TEL AVIV, Israel (news agencies) — After 16 months of excruciating uncertainty, Idit Ohel finally received word this week that her 24-year-old son, a hostage in Gaza, is still alive.
She said she fainted upon hearing the brutal details of his captivity from freed hostages who had been held with him by Hamas since Oct. 7, 2023. Bound by chains in an underground tunnel, Alon Ohel has subsisted on a piece of bread or less each day.
“He hasn’t seen sunlight in 493 days,” she told reporters on Monday.
As the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas seems increasingly at risk of falling apart — Hamas says it will not free three hostages on Saturday as planned, and Israel says it’s ready to resume the war if it doesn’t — families of the hostages are struggling to maintain hope. They are pleading with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to give up on the ceasefire framework, and to speed up the timeline of releases if possible.
Their worries about the ceasefire collapsing have been exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s demand that all of the hostages be freed by Saturday — and his insistence that Gaza be emptied of all Palestinians and redeveloped as a tourist enclave controlled by the United States.
The emaciated state of three hostages released last Saturday has infuriated Israelis and terrified families of the remaining hostages, especially as more details come out about the conditions of their captivity.
The situation is especially difficult for relatives of hostages who are not on the list of 33 hostages expected to be released in the ceasefire’s first, six-week phase, which began on Jan. 19. The agreement requires Israel to free 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, whose families are also worried about how their enemy treats them.
Two hostages released on Saturday, Or Levy and Eli Sharabi, were held together with Alon Ohel, and a fourth hostage, Eliya Cohen. The four were held underground since their kidnapping, Idit Ohel said.
Cohen is expected to be released in the ceasefire’s first stage; Ohel would be freed in the second stage, if Israel and Hamas reach that point.
Levy, Ohel, and Cohen were kidnapped from a bomb shelter near a music festival in southern Israel, along with Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American-Israeli who was killed in captivity in August.
“It breaks my heart to know he was chained and to know what happened to him in the tunnels from people in the tunnels,” Cohen’s fiancée, Ziv Abud, 27, told reporters on Tuesday.
The returned hostages said that Cohen had lost more than 20 kilograms (44 pounds) and had a bullet in his leg that did not receive medical attention. While they were with him, Cohen was unaware that Abud had survived the Hamas attack on the bomb shelter where they were hiding.
During the Oct. 7 attack, militants tossed grenades and sprayed bullets inside the concrete bomb shelter near the music festival, where almost 30 people had crammed inside. At least 16 people inside the shelter were killed.
Abud said she was protected by the crush of bodies above her. Going in and out of consciousness, she spent hours laying beneath the bodies of her nephew and his girlfriend.
For families of hostages who are not scheduled for release in the first phase of the ceasefire, its uncertainty is even more difficult to bear.
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