The Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai published a poem last fall that begins with the words “Instead of Moses.” Instead of Abraham, it continues, instead of Buddha, Jesus, Socrates and Tolstoy,
Instead, instead of everything,
I see by day,
And see at night,
I see in a dream, and on waking,
In bed, in the shower, and on the road,
In shops
In Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem,
Only the face
Only the face
Of Einav Zangauker.
The face of Einav Zangauker. How to describe it? The drooping eyes. The dark pits in which they rest. The toothy mouth that tugs downward. And the gaze. The gaze of Einav Zangauker — whose son, Matan, was captured by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and remains a hostage in Gaza — is one that has seen the other side. It’s a gaze of anguish. Of torture, rage, sleeplessness and steel. It’s a gaze that the entire Israeli public has come to recognize, because Einav — as she is now known — is the country’s most visible representative of the hostage crisis and its fiercest opponent of the war.
On a recent Saturday evening, Einav dragged deeply on a cigarette. She was standing in the plaza outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which Israelis have renamed Hostages Square, shivering in a thin black cardigan and skinny jeans — her legs like two twigs wrapped in bark. She has lost 25 pounds since the attacks, and her frame was that of a girl, though her face looked older than her 46 years.
“He will come home!” a woman called out to her.
“Thank you,” Einav replied softly.
Behind her, a giant screen projected the words “Get Them Out of Hell.” A clock showed 490 days, 12 hours, 43 minutes and counting. That morning, Israelis all over the country gathered for watch parties to celebrate the fifth scheduled release of hostages in five weeks. The releases until then were joyful — the hostages seeming relatively healthy — but this time the sight was ominous. The three men paraded onto a stage in central Gaza by their masked captors appeared skeletal and frail. Health professionals advised the families not to press them for information, but details began trickling out. One of the men was shackled for the entirety of his time in captivity; he did not walk or stand for 16 months, according to the Israeli media. All three men were starved, occasionally going days without any food whatsoever. They were subjected to interrogations during which they were tied upside down, beaten and burned with scalding objects. To see the state the men were in, Einav said, was “a catastrophe.”
The families of the 251 hostages taken on Oct. 7 represent all sectors of Israeli society. Many hailed from the kibbutzim, the collective farming communities that are traditionally left-wing strongholds. Some came from the peripheria, impoverished towns in economic development zones, which lean heavily right. There were Bedouins, settlers and children of immigrants. Together they have become a forceful bloc influencing Israeli politics, though they hold differing views on the war. A handful of the families have opposed any agreement with Hamas, even one that would free their loved ones, if it meant the retreat of Israeli forces from strategic corridors in Gaza. But an overwhelming majority of families have been unified in calling for a deal that would bring the hostages home in exchange for a cease-fire and prisoner release.
In January, Israel signed just such a deal with Hamas, but to the dismay of many families, it was divided into two phases: The first phase, which ends on Saturday, consisted of a six-week cease-fire and the exchange of roughly 1,500 Palestinian prisoners for 33 Israeli hostages, starting with women, men over 50 and the sick and wounded. The second phase would include a full Israeli retreat from Gaza and the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the remaining 59 hostages, about 25 of whom Israeli authorities believe to be alive.
Many of the hostage families have found solace at the square, where they gather with their supporters to hold vigils, sing songs and mark birthdays as they await news of their loved ones. Recently, a tunnel, which you can walk through, was erected in the middle of the square, simulating Hamas’s underground network. Nearby, a booth with V.R. technology bears a sign: “Experience through the Hostages’ Eyes.” But that Saturday, when Einav heard the violin music that signaled the start of a vigil, she got ready to leave.
For Einav and some other hostage relatives, the displays at the square, which are organized by the Hostage Families Forum, an apolitical advocacy group, are too sentimental, too toothless. When I talked to Ifat Kalderon, whose cousin, Ofer, was released from captivity in early February, she called it not “Kikar Hahatufim” (Hostages Square), but “Kikar Halitufim” (Caressing Square). She said that when members of her family gave a speech there last year, “They were told, ‘No matter what, you can’t go onstage and make accusations against members of the government or Netanyahu.’” (The forum’s media department said the group’s messaging is determined by the families themselves and “changes according to ongoing situations.”)
