TEL AVIV, Israel − Liad Gross visits “Hostage Square” every week to remember.
During Purim, a usually joyful Jewish holiday that celebrates survival and continuity, she took the unusual approach of dressing up covered in makeup to look bruised and beaten, as if a victim of assault.
Six months from Hamas’ attack, the deadliest single assault against Jews since the Holocaust, there isn’t much celebrating going on in Israel. On Oct. 7, about 1,200 people were killed and 240 more were dragged to the Gaza Strip as hostages. More than 100 have been released and about 100 are believed to be still alive in captivity.
And while global outrage grows about the catastrophic destruction in Gaza from Israel’s military campaign to destroy Hamas, and the more than 30,000 Palestinians killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, Israelis remain traumatized, worrying that the world has forgotten about the hostages.
“It’s hard for me to be here with all the people,” Gross, 36, who works with troubled youth, said, reflecting on her friends, Eitan Horn, 37, and his brother Yair, 45. They disappeared when Hamas swarmed through Kibbutz Nir Oz, on the border with Gaza.
“Time passes and nothing new is coming through.”
‘All her life is ahead of her’
Shlomi Berger, 52, the father of 19-year-old hostage Agam, is all too aware about the march of time and feeling like progress can’t come fast enough.
He worries there is a kind of collective international amnesia about the plight of the hostages and their degrading and inhumane treatment by Hamas.
“It’s like the world has forgotten there are still 134 hostages over there,” he said.
Berger believes bringing his daughter and the other hostages home is the first step to ending the war. He is nevertheless guarded about what is the best strategy to make that happen.
“We’re waiting for her,” Berger, a civil engineer, said as he clasped his daughter’s violin in her childhood room about 10 miles south of Tel Aviv. Agam was last seen on a Hamas Telegram video being led on Oct. 7 to a car while still in her pajamas. Images show her with a bloodied face with her hands handcuffed behind her back.
“She loves to play the violin, and we can’t wait to hear her play again,” Berger said as he showed some of the books, cards, drawings and small gifts that had been sent to his family. They lay propped on her bed. Some of his daughter’s friends had written personal notes on the walls in her room.
“For me every day is the seventh of October. It never ends,” he said. “I go to sleep 1, 2, 3 in the afternoon. I just fall down. … My wife won’t go to work. The kids don’t want to go to school. … It’s ups and downs all day.”
Berger said he tries to keep his mind free from speculating about how his daughter is being treated in captivity.
“It’s not the physical situation that worries me the most,” he said, referring to public and private testimony from some of the released hostages, and doctors treating them, that they were sexually abused.
“It’s the mental situation. We need to be here strong for her. She’ll need to deal with many things when she’s released. We need to be here to raise her up,” he said. “She’s a young girl. All her life is ahead of her.”
‘If Israel must defend its existence alone, Israel will do it’
The shock of Oct. 7 has challenged every fabric of Israeli society. It’s led to deep anxiety and reassessments of security. It’s revived and amplified domestic political rifts over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership. It has led to internal disagreements over the conduct of the war.
Overseas, there’s been a burst of global outrage directed at Israel over the war’s toll on civilians in Gaza, including war crimes allegations brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands. Incidents of anti-semitism have surged.
As the war has dragged on, Israel looks increasingly isolated over its military campaign with a growing civilian death toll and the struggles of aid workers to deliver humanitarian supplies to those trapped in Gaza. The Israeli military’s recent killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza led to global condemnation.
Israeli politicians are steadfast in their view that the campaign to “crush” Hamas must succeed, even if it means that Israel has to go it alone.
“Some (in the U.S. administration) don’t realize that the old status quo is not coming back,” said Simcha Rothman, an outspoken right-wing Israeli politician. “I have to say if Israel must defend its existence alone, Israel will do it. It won’t be good for Israel. It won’t be good for peace in the Middle East. It won’t be good for the U.S. either,” said Rothman in an interview in his office at The Knesset, Israel’s Parliament.
Matan Kahana, an Israeli lawmaker from the centrist Israel Resilience Party, expressed annoyance over calls, including from the U.S., that Israel should commit to a cease-fire without first achieving its war objective of dismantling Hamas and getting the hostages back.
“(Hamas) came to Israel to kill and slaughter,” Kahana said. “The world is forgetting that.”
A replica of a Hamas tunnel in Israel’s ‘Hostage Square’
The faces of those still in captivity can be seen in towns and cities across Israel smiling out from posters stuck to lampposts, in shop windows, graffitied to the sides of buildings.
Their portraits are among the first things visitors see when landing at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. Cafes and restaurants have dedicated favorite items on their menus to them. A “Bring Them Home” song can be heard at rallies, concerts and on the radio.
At the “Bring Them Home” event attended by Gross, several thousand people showed up in “Hostage Square” to wave Israeli flags, take part in vigils, experience a replica Hamas tunnel, share testimonies, offer condolences and chant for the removal of Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving leader.
