Hostages’ families warn of ‘lost opportunity of the century’ as Hamas airs new clip of captives

Thousands of people protested in Tel Aviv and around the country Saturday night, demanding a deal to free remaining hostages held in Gaza, as the Hostages and Missing Families Forum warned that “Israel faces the ‘lost opportunity of the century'” in failing to secure a wide-ranging regional deal to end the war.

The protests were held hours after Hamas’s military wing released a propaganda video featuring hostages Elkana Bohbot and Yosef-Haim Ohana, as it has often done in a bid to increase public pressure on the Israeli government.

The families of the two granted media outlets permission to air the clip, almost certainly dictated by the pair’s captors.

In the video, Ohana sits on the ground next to Bohbot, who lies under a blanket. Ohana says Bohbot’s “medical and psychological conditions are very difficult” and says he has attempted to harm himself.

“We have lost our world and our hope,” he says. “How did things get to this point? Our lives are in imminent danger. Every minute here is critical!”

He says that Bohbot is refusing to eat or drink and that he too has decided to stop eating, “because my friend’s fate is my fate, and our fate is in your hands.”

“An entire country wants this nightmare to end. From now on, every drop of blood spilled, every additional deterioration that you see with your own eyes — is on you. It is only in the hands of the decision-makers.”

‘How do you sleep at night?’

In a statement ahead of Saturday’s rallies, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said “the government must adopt a broad regional deal that will bring change to the Middle East, end the war, and return all 59 hostages.

“The historic opportunity will go down the drain due to the insistence [by the government] to continue the war and abandon the hostages,” the Forum said. “The government is acting against [US President Donald] Trump’s policies and in complete opposition to the wishes of the vast majority of the Israeli public.”

Recent days have seen reports that Israel may be left out of a major defense deal between Washington and Saudi Arabia, as it has apparently refused to make concessions the Saudis have demanded for normalization, including tangible progress toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Sources told Reuters on Thursday that the US was no longer demanding Saudi Arabia normalize ties with Israel as a condition for progress on civil nuclear cooperation talks.

This week, it was revealed that Israel fears for the life of Israeli hostage Tamir Nimrodi and two foreign hostages, with there being no signs of life since the Oct. 7 attack.

Speaking at the rally in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, Tamir’s mother Herut Nimrodi said that “this week has been particularly turbulent and harsh for our family,” which was thrown into “a discourse of numbers tossed into the air with insufferable abandon.” She censured the “incomprehensible casualness” with which comments were made about her son (Netanyahu’s wife Sara was the first to let slip that Israel now fears that less than 24 of the 59 hostages in Gaza are still alive).

She demanded that “members of Knesset and media figures exercise discretion before talking about our loved ones,” adding: “There is just one status — hostages. There are 59 pure souls who fit that definition, and each and every one of them must come home now. Bring back the hostages, end the war.”

“Since October 7, there has been no certainty regarding Tamir’s condition or fate — and it is from that, and only from that, that the grave concern for his life arises,” she said. “There is no new information about him. Every day is filled with anxiety. Every day is a struggle. Every day is an attempt to cling to a ‘maybe.’

“All of us, all the families, are in such a heightened state of alert that every word, every sentence spoken in the media or in private conversations about our loved ones, jolts us out of our artificial calm. It makes it even harder for us to function in this already insane reality,” she said.

Other speakers at the Hostages Square rally highlighted opinion polls indicating that some 70 percent of the public supports an end to the fighting in Gaza as part of a deal to bring back the hostages.

The comments came after Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who opposes a truce-hostage deal and who has consistently failed to cross the electoral threshold in recent surveys — reportedly told hostage families that he represents the majority of the public.

Ilan Dalal, whose son Guy Gilboa-Dalal is among the living captives, cited the reported 70% support, saying: “According to every poll, the nation has already chosen. It’s chosen the hostages.”

At a separate rally in Habima Square in Tel Aviv, known for drawing more government-critical crowds, Rafi Ben Shitrit, the father of Staff Sgt. Shimon Alroy Ben Shitrit, who was killed during the attack on an IDF base on October 7, lashed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for saying this week that he “sleep[s] with a clear conscience.”

“This week, I heard the most failed of Israel’s leaders say that he sleeps with a clear conscience. A leader under whose tenure the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust occurred. He sleeps with a clear conscience. We are nearly 2,000 families whose tears have run out — and we can’t get a wink of sleep,” said Shitrit.