Einav, a former house cleaner from the hardscrabble southern town Ofakim, voted for Netanyahu and his Likud party in every election in which he ran. But she is convinced that he has torpedoed past deals to free the hostages and may blow up the current cease-fire before all the captives are released. Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that rooting out Hamas was his top priority in Gaza; by withdrawing now, as required by the agreement’s second phase, he would be forced to concede that Hamas remains the ruling force there.
His political future may also be at stake: Though Netanyahu agreed to the terms of the deal, two of his far-right ministers refused to support it, warning against the release of Palestinian prisoners and calling for Jewish settlements in Gaza. One of them, Itamar Ben-Gvir, resigned from the government in protest. The other, Israel’s ultranationalist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, threatened that if the agreement entered its second phase, he, too, would resign — an outcome that could dissolve the government and trigger a new election.
Matan, who turned 25 in captivity, was not included in the list of hostages that Hamas agreed to free in the first phase of the truce deal; he will be released only if Israel and Hamas see the next phase of the deal through. And so Einav has been relentless in her activism: She has camped out in a tent across from Israel’s legislature, the Knesset; chained herself to bridges; lit a bonfire in the middle of a Tel Aviv highway; and marched on Netanyahu’s house. “I will personally haunt you if my Matan comes home in a body bag,” she said later, addressing him. “I will be your biggest nightmare.” Naama Lazimi, a member of the Knesset from the opposition, said that, for Netanyahu’s base, “Einav is the hardest thing for them to encounter, because she is them: She is the Mizrahi” — a Jew of North African descent — “Likud voter from Ofakim.”
That evening in Tel Aviv, Einav said her goodbyes at the vigil, then walked briskly toward the Israel Defense Forces headquarters on Begin Road, where some hostage families started gravitating a year ago, seeking an alternative to the atmosphere at Hostages Square. At Begin Road, the protests are more explicitly political and combative. There are no media advisers to rein in the speakers, no talk about replacing the phrase “end the war” with the more diplomatic-sounding “long-term cease-fire.”
Einav has become the voice of the Begin protest movement. Her speeches, delivered nearly every Saturday night, are direct and assertive. Through her uncompromising perseverance, she has managed to coalesce a good portion of the public that yearns for political change. Seventy percent of Israelis support continuing with the cease-fire agreement and withdrawing from Gaza in exchange for all the hostages, according to a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute.
By the time Einav arrived at Begin Road that evening, hundreds of protesters had already assembled. “All of them! Now!” people chanted. Many wore baseball caps in MAGA red, a direct appeal to President Trump, that read, in English, “END THIS FUC*!NG WAR.” Einav climbed onto a pedestrian overpass overlooking the sea of protesters below. Upon seeing her, a deafening chant rose: “We are with you! You are not alone!”
“I love you all, but I am raging!” Einav cried out into the microphone. “The prime minister is vacationing in Washington while we are watching a reality show of the Holocaust!” The crowd booed and hissed; a rolling drumbeat began.
“My Matan,” she went on. “The government betrayed you, but the people of Israel are all with you.” She urged him, “Hold on just a little longer!”
Every night, before she drifts off, Einav sees the same image: Matan, sitting cross-legged on the floor of a small, windowless cell, iron bars slammed closed in front of him. Released hostages have testified that Hamas held some of the men in cages in underground tunnels. With that picture in her mind, Einav finds it “impossible to sleep,” she told me over instant coffee last month (her 20th cup that morning). “My eyes burn. I’m like a baby that cries itself to sleep. At some point, I collapse.”
Einav last saw Matan the night before he was captured. It was a Friday, and he came for Shabbat dinner with his girlfriend, Ilana Gritzewsky. Ilana, who was then 30, had just returned from visiting her parents in Mexico, where she was raised. Matan and Ilana shared a modest house in Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small farming community that abuts Israel’s fence with Gaza. They met and fell in love while managing a cannabis greenhouse. Matan, like Einav’s father, had a passion for working the land. They were a handsome, dreamy-looking couple: Matan with long, untamed curls; Ilana with a deep tan and a delicate nose ring.
Matan had been an introverted and plaintive boy. His friends nicknamed him Akavish — “Spider” — because he had arachnophobia. While they liked going out to movies and parties, he preferred to stay home and build model airplanes. This suited Einav, who describes herself as an extremely anxious parent. She also has two daughters; the younger one, who is 13, has a disabling genetic disorder and at times uses a wheelchair. Einav called her children dozens of times a day to check on their whereabouts. She divorced her husband when they were little, and Matan took on the role of a substitute father. He used to brush his youngest sister’s hair at night.
