From the Liveblog of
Saturday, July 5, 2025
Ex-hostage Gadi Mozes: I wanted to tell PM ‘You abandoned us,’ but I didn’t, ‘out of politeness’
Released hostage Gadi Mozes, from Kibbutz Nir Oz, tells Channel 12 that when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the devastated border community on Thursday, he wanted to tell the premier, “You abandoned us” — but refrained from doing so “out of politeness.”
“After the meeting with him, I was exhausted. I really wasn’t able to hold it together,” Mozes, 80, tells “Meet the Press.”
“I’d hoped Bibi would come much earlier,” says the former hostage, using the prime minister’s nickname.
Despite repeated requests that Netanyahu visit the community — the hardest hit in the Hamas-led invasion that started the ongoing war — the premier declined to come until Thursday, 636 days after the onslaught.
“I’d hoped that I’d be able to tell him, ‘You abandoned us,'” Mozes says.
“Did you say that to him?” the hosts ask.
“No,” he says.
“Why?” they ask.
“Out of politeness,” he responds.
Mozes also tells the hosts that Nir Oz has not received the money it’s been promised by the government for rehabilitation.
“I asked [Netanyahu] to reduce the bureaucracy. I told him that his officials were making our lives difficult. They aren’t releasing the funds,” says Mozes. “In his role as prime minister, [Netanyahu] said things that he didn’t fulfill.”
Mozes, who was released as part of a hostage-ceasefire deal earlier this year after 482 days in captivity, also says that his captors in Gaza lied to him about the fate of his partner, Efrat Katz, who was killed amid the Hamas-led onslaught, saying she was alive and held captive.
When Mozes’s captors allowed him to listen to the news on a transistor radio, “the broadcast opened with an Air Force investigation into the death of Efrat Katz, from Nir Oz. I threw the radio at [the guard] and shouted at him — ‘Why did you lie to me?’ He laughed,” Mozes recalls.
The investigation found that, amid the chaos of the invasion, Katz, 68, was likely killed as a result of Israeli Air Force fire on a vehicle targeting several terrorists, who were at the time attempting to kidnap her to Gaza.
The Times of Israel Community.