“The holidays are not holidays for me without you,” Yarden Bibas posted on social media on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, on 22 September. “Dates and days are meaningless.” Two years ago, his wife, Shiri, and their two small children, Ariel and Kfir, were kidnapped by Hamas militants on 7 October 2023, along with 248 others; around 1,200 Israelis were murdered. The Bibas family was returned to Israel in coffins in February 2025. As Jewish families gathered to celebrate the new year, the families of the hostages who are still in Gaza demanded more be done to secure their release. Though the rest of the world seems to have largely forgotten their plight, 48 hostages remain in Hamas captivity. Only 20 are thought still to be alive.
Anger among the families of hostages, and swathes of Israel’s public, has swelled since the summer of 2024. At that point, many have said, it seemed the continuation – and escalation – of the war in Gaza was no longer underpinned by Israel’s two original stated aims: ensuring the security of the country’s borders and the release of the hostages. Protests are held on a weekly basis, where frustration that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is not doing more to bring home those still held captive pours out. According to Sharone Lifschitz, a British-Israeli woman whose parents were taken from their home at Kibbutz Nir Oz, most Israelis now believe Netanyahu is using the atrocities of 7 October to stay in power. Her 87-year-old mother, Yocheved, was released in 2023; her father, 84-year-old Oded, died in captivity, his body returned along with the Bibas family. “I don’t think people here [in the UK] understand what’s happening in Israel,” she told me – including British Jews. “I cannot tell you the desperation. I cannot tell you how many hostage families who [once had] faith that the prime minister would do what it takes are now screaming outside his house.”
The protest on 22 September outside the official prime ministerial residence on Gaza Street, Jerusalem, was different to the many that had come before. “People were coming from their Rosh Hashanah dinners,” recalled Dana Venkert, a young Israeli graduate student who was among them. Some brought their food, in a “demonstration of solidarity” with families who have nothing to celebrate. Many were dressed in white as is customary for the holidays. Yet, Venkert told me, “we were sitting there, and we said that the mood feels a bit like a Shiva” – the prayers traditionally held when someone dies. But grieving, Venkert pointed out, “is something you do after a loved one is gone, and their loved ones are not gone. They’re very much alive.”
Venkert is part of Soldiers for Hostages, a group of hundreds of Israeli soldiers who feel they can no longer serve in the military while the government does not prioritise the return of Israeli citizens and while the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens. “Netanyahu would much rather have dead hostages as martyrs – that you can avenge – than living hostages who are broken, tortured people that are a living, walking monument of his incompetence,” said Venkert. Dead hostages do not require care to be taken when carrying out military operations.
Netanyahu leads a fragile political coalition. His survival depends on keeping men like Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, onside. These far-right politicians are currently subject to UK sanctions for inciting violence against Palestinians. Netanyahu, many believe, would rather prolong the war in Gaza and keep his coalition intact than risk a ceasefire deal which would include the release of hostages. Such a deal could prompt Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to blow up his government.
“He has no moral compass,” Lifschitz insisted. “But he does understand what it entails to take fringe fanatics into government and depend on them. I think he has been in power for so long that he is not able to differentiate between himself and the state.”
The regular protests in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa aren’t widely reported outside of Israel. The international community seems only to mention the hostages still held by Hamas as an afterthought. While the horrors of Israel’s Gaza ground offensive are rightly reported daily by the world’s media, the atrocities being perpetrated beneath the surface, in Hamas-made tunnels, receive little attention. Images released in August of an emaciated Evyatar David – one of 44 young people kidnapped from the Nova music festival on 7 October – served as a reminder of the torture the hostages endure. Hamas denies it is starving hostages, claiming they eat what its fighters and civilians in Gaza eat. Israel has blocked traditional aid routes, arguing that Hamas steals food intended for civilians.