When the family gathered for dinner that Friday, Einav served her son’s favorite: slow-cooked veal. Ilana brought over challah and a chocolate cake that she baked that morning.
They were supposed to reconvene at Einav’s place for cholent the next day, but at 6:32 a.m., as air-raid sirens blared across the country, Matan texted his mother to check on the family. He later tried to reassure her: “Ima” — Mom — “I’m fine. Everything is OK.”
An hour later, as Hamas militants moved from house to house in a murderous spree, he asked her, “Is the I.D.F. in the kibbutzim?”
Einav responded: “There are not enough forces.” Using a term of endearment, she added, “Don’t leave the safe room, kapara, OK???”
Shortly before 10, Matan sent a flurry of texts:
“Anything new?”
“Are we attacking?”
“There are still gunshots here.”
Einav told him that there were shots in Ofakim too. “Stay quiet. Turn off the lights.”
“Ima I love you,” he wrote back. Then: “Someone is here.”
As Matan and Ilana heard the terrorists break into their house, they made the decision to flee. Matan held the door of the safe room closed while Ilana jumped out the window. Then he jumped, too. With nowhere to hide outside, Matan told Ilana to run. But she felt too paralyzed to move and was captured by Hamas when she tried to seek help at a neighbor’s house. Her last glimpse of Matan was of him fleeing in his pajamas and socks. His long hair was matted. “He had a look of fear on his face,” she told me.
For weeks after Matan and Ilana vanished, Einav thought she was losing her mind. She knew Matan was a hostage in Gaza, but it wasn’t until May that she learned the circumstances of his capture.
Israeli media made public an I.D.F. interrogation video, in which an 18-year-old arrested in Gaza in March recounted how he rampaged through Nir Oz that morning with a small group including his father, who he said was a member of the Hamas security services. When they saw Matan cowering in some bushes, the man said, they struck him in the back, then ordered him to take them to his home, where “he gave us Coke, Nutella and water.” A passing Toyota van full of people stopped them as they led Matan outside. “They took him from me by force, put him in the jeep and took him to Gaza,” the man said in the interrogation video. (The Times was not able to independently verify the claims in the video or determine the circumstances under which they were made. International law experts and human rights groups caution that interrogation videos are, by definition, made under duress.)
In the days after Matan’s disappearance, Einav believed that it wouldn’t be long before Netanyahu negotiated the release of the hostages, who ranged in age from a 9-month-old baby to men and women in their 80s. “Everyone told me to stay quiet, so I did,” she said. She trusted Netanyahu to act. “I used to watch him on the big stages and see his international legitimacy,” she told me. “People eagerly listened to him, and so did I. I used to drink in his words.” Instead, Netanyahu, intent on eradicating Hamas, began a bombardment of Gaza that became one of the most ferocious military campaigns of the 21st century. According to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed, a majority of them women and children.
In the fall of 2023, Israel and Hamas negotiated a deal that brought home Ilana and 104 other hostages. Einav was so eager to see her that she camped out in secret at the hospital where Ilana was being treated just so she could catch a glimpse of her. She feared that Ilana would choose to return to her parents in Mexico after her release. But Ilana has barely left her side since. “I didn’t know what I was coming home to,” Ilana said. “But as soon as I realized that Matan was in the tunnels, I knew that my whole life was in those tunnels.”
More hostage releases were set to unfold over the following days, but the 2023 deal soon collapsed: Israel blamed Hamas for reneging on the terms of the agreement by attempting to release three corpses instead of three living female hostages. Members of Israel’s war cabinet argued in closed meetings that Israel should overlook the infraction and maintain the cease-fire, to save as many hostages as it could. “I thought that it was right to continue implementing the deal in any way possible,” Gadi Eisenkot, a retired general and member of the war cabinet, told the investigative news show “Uvda” last year. But Netanyahu and his broader security cabinet overruled them. That night, Israel resumed its bombing campaign in Gaza. “That was my first breaking point,” Einav told me. “I remember thinking, How do I peel myself off the floor?”
That winter, Einav met with Netanyahu for a second time since the attacks, along with relatives of other hostages. “We will do everything in our power to bring your loved ones home,” he told them again. When the families pressed him on what he meant by “everything,” Netanyahu waffled, according to Einav. “That’s when the thought started to nag at me that something bad was happening,” she told me. Einav disagreed with the few families at that meeting who called for preventing humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Einav knew from Ilana that what little food the hostages received came from the aid packages, and a blockade would also hurt everyday Palestinians, which she found morally wrong. But Netanyahu “seemed to back those families, after telling us something completely different,” she told me. “I realized that his war goals” — to eliminate Hamas and bring back the hostages — “were on a collision course.”