Netanyahu has consistently said that only military pressure will bring their loved ones home.
Some, like Leora Acoca Goldberg, a former Miss Israel in the 1980s, are inclined to believe him.
“God forbid my children were there (in Gaza) I would probably be very emotional and desperate and I would be crying and screaming and trying to put pressure on the government exactly like every parent in Israel is doing,” Goldberg said. “But I believe in our government and Netanyahu. They really care.”
Others feel that Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges and has so far not taken responsibility for failing to prevent Hamas’ brutal attack, has overstayed his welcome.
“Everything that Netanyahu says and does shows that surviving as prime minister and finishing the war are at least equal motivations for him,” said Ronen Keler, a tech executive and naval reservist who is among thousands of Israelis who have renewed huge street demonstrations, a regular occurrence for months before the war, in recent weeks. They are demanding that Netanyahu be replaced and elections called. In recent days, furious protesters, angry that he is undermining Israel’s democracy, using the war to distract attention from his legal woes and alienating Israel’s international partners and alliances, have clashed with police outside Netanyahu’s Jerusalem home.
‘Like the Holocaust is here again’
Since the country’s founding in 1948, Israel has fought at least half a dozen wars against various Arab forces, as well as in two armed Palestinian uprisings known as intifadas, and against Palestinians who targeted Israeli civilians with suicide bombings. Outside of full-blown war, tit-for-tat exchanges between Israel’s military and groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah in Lebanon − organizations considered terrorist groups by the U.S. and others −− are a regular occurrence. Israelis are used to going to bomb shelters. Many homes have safe rooms.
Israel’s arch-enemy Iran has long vowed to completely destroy Israel.
But Oct. 7 has cut deep in ways that has surprised even the country’s mental health professionals, and in ways that they are only just beginning to understand, according to more than a dozen doctors and researchers.
Gil Zalsman, an Israeli psychiatrist who specializes in adolescent suicidal behavior, said the events of Oct. 7, which saw Israelis killed, abducted and brutalized on a scale that many in the country had thought inconceivable, have impacted Israelis “like nothing else before it.”
He said Oct. 7 had unleashed a tidal wave of collective trauma, including in many cases involving people who have no direct or even indirect connection to the attack.
“We have tried to search the literature to understand what we as medical professionals can do. How should we react? The 9/11 attacks in the U.S. were terrible. But they started and ended. We are still in the event. We are not post-traumatic yet. We don’t even know if the worst is behind us,” he said.
Zalsman’s own Holocaust-surviving mother who, after a lifetime of survivor’s silence, suddenly found her trauma “reactivated” after Oct. 7.
“She tells me that she feels like the Holocaust is here again. I never thought I would see such an extreme reaction in her,” said Zalsman, who said that in his clinic near Tel Aviv he has recorded about a 40% rise in trauma reactivation cases over the last six months; patients whose cases have nothing to do with Oct. 7.
“My mother never spoke about the Holocaust. Now cries every night in her sleep, ‘Don’t take me, don’t take me.'”
Rachel Lewis, who manages psychiatric services for Maccabi Health Services, a large HMO in central Israel, said that since Oct. 7, family doctors in her area have been prescribing 65% more anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications compared to a year earlier. In children, she said, there has been an 83% increase.
One study, co-authored by Ido Lurie of the Shalvata Mental Health Center, north of Tel Aviv, estimates that more than 5% of Israel’s population of just under 10 million will eventually develop PTSD due to Oct. 7.
‘Constant stress’
At the “Bring Them Home” rally in Tel Aviv, Gross said she is trying to remain hopeful.
“It’s been too long. We are waiting for them. Praying they are still OK, hanging on,” she said of her friends.
She described Eitan and Yair Horn as “kind, funny, warm-hearted.”
And for Yaniv Peri and his family, who live about 4 miles from Israel’s border with Lebanon, they are thinking each day not so much of what has happened in Israel already, but what might yet happen.
Dozens of communities in Israel’s North have been evacuated because of the possibility that the war will eventually spread to a sustained conflict with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shia militia based in Lebanon. Iran has vowed to retaliate after it accused Israel of bombing its embassy complex in Syria in early April, in a potential escalation of regional tensions over the war in Gaza.
The Peris have chosen not to leave.
Instead, they have installed steel bars on all the windows of their home. The back door has been replaced with something more sturdy. They have stockpiled food, water and medicines. A generator will be able to sustain their core electricity needs − the fridge, charging cell phones − for up to three days.
The kids, five and seven, constantly do drills to practice how to stay safe if there’s a rocket attack or militants besiege their school.
“We live in a constant stress,” said Peri, 44, a production manager at a warehouse that makes medical devices.
“We hear artillery and war planes all the time, all around us. You hear the air raid sirens. You try to live a normal life but it is always on your mind. Every time you leave the house or even take a shower. You have to take all this under consideration because it can happen any minute,” he said.
Then Peri quickly added: “But we’re not leaving. That would be surrendering.”
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