Portraying the families of the Israeli men, women and children who were kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 and are being held in the Gaza Strip as ‘enemies of the state’ is nothing new. As far back as November, not even two months into the war, Shomrim reported on the early stages of a phenomenon that has become an all-out offensive. Indeed, when asked when the insults and the spitting at them began, the families think back to the first days after the October 7 massacre, when Avichai Brodutch, from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, held a sit-in protest in front of the Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv. He was soon joined by other relatives. As the number of protesting families swelled, however, so, too, did the harassment and insults. Eli Albag, whose daughter, Liri, was serving as a spotter on October 7 and is still being held in Gaza, was attacked by someone riding a moped. “You are treasonous leftists and a danger to Israel,” the assailant shouted at him. “Please God may you and your daughter die in Gaza.” In that incident, the assailant was arrested and the public was outraged; today, such things are routine occurrences on social media and in the street. Just three months ago, Gadi Kedem – whose daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren were murdered on October 7 – was taken to hospital after two right-wing activists attacked him. They hurled insults at Kedem and his wife, Reuma, saying “it’s good that your children were murdered” and calling them “leftist, traitor whores.”

That same evening, it was reported that Avi Marciano – whose daughter Noa, also an IDF spotter, was kidnapped and murdered in Gaza – was also attacked. These are extreme incidents but according to journalist Jacky Levy – whose wife, Noam Dan, is a relative of the Dan-Calderon from Kibbutz Nir Oz – they are not isolated. “You won’t find a single relative of the hostage who has not been spat at or insulted while standing on the street with a photograph of their loved one. It really makes you want to give up on life. People have told us that we don’t really want to get the hostages back and that we are using this terrible tragedy to fulfill our political goals.”

Even hostages who have been freed from Hamas captivity have not been exempt from the invective. A tearful Adina Moshe spoke about how “we were standing at a junction, just the female hostages who had been released, and a car drove up to us, the driver flipped us the bird and said, ‘It’s a shame you were released, you whores.’ Yagil Yaakov, who is just 13 years old, wrote this week on Instagram about some of the messages he has been receiving, like ‘Why did you come back?’ and ‘I wish you had been murdered in Gaza with all the other children.”

Beyond the pure malevolence and criminal insensitivity toward victims of this horrific tragedy, the people who have been harassing the families demanding the return of their loved ones apparently view them as obstacles to achieving “total victory,” the platitudinous slogan that even Defense Minister Yoav Gallant dismissed as “nonsense.”

An examination of the comments made about and to the hostages’ families over time raises an interesting observation. As the months rolled by, these attacks stopped being marginal phenomena limited to the lunatic fringes of the extreme right. Even members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, who did not exactly display much sensitivity in their dealings with the hostages’ families beforehand, started to assail them. According to Tammy Shinkman, a media consultant who has been accompanying some of the families, “this began to manifest the government’s disregard for such values as solidarity and camaraderie.”

Eli Albag, whose daughter, Liri, is still being held in Gaza, was attacked by someone riding a moped. “You are treasonous leftists and a danger to Israel,” the assailant shouted at him. “Please God may you and your daughter die in Gaza."

Israel’s politicians sink to new depths

Let’s return to late January. With reports circulating about a possible second hostage-release deal and the families engaged in a combative struggle, Likud spokesman Guy Levy reportedly held a one-on-one conversation with a relative of one of the hostages. Levy was unhappy with the demonstrations outside Netanyahu’s private residence in Caesarea, which he described as “people screaming into a megaphone in your backyard on Shabbat in the morning.” According to the report, Levy said that “you have to make a public call to all of those people who are taking advantage of your suffering to stop. You are turning the public against you. You are making people turn this into a political issue. We have reached the point where the hostages are a contentious issue, because Ronen Tzur is managing their families’ campaign.” He also did not conceal his concern that the families’ protest would lead to the downfall of the Netanyahu-led government. “Having an election now would be a distraction and nobody would deal with the hostage issue for the next six months,” he warned. “It would be a disaster.”

Much has happened since then: Tzur, the controversial public relations consultant, stepped down from his role with the Hostage and Missing Families Forum; the forum has become a lot more conciliatory in its approach and only a handful of families (who hold separate demonstrations on Azrieli Bridge and not in Hostage Square) have adhere to a more militant line; and the headlines in the battle between the Forum and the politicians have been provided, ironically, by members of the Netanyahu government.

What caused these members of the coalition to change their approach and distance themselves from the hostages’ families, who were shattered with grief and dependent on politicians’ decisions? Why did Netanyahu permit himself, during a cabinet meeting in July, to say that “the hostages are suffering but they are not dying,” despite knowing that it was a factually incorrect assertion and that such a provocative comment would be leaked? And why did the prime minister’s wife, Sara Netanyahu, permit herself, according to a report on N12 news, to ask an opposition Knesset member “how come so many hostages have been released and didn’t even bother to thank us?” She subsequently denied having made the comments.