Gil Dickmann, whose cousin was among those captured from Kibbutz Be’eri, recalled paying attention to Einav at that meeting. “She had a no-bullshit attitude,” he said. She told me that she was the last to speak, and she informed Netanyahu that just as her vote gave him a mandate to lead, she would “take that mandate away.” In the months before that meeting, “We had a sense that we were being played, but we didn’t know by whom,” Dickmann said. “Then, as time passed, it became clear who the biggest player of all was. It became clear that the person responsible was Netanyahu.”
By then, several hostage families had begun to protest outside the I.D.F. headquarters near Begin Road. They hoped to intercept politicians and security chiefs as they drove into the compound. The first to do so was Avichai Brodutch, a pineapple grower from Kibbutz Kfar Aza whose wife and children were captured from their home. Days after the attacks, he set up a chair and a hand-drawn sign: “My family is in Gaza.” He was soon joined by Hadas Kalderon, whose two children and ex-husband, Ofer, were also held hostage by Hamas. Kalderon and a handful of other women formed a group called the Mothers’ Guard. Einav occasionally drove by with her daughters and offered her support, but she initially shied away from public action. As she put it, “I was still under the influence of the Bibi-ist cult.”
The Brodutch and Kalderon children were returned as part of the 2023 truce deal. Hadas and Avichai now devoted themselves to their children’s rehabilitation. So Ifat Kalderon, Ofer’s cousin, took over the Begin Road guard with a handful of other relatives and supporters. In February 2024, Einav, still anguished after the meeting with Netanyahu, decided to sleep outside the defense headquarters until Matan returned. Kalderon and the other women arranged a tent and blankets for her and offered their sympathies. Once the police ordered her to remove the tent, she joined the rest of the group at Begin.
The truce deal had by then collapsed, and the women believed that more urgent action was needed. The Begin families decided to schedule weekly protests on Saturday evenings, coinciding with the vigils at Hostages Square held by the Families Forum. In March 2024, they delivered their first joint statement, arguing that Netanyahu’s conduct regarding the hostages amounted to “a crime.” Their goal was twofold, Kalderon told me: to pressure him not to foil future deals, and to call for an end to the war in Gaza. Some of them spoke out explicitly against the killing of innocent Palestinians.
A rebellious streak runs through the Begin families; they are tough-minded and unsentimental. They are not careful. Gilad Kariv, a politician from the left-wing Democrats Party who has followed closely the protest of the hostage families, said that “Einav and her group came in at just the right time.” Without the work of the official hostages group, he said, there would not be such overwhelming support among Israelis for the cease-fire deal. But without the work of the Begin families, he added, “there would be no political impact” — no successful campaign to tie the failures of Oct. 7 to Netanyahu and his government.
The Begin families were helped along by a well-organized, countrywide protest movement that galvanized Israelis in the months preceding the October attacks, when a Netanyahu-backed series of bills aimed at weakening the courts touched off public furor. Many figures who had become prominent in the anti-government movement now took up the hostage issue. They joined forces with relatives of the captives. They arranged sit-ins and strikes, mobilized supporters to camp out in Jerusalem outside the Knesset and held “disruptions,” which included blocking major highways. Together they represented a new kind of opposition, with Einav as its most recognizable leader.
“It breaks my heart to say it, but there’s no opposition,” Einav recently told a sympathetic lawmaker, in an exchange caught on camera by Channel 12. “We are the opposition: the hostage families, the public that is out there with us every day and every night.” Last summer, activists dangled a large cage from the Begin overpass, with Einav hoisted inside it. Thousands of protesters joined her in chanting, “We will not abandon them!” Holding a megaphone, she cried out: “A hostage deal is the cure to everything that is going on in this country. It will unite us! It will connect us!”
Her public campaign has overtaken her private life. The meal she prepared for Matan that Shabbat evening was the last time she cooked. She can’t face being in the kitchen, she told me. “To me it represents family, and my family isn’t complete.” She recently pulled her youngest daughter out of school and moved with her daughters to Tel Aviv, away from their extended family, in order to be close to the center of the protest movement. Once a week, she drives her daughter back home to a specialized center for her treatment. She worried that, in her total devotion to saving her son, she has lost sight of her daughters. “It’s a scar that they will carry forever,” she said.
