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On the clear, blue-skied Saturday morning of Oct. 7, 2023, our loved ones and 245 others were brutally stolen from us by Hamas terrorists. Carmel was visiting her parents at Kibbutz Be’eri. Almog, Alexander, Eden, Hersh, and Ori had been celebrating peace and freedom at the Nova Music Festival. These six beautiful people were abducted into Gaza, several of them with critical injuries. They languished in miserable conditions for 328 days, then, on Aug. 29, were shot in the head, hands, shoulders, and elsewhere in their battered and starving bodies.
Israeli forces found their emaciated corpses two days later in a tunnel 65 feet under a Gazan child’s bedroom. The tunnel was just over two feet wide and 5 ft. 6 in. high. It had minimal oxygen, no light, and no plumbing. Their Hamas captors executed our loved ones at point blank range, exited the tunnel, and shut a bolted door.
In captivity, Alexander, nearly six feet tall, dropped from 190 pounds to 132 pounds. Hersh, a couple inches taller, weighed just 116 pounds. Eden, 5-ft.-5, was found at 79 pounds.
It was Hamas that took our loved ones, tortured them, and pulled the triggers that murdered them. But many others failed to save them. Israeli governmental decision-makers had opportunities to reach negotiated settlements to release our loved ones and, for calculations they deemed strategic, they chose not to. These choices will be the eternal legacy of these men. But there are so many other people who could have done so much more to save them—and still others who will join them as accomplices in avoidable deaths if they stand by and allow malevolent entities to triumph over the passive words of people with power.
This is our clarion call now: There are still 101 hostages in horrific conditions in Gaza, and the time to save them is running out. Sympathetic words alone will not spare them the same fate as Almog, Alexander, Carmel, Eden, Hersh, and Ori. Now is the time for decisive, deliberate, meaningful action.