The distribution of these incidents over time suggests that it is no coincidence. Even today, the Likud Knesset faction prohibits hostages’ families from appearing before it, unlike the other factions represented in parliament. Likud MK Tally Gotliv told Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is captive in Gaza, that “your protest is destroying the country.” Meanwhile, a security guard working for Amichai Chikli, another Likud lawmaker, tore down the yellow ribbons that supporters of the hostages’ families had tied to trees near his home. And the speaker of the Knesset, Likudnik Amir Ohana, barred Danny Elgart, whose brother Yitzhak was captured by Hamas from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, from entering the nation’s parliament, arguing that “his presence was likely to cause a disturbance.” A day earlier, Elgart had responded angrily when the relative of another hostage said, during a meeting of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee that the proposed deal on the table was “irresponsible” and that the government should not accept it. Elgart told committee chairman Simcha Rothman of the National Religious Party: “I see you brought your backers with you today.” Rothman instructed him to stop interrupting another hostage relative and, when he refused, ordered him to leave the room. Elgart refused and was forcibly removed by security guards.

During another meeting of the same committee, Rothman ejected Ayala Metzger – the daughter-in-law of Yoram Metzger, who was killed while in captivity – after she objected to the fact that Zvika Mor, whose son Eitan is being held in Gaza and who is the head of another hostages’ families group known as the Tikva Forum, took up all of the time allocated to hostages’ families at the meeting. Mor used up the precious time explaining why, according to the Book of Numbers, Israel must reject the hostages-for-prisoners deal. Rothman, incidentally, told Kan public television that he had not seen the photographs of IDF spotters in Hamas captivity because he “didn’t have the time” and had already seen enough.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the chairman of Rothman’s party, also refused to watch the video of the spotters, asking his associates, according to Ynet, whether they “deliberately wanted to make sure you have sleepless nights?” Reactions to his comments were as furious as when he told hostages’ relatives, during a meeting of the Knesset’s Finance Committee, that he could not support an exchange deal because it would be like “Sinwar asking for 20 of the inhabitants of the Gaza border area to be killed in exchange for every living hostage … We will not commit collective suicide.”

“You really have no idea how much weight people from [Netanyahu’s] base attach to what is happening there – and it doesn’t matter if it’s Begin Bridge, Kaplan Street or Hostage Square. As far as they are concerned, it’s all the same thing."

For the coalition, everything’s linked to Kaplan

Text: Rothman is not alone in this. At the beginning, when hostages’ families came to address lawmakers at the start of Knesset committee meetings and remind them of their ongoing pain, even those who responded more emotionally were treated with respect by the politicians. Those days are long gone. The chairman of the Special Knesset Committee for Public Petitions, United Torah Judaism MK Yitzhak Pindrus, chided Esther Buchshtab – whose son, Yagev, was being held in Gaza; since then, the IDF confirmed that he was killed in captivity – saying “there are bereaved families here. Do you want to play politics? Do you want to oust Bibi? This isn’t Channel 12 here.”

Likud MK Nissim Vanturi shoved relatives of one of the hostages in the corridors of the Knesset when they tried to confront him over his opposition to a cease-fire deal with Hamas. Venturi's assistant tried to grab a cellphone from one family member who was filming the encounter. Tzachi Hanegbi, a Likud stalwart and Netanyahu’s appointee as head of the National Security Council, even went as far as to mock female relatives of the hostages. “Go ahead, you can just curse at me,” he said to one of them in late May. When she left the room in tears, he turned to another who had stood up in anger and asked, “are you going to be dramatic and slam the door after you, too?”

A large proportion of the people mentioned above have never encapsulated the essence of what it is to be a sensitive statesperson. This collection of incidents, however, shows that they are now allowing themselves to go further than ever before. Have they realized that these clashes pay off in terms of garnering support among their home voters, who have moved noticeably to the right since the start of the war? Likud spokesman Guy Levy, in the abovementioned recorded conversation, said that “it appears that the families of the abductees are against [Netanyahu], so there is a backlash from his supporters.”

From the above, it is also possible to understand that the attacks against the families have a political goal: to manufacture solidarity with Netanyahu. It is no coincidence that several of the families told Shomrim that “there are more ministers who said they would support a deal but they don’t come out and say so because they do not want political problems with the supporters – until they absolutely have no choice.”

These “supporters,” according to one resident of the Israeli peripheries who is well-acquainted with the Likud base in his town, “are expected to avoid identifying with anything that is connected to the [anti-judicial coup protests on Tel Aviv’s] Kaplan Street.”

Is there any connection? Israelis are no longer demonstrating against the judicial overhaul.

