Day 513 of the War: Hearing The Testimonies

If we thought that despair could not go any deeper, last week proved that there is no limit to it. The funerals of the Bibas family caught us unprepared, even though we knew that the chances of them returning alive were very slim. We also mourned Oded Lifshitz, who fought for peace all his life alongside many other activists in the kibbutzim of the western Negev. His wife, Yocheved—an especially brave and noble woman—said in her eulogy: “We fought all our life for peace, only to get a hard blow from the people of the other side.”

Still, many of us believe that peace treaties are the only way to survive in the Middle East, and we have proof in our agreements with Egypt and Jordan.

Despite the sorrow, there were some brighter moments at the Families’ Headquarters last week. We are starting to see the families of the returned hostages in the dining room, and they seem alive and alert. The vitality and energy have returned to their faces and their walk. They continue the struggle to bring all the hostages home, but now they do so with the awareness of how lucky they are alongside the urgency to bring back all the others now.

I heard that at the beginning of the war, Pope Francis asked Hamas to take him hostage in exchange for those kidnapped from Israel. I have been thinking about this, and realized that it was a very thoughtful offer. Most of the people who were brutally abducted from their homes, held in dark tunnels without food or water, and tortured by Hamas were completely unprepared for such an ordeal. I feel that Pope Francis could actually know more than most of us about the plight of the hostages from all his reading and from a life full of meditation and fasting.

But then I saw the television interview with the released hostage Eli Sharabi, conducted by journalist Ilana Dayan. Eli Sharabi, who had a full and wonderful life in Kibbutz Be’eri, surrounded by a loving family and a supportive community, learned upon his release that his wife and two daughters had been murdered on October 7, and that his brother Yossi, who was also kidnapped to Gaza, had been killed in captivity.

And yet, Eli Sharabi taught us all about the resilience of the human spirit. It was simply unbelievable to listen to him, among other things, describing how he and the other hostages who were with him in the tunnel planned every request from their captors, even for something as small as a quarter of a pita bread. They became experts in the science of captivity, trying to survive their time in hell in the most dignified way possible. His story resonated with other tragic yet breathtaking accounts of the Holocaust. I looked at Eli Sharabi with enormous admiration and hope.

Last night, I went to Hostage Square again. It was a somber night, and I felt the need to attend the more formal rally and listen to the testimonies of family members. It is beyond words to realize that, despite everything we now know, the government is still toying with the idea of waging war again.