The headline of an admiring article about Einav recently declared: “Not an operative, not a politician, not nice.” Not-niceness has become part of her public persona, but in recent weeks, as I spent time with her in protests and alone, I was struck by her almost radical acceptance of others. She respects anyone who challenges her way of thinking — welcomes it, even. She has remained close with those hostage families who prefer a more muted, reverential approach toward those in power. “I don’t think I have a right to criticize any family,” she told me. “Just as my Matan was kidnapped, so was their loved one.” Occasionally, though, that facade will crack, and she will lose her composure. When one hostage mother told her recently that the Israeli military “hasn’t finished the job in Gaza,” Einav shot back: “And your son is the subcontractor?”
The government’s supporters have watched her growing influence with alarm. For more than a year, Netanyahu-friendly media outlets, particularly Israel’s Channel 14, have adamantly opposed any deal with Hamas: Their official line was that only sustained military pressure would bring the hostages home and reinstate a sense of security in Israel. But in August, the bodies of six hostages were recovered by Israeli soldiers operating in a Gaza tunnel — an autopsy revealed that they were shot by their captors at close range and were starving before they were killed. Einav and other hostage relatives pointed out that the terms of the current truce agreement were essentially the same as ones proposed by former President Joe Biden back in May. Had Netanyahu been willing to take the deal then, they argued, those six hostages would still be alive.
Pundits on Channel 14 began to lash out against several of the hostage relatives — particularly Einav. “She’s very vocal, very belligerent, very aggressive,” Irit Linur, one of the channel’s regular talking heads, said. Likud activists went even further, suggesting that she was being paid by the anti-Netanyahu movement. “You sold your son for money!” Avi Saban, a party operative, said in a video that went viral. Amnon Abramovich, a political analyst for Israel’s Channel 12, told me that Netanyahu and his supporters in the media, “turned Einav Zangauker and the families of the hostages into domestic enemies. They created a malicious and false equation: either total victory or the return of the hostages.” At protests, Einav was spat on and cursed at. In September, the police arrested a man who had released a video in which he brandished a knife and threatened her.
Einav first received proof that Matan was alive from Yocheved Lifshitz, a hostage in her 80s who was one of the first released after the attacks. Lifshitz, who was shown a photograph of Matan, confirmed that she saw him in a tunnel in Gaza. Further proof came last summer, when a bottle of urine retrieved by soldiers from a tunnel was found to contain Matan’s DNA. For months after that, however, Einav had no news of him.
Then, in December, Hamas released a three-minute video. Einav was in her car when she received it. She pulled over and pressed play on her phone, covering her mouth.
Matan, his hair shorn and his face wan, could be seen sitting against a concrete wall.
“I am prisoner Matan Zangauker, and I’ve been in Hamas captivity for more than 420 days,” he said. “Isolation kills, and darkness is scary. … Every day I die a little more.” He spoke of the hardships of captivity, of living with rats and spiders.
Einav watched, sobbing. “Haim sheli” — my life — she kept repeating.
At one point, Matan addressed her. “Ima, I watch you, and I hear a lot about you, I am aware of the things you’re doing,” he said. “I hope to sit with you again at the same table, eat with you, talk to you.”
The experience of hearing his voice was so overpowering, Einav later said, that she could feel her “uterus contract” — as if she were in labor once again.
Around that time, Einav drove to Jerusalem to attend a national-security meeting at the Knesset. Since the attacks, hostage families have been allowed to speak briefly at the start of parliamentary committees, though members of the coalition increasingly cut them off, order them removed or sit out the hearings altogether. Einav found herself sitting at a table across from Ben-Gvir, the ultranationalist minister, who would later boast of having personally scuttled deals to release the hostages. “Over the last year, using our political power, we managed to prevent the deal from going ahead, time after time,” he wrote on social media. His admission contradicted Netanyahu’s oft-repeated claims that only Hamas was at fault for foiling a deal until now.
Einav turned to Ben-Gvir and told him that she had tried to meet with him before. “But you chose to run away,” she said. “There are hostages who are now dozens of meters underground. The fact that you want to pave roads, build outposts and settle the Gaza Strip on their blood, without bringing them back home, is not a Jewish value.” She asked him how he could call himself religious if he didn’t abide by the Jewish mitzvah to redeem captives.