“It’s unbelievable that you still don’t have a clue how interconnected it all is to Kaplan,” he sighs in response. “You really have no idea how much weight people from [Netanyahu’s] base attach to what is happening there – and it doesn’t matter if it’s Begin Bridge, Kaplan Street or Hostage Square. As far as they are concerned, it’s all the same thing. You just don’t get how fed up they are with the blocked streets and how much the hostage families' protests drive people to distraction.”

Why does it anger them so much?

“They see it as an effort to stop the war and bring Bibi down. They are not willing to stop the war and they do not think that replacing Bibi is necessary right now, so even people who were angry with Bibi after October 7 and even saw him as responsible for it, have decided that they would vote for him again because of Kaplan.”

So, from Netanyahu’s perspective, is it beneficial that these protests take place, that the families are angry with him and demonstrate on the streets?

“Obviously. The people who were angry with him for becoming a leftist, because he didn’t promise revenge like Ben-Gvir did, are now returning to the fold just to show them.”

So, they’re ‘just showing’ the hostages?

“Their argument is that it has gone beyond a protest calling for the release of the hostages; they say that the Kaplan protests have been forced upon the families and, in any case, they prefer to finish the job in Gaza rather than get the hostages back. Not because they are bad people but because they believe that this is the right agenda and that it serves the general interest.”

Jacky Levy – whose wife, Noam Dan, is a relative of the Dan-Calderon from Kibbutz Nir Oz: “Even today people ask why she cares so much when Ofer is a very distant cousin. People who oppose the deal appear to be obsessed with the issue of exactly how closely we are related to the hostages.”

‘Terror and bereavement have been privatized’

 According to political advisors and others, Netanyahu is trying to rehabilitate his political standing by diverting the discussion away from the October 7 massacre and onto his goal of “total victory.”

“In a country when incident follows hot on the heels of incident, time makes normalization almost possible,” says Shinkman. “The hostages are no longer the first item on the evening news broadcasts. They are mentioned third or fourth – and sometimes not at all. And because the families keep insisting on reminding the country of their existence, there is a battle for a knockout blow, since the interests of the government and the families are, for the most part, completely at odds.”

Jacky Levy adds: “Any discussion of the hostages reminds people of the pogrom-like nature of the October 7 attack and when you decided not to resign and not take responsibility, you need the discourse around you not to refer to that catastrophe – so the phrase ‘hostages’ families’ becomes part of the campaign. The hostages were not kidnapped to this country. They were not kidnapped by their families. That’s what you call ‘tough luck.’ Families sometimes have problems and we have to differentiate between families and the country.

“What’s happened here is the privatization of terror and bereavement. As the people who slander us the most tell us, ‘If it were my brother, I would burn down the country – but he has to make responsible decisions.’ As if it were not the state’s responsibility to ensure the safe return of citizens who were abducted from their homes and that we are responsible for bringing weakness into a world of allegedly mature and rational decisions.”

Levy’s partner, Noam Dan, is the cousin of Hadas Calderon, whose children were kidnapped and released as part of last year’s exchange deal and whose former partner and the father of her children, Ofer Calderon, is still being held captive. “Even today,” Levy tells Shomrim, “people ask why she cares so much when Ofer is a very distant cousin. People who oppose the deal appear to be obsessed with the issue of exactly how closely we are related to the hostages.”

First-degree relatives of the hostages are often unable to cope emotionally, so they leave the activity to the secondary circle. That argument is designed simply to take them out of the equation.

“Correct. I told those people that they should go to the Holocaust Memorial Day services and see how closely related the people there are to the victims. Maybe they are also just taking advantage of the situation. Nobody screams at the top of their lungs at a protest for the hostages’ release because they enjoy it. These are people who haven’t been able to breathe for months. Some of them feel guilt that they and their children are alive, while their cousin is climbing the walls with anxiety over her father who’s rotting somewhere in Gaza.”

What else infuriates you about the discourse?

“The phrase ‘unreasonable deal’ that Ben-Gvir keeps repeating about a possible agreement, including one that would see most of the child hostages freed. He is trying to get us accustomed to only hearing the word ‘deal’ in the context of the additional ‘unreasonable.’ As if it’s the deal that is unreasonable and not the state of our personal security. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is effective.

“All of those inadvertent comments, too. The things they say and then deny or say that they were taken out of context – they’re all designed to downplay the pain and to insinuate that, in general, this isn’t a problem for all of the Israeli people, it’s just the leftists because they are heretics who supported the disengagement.  Then they have a problem with the Nova music festival, which was attended by people from every walk of life in Israel..”

From the outset the families did not form one unified front. Did that make it easier to divide you?