“I’m still shocked that the world didn’t demand the immediate release of Evyatar after they saw this video,” his brother, Ilay David, told me from his home in Israel. The family knows that Evyatar, who was 22 when he was kidnapped, has been in a “filthy, squeezed” tunnel since 2024 – more than a year. The only request they’ve issued is that he and any remaining hostages be given food, “just to make sure that he will survive negotiations, that he will survive any kind of military operation in Gaza”. Food must be allowed into Gaza, and agencies must ensure some of it reaches the captives. It was, David said, “the most humanitarian message”. The family did not mention, let alone demand, his release. And still the world did not act, he said.
“It’s a nightmare for my parents, for him, for the other hostages,” David told me. He is astonished that the UK, France, Australia and Canada recognised a Palestinian state before the hostages have been released. When Hamas are celebrating, he said, “then something’s probably wrong”. “Putting aside my political views, if there should be a Palestinian state or shouldn’t be one, it’s not the right time for those declarations.”
Sharone Lifschitz agreed that the UK should have required the release of the remaining hostages before recognising Palestine, but she is more philosophical. What is much more important, she said, is that Hamas has no role in a future Palestinian state and is forced to give up its weapons. And while there is frustration with foreign governments, fury is reserved for the Israeli prime minister. “I have to be really brutal: I think that the government of Israel – its actions – is killing the hostages.”
In his address at the UN’s New York headquarters on 26 September, Netanyahu focused on the hostages. “We have not forgotten you, not even for a second,” he roared to a half-empty room after dozens of diplomats walked out in protest. “We will not rest until we bring all of you home.”
Lifschitz told me she “couldn’t bear to watch” the speech. “I feel so strongly that he is ready to give us all up in smoke.” Other hostage families reacted with contempt and rage. Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is still being held in Gaza, wrote on social media: “He told Matan that he hasn’t forgotten him, but he didn’t say that he was the one who ordered the bombing of him and all the others to death.” This is a prime minister, she said, who “traded the blood of his citizens for the sake of the messianic extremists in his government”.
Dana Venkert said that Netanyahu’s speech felt like “cynically exploiting the suffering of innocent people”. Just days before Netanyahu’s UN address, the families of those same hostages he had branded heroes stood outside his home in tears. He did not come to speak to them. Instead, the police pushed them away, blocking the street with a barrier, shielding anyone entering or leaving the prime minister’s residence from the protesters outside.
There are some who still believe Netanyahu’s government is working on an agreement under which their loved ones will come home. “What I pray every night before I go to sleep, is that the Israeli government will have the strength and the wisdom to make the right choices,” Ilay David told me. There will be a ceasefire eventually, he said, because “you cannot fight forever”. The families of the 20 hostages still believed to be alive will hope, more than anyone, that Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan will be the one that finally succeeds. Because their loved ones are fighting time. “Hostages are being used as human shields; they are dying from hunger; they are dying from enemy fire or friendly fire, and it’s a tragedy,” said David.
Only a ceasefire will lead to the return of the remaining hostages. The road to peace is difficult, Sharone Lifschitz told me, but how can the state of Israel survive if it cannot achieve it? Alongside sadness, there is anger when she speaks. “I’m one of 42 families who had loved ones that could have been saved, and somebody decided that wasn’t the priority,” she said. “My father lost his life to this horrific hatred. And the people who did not save him are still in power. They are fine.”
Nine people are still missing from Kibbutz Nir Oz, four of whom are thought to be alive. “I can’t tell you how much it hurts,” Lifschitz said. “These are people I have known all my life; I know their mothers.” She does not want vengeance nor to respond to hatred with more hate. The killing of Gazan civilians, she said, is not being done in her name. “Revenge doesn’t make us hurt less,” she said. “Why would I want pain for someone else?”
Hope is the only option open to the families of the hostages who still remain in Gaza. “I don’t have any other choice,” Ilay David told me. Evyatar must “come home and hug his mother and play music with me and sing with his father and listen to my younger sister’s secrets”. It is, he said, the only outcome he can allow himself to believe in. “If I think otherwise, I wouldn’t get out of bed and I couldn’t go to sleep.”
[Further reading: Did you hear there’s a Rapture tonight?]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate
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