1st hostage to return from Gaza meets Trump, urges him to do all he can to free captives
Judith Raanan, taken with teen daughter while visiting Nahal Oz and released two weeks later, gives US president-elect a painting and tells him about her time in captivity
An Israel-American former hostage met US President-elect Donald Trump in Florida and urged him to do everything he can to free the remaining 100 captives held by terrorists in Gaza, according to a Tuesday statement by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
Judith Raanan was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nahal Oz during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, along with her 18-year-old daughter, Natalie. Less than two weeks later, on October 20, the pair became the first to be released by Hamas.
Raanan gave Trump a painting of hers and told him about the kidnapping and her time in captivity in Gaza, according to the Families Forum statement.
The statement noted that Raanan’s main message was that she trusts Trump and asked him to do everything in his power to secure the return of all the hostages, both the living and the dead.
Judith and Natalie, residents of Evanston, Illinois, outside of Chicago, had been in Israel to celebrate a relative’s 85th birthday and the Jewish holiday season when they were kidnapped from the Gaza border community.
The mother and daughter were set free unilaterally by the terror group. The exact mechanism behind the transfer was not clear — Hamas said that the release was made “for humanitarian reasons.”
For more than a year, several waves of negotiations have stalled and failed to reach a sequel to an agreement reached in late November 2023, in which 105 hostages were released in a weeklong truce.
Israel believes that 96 of the 251 hostages kidnapped on October 7 are still in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 34 confirmed dead by the Israel Defense Forces. Over the past 14 months, IDF troops have rescued eight hostages and recovered the bodies of 38.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Gaza Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
The outgoing Biden administration is still working to secure a deal before leaving the White House.
Talks for a potential deal were recently renewed following the ceasefire in Lebanon, and recent regional developments, along with Trump’s threat that there will be “hell to pay” if the hostages are not released by the time he enters office on January 20, 2025.
Three hostages with US citizenship — Edan Alexander, Sagui Dekel-Chen and Keith Siegel — are believed to still be alive. The bodies of four other Americans — Omer Neutra, Judith Weinstein, Gadi Haggai and Itay Chen — are still being held in Gaza.
A rare critique of Biden from a hostage family
Relatives of those seven hostages met with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan later Tuesday to receive an update on the Biden administration’s efforts to secure a hostage deal before Sullivan himself headed to the region to advance that aim.
One of the participants in the White House meeting with Iris Weinstein Haggai, daughter of slain hostages Judi and Gadi.
Speaking to The Times of Israel after the meeting, Weinstein Haggai said US President Joe Biden should have issued the kind of statement released last week by President-elect Donald Trump, who warned of “all hell to pay” if captives in the Middle East were not immediately released.
“All world leaders should have done on October 8, 2023, what Trump did in his tweet,” Weinstein Haggai said. “Our situation would have been a lot different. We would have saved many lives — not only Israelis, not only hostages’ but also Palestinians — if only world leaders took a stand for the unconditional release of all these hostages.”
Asked specifically whether her critique of world leaders extended to Biden, Weinstein Haggai responded, “definitely,” taking ownership of a rare critique of the outgoing president who has repeatedly been heralded by the American hostage families for his efforts to secure their loved ones’ release.
She recognized that Biden has several times throughout the war called for the unconditional release of the hostages, and she expressed appreciation for the president’s decision to visit Israel days after October 7. “But the demand for them to be released ‘or else,’ is what I’m looking for,” said Weinstein Haggai, whose parents’ bodies have been held in Gaza since they were murdered during the Hamas onslaught.
Weinstein Haggai clarified that she doesn’t expect Hamas to immediately comply with such demands, but stated they would lead the terror group to understand the international community is not accepting its narrative and that it therefore doesn’t have legitimacy to raise demands in negotiations or refuse to engage in talks at all.
“When these Hamas terrorists… see that world leaders don’t pressure them… it sends a message to them that they can execute six beautiful young people and there are no consequences, that they can release these propaganda videos and nobody’s going to do anything,” she said.
While many world leaders have demanded the immediate release of the hostages, they have done so as part of calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, which the hostages’ daughter laments is something they haven’t done when addressing other conflicts.
“It hurts my soul to see what’s happening in Gaza. My family lived a mile from Gaza for a reason. We were the first in line to advocate for peace and for a two-state solution, but the hostages can’t be used to solve the Middle East crisis,” Weinstein Haggai argued.
Regardless, she said it was “never too late” for world leaders to issue the kind of statement Trump did.
