Ex-hostage Iair Horn to lead negotiator Dermer: Explain why my captive brother won’t be home for Passover

Former captive Iair Horn, whose younger brother Eitan is still in captivity, tells Israel’s lead hostage negotiator, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, to meet with him and his family and “explain to us why you don’t sign a deal, like all of Israeli society is asking, and put an end to this nightmare that began 540 days ago.”

“Explain to us why we’ll be having another Passover seder without Eitan,” Horn says at the Hostages Square rally in Tel Aviv. “Please explain to us why Eitan, who is still very sick with a difficult skin disease, remains in the tunnels.”

“Returning the hostages needs to be the top national priority, but there’s no progress in negotiations,” Horn says.

“We’ve resumed the fighting — fighting that endangers the hostages,” says Horn. “I was there, I tell you, I heard tanks rolling over me, I ran in the tunnels during the bombings, I pulled Eitan by the arm when he didn’t have the energy to move anymore — ‘I’m not leaving you here,’ I yelled to him.”

“I know there is someone who can pull someone by the arm to get out all the hostages now… before they become collateral damage,” Horn says, calling on the government to reach a deal by Passover, which begins on April 12.

Horn, who was released on February 15 as part of the now-scuttled hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas, says he spent “498 days underground, without water, without seeing the sun, without breathing fresh air.”

“I’m sick of being ‘without.’ From now on, I want to be ‘with,'” he says.

“It’s almost Passover, the festival of freedom,” says Horn. “I wish us a seder ‘with’ — with the living hostages who have to come home, with the fallen who have to be buried.”