Referring to the Hamas leader at the time, Yahya Sinwar, Ben-Gvir told her: “In this deal, we’re going to release a thousand Sinwars. Sorry, I’m not willing to have thousands of our daughters raped —”
Einav shot up from her chair. “They’re being raped now!” she screamed. The moderator interjected and called for a break.
By January, as the list of hostages to be released in the first phase of the agreement was being determined, Einav was no longer allowed into the Knesset building. Standing on the pavement outside, she told the guard who refused her entry: “The prime minister of Israel is carrying out a selektzia” — a charged reference to the selection process used by the Nazis to determine who would go to a forced labor camp and who would die. She knew that Matan’s name would not be on the list, because he was a young, healthy man and was not considered a priority. But as she and the other hostage families saw it, by that point, all the hostages were a priority.
She said she was exhilarated to see the first releases of hostages but worried that the truce would not last long enough for them to continue. In February, when the Hebrew media began reporting that Netanyahu was about to overhaul his negotiating team, installing confidants instead of seasoned negotiators, Einav decided to follow him to Washington.
I met her in Tel Aviv two days before her trip. She said that she did not trust Netanyahu to carry out the will of the Israeli public and honor the cease-fire. She had witnessed how politics in Israel gets done, she told me: “In the dark, by pulling strings.” There had been growing calls for her to enter the political fray. But, she said, “if this is the face of politics, why should I enter?”
She anxiously waited outside the White House for news of the meeting between Netanyahu and Trump. Shortly before 7, the two leaders stepped out, and Trump spoke. What he proposed next — that the United States would “own” Gaza and displace its two million people — caught even his own advisers by surprise, The Times has reported. Trump was advocating what amounted to a population transfer from the Gaza Strip — a form of ethnic cleansing in violation of international law. In an interview with Fox News from Washington, Netanyahu seized on Trump’s mass-displacement plan, calling it “the first fresh idea in years.”
The hostage relatives responded with disbelief. “Stunned,” one characterized his reaction in Haaretz. “Totally crazy,” Ifat Kalderon told me. Einav did not want to be seen criticizing the plan. “I won’t go into discussions of the ‘day after’ in Gaza,” she said in a video. “I’m not a politician.” But when I saw her after her return, she looked crestfallen. Trump’s comments meant that the cease-fire deal, already fragile, had grown even more strained.
“Surviving?” an acquaintance asked her.
“More than Matan,” she responded.
A week later, on Feb. 15, Hamas staged yet another armed ceremony for the handover of three male hostages to the Red Cross. As in previous ceremonies, they gave the captives “release diplomas” and displayed an array of firearms stolen from the Israeli military. But onstage this time was something else: a large hourglass with pictures of Einav and Matan, and a message in Hebrew, Arabic and English — “Time is running out.”
The display set off public uproar in Israel. It also appeared to bolster the argument that Einav’s campaign may be proving counterproductive. Tzvika Mor, whose son was captured from the Nova music festival, argues that Einav’s actions have made Matan too precious an asset for Hamas. In a radio interview last year, Mor said: “I think that Matan Zangauker is the most valuable hostage because of these actions. I have a hard time understanding the steps she is taking.” He went on: “The enemy wants to hurt you. The more you cry ‘ow,’ the more he gets the feedback that he is on the right path.” But the way Einav sees it, “It’s a mistake to sit quietly.” She did not want to end up like the wife of Ron Arad, an Israeli taken captive after he went missing in Lebanon in 1986, who, Einav said, “was told to sit at home, not go out and protest.” Nearly 40 years after his disappearance, his fate is still unknown, though he is presumed to be long dead.
Last week, outrage in Israel grew, as the euphoric celebrations over the first releases of hostages gave way to scenes of mourning. Israelis were informed that the next release would be not of living hostages but of four bodies: a young mother, Shiri Bibas, who was abducted at 32; her two flame-haired little boys — 9-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel — and 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz, a veteran peace activist. But they weren’t prepared for the macabre exhibiting of coffins that took place in central Gaza, where music blared and onlookers cheered. Nor were they prepared for the findings of Israel’s autopsy. According to the military, it concluded that the Bibas children were murdered by their captors with “their bare hands” and that the remains that were supposedly Shiri Bibas’s were not hers. (Hamas returned her body soon afterward.)
