‘A free spirit, brave and sensitive’: Herzog eulogizes Inbar Haiman, asks her family for forgiveness

President Isaac Herzog eulogizes slain hostage Inbar Haiman, the last female hostage held in Gaza, whose body was returned to Israel on Wednesday night, at her funeral in Petah Tikva.

“Dearest Inbar, beloved, brave – the last of the [female] abductees to return to us!” Herzog begins, adding, “We are all here… to finally grant you a place of rest.”

Addressing the Haiman family, Herzog asks them for “forgiveness. Forgiveness that we were not there for you. Forgiveness that we could not save you. Forgiveness that it took us so long to bring you home.”

The president describes Haiman — a 27-year-old visual communications student who was murdered at the Nova music festival during the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023 — as “an artist by nature, a free spirit, brave and sensitive.” He laments that she “met her death with such cruelty — dragged into the darkness of hell by Hamas monsters.”

“In what kind of world must parents hope, for two long, horrific years, just for the right to bury their beloved daughter?” he asks.

With the return of Haiman’s body alongside eight other deceased hostages this week — and the release of the final 20 living hostages still held in Gaza — Herzog says, “perhaps, at last, we can begin to breathe a little.”

He stresses, however, that “the mission is not yet complete” until the remaining 19 deceased hostages are brought home, adding, “we must neither rest nor be still until every last one of our abducted fallen is granted proper rest in the soil of our homeland.”