“Given that a lot of very serious people warned the families that if they said anything bad about the coalition it would cost them dearly, I can totally understand all those people who force themselves to be polite and to only send out conciliatory messages of solidarity. I also have no criticism of those relatives who flew with the prime minister [to the United States last month]. Everybody is dangling between life and death. People here have not had one restful night of sleep in months. They put their lives on hold and they are doing the best they can, as they see fit. The worst are those who are trying to get inside the heads of the religious families, who are already conflicted over the fact that their children attended a party on Shabbat and warned them about the rest. It has an effect. Bibi hasn’t managed to bring down Hamas, but he did succeed in defeating the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.”

And now people are permitting themselves to go even further in their attacks.

“More and more commentators from the right are allowing themselves to treat the hostages’ families as if they were dangerous inciters. They argue that when we accuse Netanyahu of abandoning the hostages, we’re guilty of incitement – which is a police matter and not part of public protest. They also write that the police are too lenient with us. Lenient? My wife came home with bruises all over her body on more than one occasion. Noam and I also filed a libel suit against someone who wrote on Facebook that they ‘hope more determined action will be taken against full-on Hamas collaborators like Jacky Levy and his partner. Despicable, left-wing scum.’ Why? What did we do? Apart from reminding people of a disgrace that some would rather forget.”

Jacky Levy: “Any discussion of the hostages reminds people of the pogrom-like nature of the October 7 attack and when you decided not to resign and not take responsibility, you need the discourse around you not to refer to that catastrophe."

‘We’re not interested in replacing the government’

The Kaplan Street protests keep on being dragged into the hostage families’ protest because the more militant of them give speeches every Saturday night on Azrieli Bridge, two minutes from the spot on Kaplan Street where there are also weekly protests calling for the government to resign. The headquarters of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum is still adjacent to Tel Aviv Museum, some 10 minutes’ walk from both these spots. To anyone unfamiliar, it all looks the same. Even those who are familiar can easily move between the three locations.

Udi Goren, whose cousin Tal Haimi was believed captured until it emerged that he was murdered on October 7, tells Shomrim that “we are trying to differentiate between the locations because the speakers and the messages are different. At the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, we are not interested in bringing down the government. This is the government that is in power and we will work with it. We do not have time to deal with anything else.”

Maybe it would have been better for you to hold your demonstrations on a different day or in a different location?

“It’s not simple because this location has become iconic. I agree that there is overlap between the groups and it would be hard to get people out of their homes twice a week – especially people who do not live nearby.”

Gil Dickman, whose cousin Carmel Gat is still being held in Gaza, does not believe that it would matter. “The moment we started to press for a deal, the spin started and we were portrayed as ‘Kaplan families,’ with the clear goal of challenging our legitimacy and making it look like we are preventing the IDF from winning. As if the best interests of the hostages went against the interests of the state, rather than complementing them.”

How does this opposition manifest itself on the ground today?

“There’s a group that does something similar to what we do, putting up posters of fallen IDF soldiers and Nova victims across the country. But their campaign calls on the government not to give up victory for their sake and portrays the hostages’ families as ungrateful compared to the sacrifice of the fallen and their families. They tear down our posters and crudely create an equation between the fallen and the hostages – as if we have to choose between them.”

As if the fallen instructed us in their death to go all the way.

“And they portray us, the families of the hostages, as ‘Hamas’ emissaries, forcing the state into capitulation.’ Even those of us who were nothing but impartial have been subjected to character assassination, as if we betrayed our country. They say that we want a deal ‘at any cost,’ even though we never said that.”

Is calling for a deal “now” not the same as calling for one at any cost?

“No. Not at any cost. The deal that’s on the table now is one that the defense establishment says Israel can afford to pay. When we say ‘now,’ we mean before it will become too expensive and too late.”

There is a concern that releasing Palestinian security prisoners in exchange for the hostages could pave the way for the next October 7.

“Rothman told me that the hostages who have not yet been abducted are as real as the hostages currently in Gaza. That’s not true and the way to prevent future abduction is to strengthen border security. Instead, the state is absolving itself of responsibility and placing it on the very people it has abandoned.”

Do you think that there are some people who might still support you but, after 10 long months, simply prefer to forget?

“When three hostages – Alon Shamriz, Yotam Haim, and Samer Talalka – managed to escape and were killed by the IDF in December, we thought the earth would shake. That didn’t happen because even then people preferred to repress it all. It has become normalized to do public relations work on the death of hostages; human life and experiences have become cheapened; the hostages became bargaining chips, with everyone trying to calculate whether it’s worth their while saving them, like some game of chess. People say, ‘It doesn’t matter because they’re all dead anyway’ or ‘After what they’ve been through there, there’s no point rescuing them.’ That’s a case of have you murdered and also taken possession? Not only did they wait for too long and many hostages have been murdered or tortured – but they are now also arguing that there’s no point?

“The number of hostages is not as small as it appears. There are more living hostages than hostages who have been confirmed as dead. But we can’t always talk about the things we know. And even if some of the hostages will not be the same when they return, it is still a life that’s worth saving.”