Two days later, on Feb. 22, a Hamas propaganda video showed two Israeli hostages being taken in a vehicle to watch the release ceremony of other hostages who were about to be freed. That day, Israel postponed the release of more than 600 Palestinian prisoners, in what was supposed to be the largest single-day release of the agreement. Netanyahu cited Hamas’s “humiliating ceremonies” as reason for delaying the prisoner release. Einav opposed the move. She cited an Israeli news report indicating that it was a political decision that Israel’s security chiefs had cautioned against.
That evening, the mood at the Begin Road protest was somber. Some people turned out in orange, in tribute to the Bibas boys. Einav wore a cactus pin that she was given by the family of Oded Lifshitz, who grew the plant in his desert garden. As she stood on the Tel Aviv overpass and gazed down at the protesters below, a light drizzle began. Einav spoke of Oded and the Bibas family. “We could have and we should have saved them,” she cried out. Then she addressed Netanyahu. “We are in the most fateful days that the country has ever known,” she said. “The lives of Matan and the other hostages depend on your decision: Carry on to the second phase and bring them all home, or blow up the agreement and hand them a death verdict.” She urged him: “Implement the deal fully, and let us breathe again.”
On Thursday, Israel authorized the release of prisoners, as Hamas handed over the bodies of another four Israeli hostages. But the future of the truce agreement — and the fate of the hostages still in captivity — was thrown into further doubt that morning when an Israeli official was quoted in Hebrew media saying that the military would not retreat from a strategic corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, contrary to the stipulations of the deal.
Liberal Israelis are split over the extent of Einav’s influence. On one side are those who believe, as the reporter Meron Rapoport put it, that “with all respect to Trump, equally important — if not more so — is what Einav Zangauker will do.” In other words, they argue, the hostage families have substantial influence, and Netanyahu has been moved by their public pleas — instrumentally if not personally, because a hostage deal has become popular with his base.
Others believe that the timing of the truce agreement had nothing to do with the hostage families’ campaign. Impressive as it has been, they argue, it would be naïve to think that the families helped sway politics. What worked, in the end, was the framework devised by the Biden Administration and the arrival of Trump, who pressured both sides to reach a deal before he entered office. Rogel Alpher, a columnist for Haaretz, wrote shortly after: “The ‘lionesses narrative,’ according to which the hostages who have been freed so far were saved because of their families — especially their mothers — is a blatant lie. They survived because it was Hamas’s interest, and they were released because it was Hamas’s interest — and Donald Trump’s.”
Whether or not the families’ tireless protests freed the hostages, they may well have kept them alive. Many of the 25 living Israeli hostages who returned home in the first phase of the recent deal have said that they watched the news during their captivity and knew about their families’ public efforts to free them. Ofer Kalderon had not seen daylight since November 2023. But upon his release in February, he told Ifat, his cousin, that he had seen her protesting on Al Jazeera and that the knowledge was crucial in keeping up his hope that he would one day return home.
Back in Nir Oz, where one in four residents was either killed or captured in the October attack, Matan and Ilana’s house remains intact. The terrorists ransacked their closets, shattered every glass and sprayed bullets into their appliances and walls. But the mixing bowl for Ilana’s cake still sits by the sink, the ganache long hardened; the contents of the suitcase from her trip to Mexico are strewed on the floor of their bedroom. Ilana has since moved with the other surviving kibbutz members to Kiryat Gat, a town in southern Israel.
When I spoke to her in recent days, she said that she was faring better. Soon, though, she began to cry. “Am I supposed to get used to a reality in which my partner will come home in a body bag?” she asked. “Am I supposed to just keep on living? What did I come out of captivity for?” Almost every week, she goes back to visit the kibbutz and writes messages to Matan on the walls of their house. (“I’m not giving up. You’re home soon. We’re all waiting for you.”) The walls are now covered with her jottings, resembling a diary of sorts. For Matan’s 25th birthday, she added another entry: “Life may have stopped, but I will not stop.”
Einav has not stopped, either. Despite her growing despair, she continues to conjure the moment she will see her son again. What she yearns for most, she told the Israeli journalist Roni Kuban, is to hold him “skin to skin” — “like a birth.” Perhaps then she will start cooking again.
I told her that I had seen many hostage families rotating their attendance at public events, taking shifts. One member attends one protest; a second member attends another. But you attend them all, I said. Why?
“Because no one can wage this battle on my behalf,” she said. “I’m like a phoenix, rising from the ruins. I shake off the dust and keep fighting.”
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