grandmother’s face. “She will sit there and she will look them in the eyes and she will let them see that she’s a human being and not scared of them.”
The hostages’ families have spoken out individually and collectively about the plight of their loved ones—in general, to call for their return through some form of negotiation. On Friday, a contingent of them protested at the Kirya, Israel’s military headquarters, to demand that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declare that no cease-fire will take place until the hostages are all home. Some have vowed, starting Friday night, to camp out in front of the Kirya until all of the hostages are home. The families have a gold-star status, which none of them sought, but which gives their voices unusual heft in Israel. The model for their effort is the campaign that lasted more than a thousand days to keep in the public mind the name of Gilad Shalit, a single Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006 and released in 2011. Zaila, who served in Gaza with the IDF, said the government would have forgotten about Shalit if ordinary people hadn’t kept his name on the agenda. Time was the enemy, and as the years passed, it seemed less possible that the episode would ever conclude.
“In the first week, I thought I had an 80 percent chance of seeing them.” The next week she figured it was 70. Calculating those odds may not be psychologically healthy, Zaila conceded. “Being stupid sometimes helps,” she told me wistfully, “because you don’t know the result of things.”
“If I think about the politics, I get angry,” she added. “I think about how [my family] was left alone for hours. And now that there is a ground invasion, of course I think about my family over there, that they are going to be collateral damage. They can’t rescue 230 hostages.” With that in mind, she continued; “If we haven’t [been] able to take down Hamas for how many years now, I don’t think we will succeed now. I don’t think my family will be saved like this.” She hopes instead for “a deal,” but fears that Hamas and Israel will strike some compromise that leaves her family members still in Gaza. “There will probably be a cease-fire. And then they will just be names,” impossibly low on a long list of priorities. “That is what they did with Gilad.”
But like so many of the hostages’ families, she feels most bitter toward, and least confident in, the politicians who would have to make that deal. The Netanyahu government left her family unprotected, she said. “This right-wing government shifted its entire focus to the West Bank to support the extreme right wing, so they could build a sukkah”—a shelter for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot—“in [the] center of Hawara,” a flash-point city in the West Bank. She thinks security resources were diverted from Gaza, and that the massacre followed. “My family were abandoned. And now they’re keeping them in Gaza.”
The IDF is helpful, she said, but the government ministers aren’t attending the funerals when new bodies turn up. They are mortified and cowardly.
“Maybe they don’t want to be screamed at,” I offered.
“Okay,” she said with a shrug. “A great leader needs to go stand still and receive criticism in times of grief. This is how you measure someone—whether he knows how to lower his head and say, I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”