“The man who financed Hamas, and whose office staff are paid by the same state that funneled billions to Hamas — sleeps with a clear conscience,” he said, referring to allegations under investigation that aides to the premier were paid by Qatar to lobby for the Hamas-supporting nation. “What more is there to say that hasn’t already been said? Indeed, we are left mute, without a voice.”

At the same protest, Shai Mozes, whose parents Margalit and Gadi Mozes were kidnapped in the Hamas onslaught and later released in separate hostage deals, was more belligerent, saying that Israel’s “real enemy is not Hamas, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is destroying Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

The Habima rally was smaller than usual, drawing a few hundred people. The crowd was dotted with Israeli flags, and chants including, “The entire nation knows that Bibi is a crook” — using the premier’s nickname.

The protest started with a moment of silence for five IDF soldiers killed fighting in Gaza this week.

At another anti-government protest on Tel Aviv’s Begin Road, Yael Adar, whose son Tamir was snatched to Gaza after he was killed defending Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas onslaught, said the government was “sending our children to die in the name of lust for power.”

She slammed Netanyahu for failing to bring back the remains of her son, who was part of Nir Oz’s civilian defense squad, which fought for hours before the IDF arrived.

“How is it that the person who went out first became transparent?” she asked. “How is it that someone who fought for the country is not being fought for by the country?”

Adar urged Netanyahu to follow in the footsteps of Menachem Begin, who also served in the premiership while heading up the Likud party, and to resign immediately. Begin quit in 1983 amid the IDF’s rising death toll in the First Lebanon War, which he had launched the previous year.

“It’s called taking responsibility,” said Adar.

After her speech and as the 1,500-odd crowd melted away, some 100 activists, many of them bearing torches, lit a bonfire on the road in front of the entrance to the IDF headquarters. They chanted: “Enough of the killing and grief, the hostages are above everything.”

At a protest in Kibbutz Nir Oz by the Gaza border, Silvia Cunio, mother of hostages David and Ariel Cunio, said: “There’s enough time to fight Hamas. There will be more operations and more conflicts. But Ariel and David’s lives — we won’t be able to get back if we wait too long. I don’t have the privilege to wait. And they can’t wait anymore.”

Addressing the government, she asked: “Where are you? Where is the state? Where is the humanity? How do you sleep at night when my children and the other hostages, are buried alive underground?”

At the Habima protest, Media personality Linoy Bar Geffen, who often emcees the rallies, said the demonstration called for an end to the fighting in Gaza, the return of the remaining 59 hostages in a single deal, a state commission of inquiry into the disaster of October 7, an end to the governmemt’s judicial overhaul, and new elections.

“What are you afraid of?” she asked members of Netanyahu’s coalition.

‘A country that’s worthy of living for’

Shirel Hogeg, a Sderot resident who survived the Hamas onslaught and rose to prominence after her anti-Netanyahu diatribe went viral, said the demonstration’s purpose was to make Israel “a country that’s worthy of living for, not just dying for.”

Also addressing the crowd, Gal Elkalay, a social activist who has served hundreds of days in the reserves since the start of the war, slammed the government’s decision to call up tens of thousands of reservists for yet another Gaza offensive, in a war she said had become futile.

“Not the hostages, not dismantling Hamas — this war is a war to protect the coalition,” she said. “There is no more Israel Defense Force, only a Coalition Defense Force.”

“This is not leadership, this is a criminal organization that glorifies death,” she said. “Why are we going back to war?”

Responding to calls from the audience for soldiers to refuse to serve, she said, “We will not refuse,” but she urged members of the audience to take sick days from work and effectively shut down the economy until the government gets the message.

Meanwhile, as they have done every Saturday for several weeks, about 200 left-wing activists stood in silence on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street, outside IDF Headquarters’ southern entrance, holding candles and pictures of children killed by the IDF in Gaza since Israel renewed hostilities there on March 18.

Each picture states the child’s name, as well as the date and place of their death.

The silent protest stands in stark contrast to the noisier, contemporaneous anti-government demonstrations at Habima Square and Begin Road, on either end of Kaplan Street.

Amid an extended deadlock in negotiations with Hamas for a ceasefire and hostage deal, unnamed Israeli officials cited by Channel 12 news on Saturday evening assessed that the coming few days would be key and that talks might advance against the backdrop of Trump’s visit to the Middle East — though not to Israel — which begins Monday, as well as Jerusalem’s threat to escalate the fighting in Gaza.

“These are important two days. If there is to be a shift in Hamas[‘s stance], we will see it right before the visit, or even during it,” the officials reportedly said.