Addressing DNC sidelines event, hostage’s father urges holding Hamas, Israeli government equally accountable

CHICAGO — The father of American-Israeli hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen urges attendees at a J Street event on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention to ensure their progressive communities hold Hamas accountable, even as they call for the Israeli government to agree to a ceasefire.

“All of us have had a reckoning over the past 10 months about what does peace mean today, given that our neighbors did what they did in the most horrible way to our home and to our people,” says Jonathan Dekel-Chen, a resident of the Gaza border community of Kibbutz Nir Oz.

“This in no way contradicts our concern for the future of the civilians of Gaza,” Dekel-Chen continues. “It’s important to know that two things can be true at once — something that is difficult to believe sometimes these days, both in the States and in Israel.”

“I’m speaking to you as a father of a 36-year-old now with three little girls — One boy who he has never met, and I don’t know if my son is alive,” Dekel-Chen tells the over 100 people present at an urban winery in Chicago.

“We should push the Israeli government as far as we possibly can to do the right thing, to lay aside the cheap politics… but at the same time, in the communities that you inhabit, there has to be accountability on the other side as well,” says the hostage father.

“One cannot legitimately condemn Israel for its war actions while ignoring what happened on October 7, that Hamas could have ended this and the suffering of millions of Palestinians in Gaza could have been avoided had they returned the hostages on October 8 or anytime thereafter,” Dekel-Chen adds.