Anat Angrest: Ongoing crisis is ‘complete failure’ for PM, my son going through ‘second Holocaust’

Anat Angrest, whose son Matan is held hostage in Gaza, says that the ongoing crisis is a “complete failure” for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, playing on his promise to achieve a “complete victory” over Hamas in the ongoing war.

Speaking at Hostages Square, Angrest says, “I am standing here because my son is going through a second Holocaust. I am the image of failure for the prime minister. I avoided using the word Holocaust until now, because I am a daughter of a Holocaust survivor.”

“My father is going through a second Holocaust through his grandson. We see videos of the Holocaust in color. The 2025 Holocaust is continuing and extending thanks to the Israeli government,” she says.

She recounts telling the government’s hostage pointman, Gal Hirsch, that her son was “skin and bones,” and that he replied to her that such comments were “Hamas propaganda.”

In response to the statement, Hirsch writes on X that the media have misrepresented his words, explaining that, in a personal message to a hostage relative last night, he said the videos released by terror groups of hostages “are part of Hamas’s starvation campaign,” and not that the captives’ suffering itself was propaganda.