Ex-hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen urges Netanyahu to put politics aside, accompany him on visit to Kibbutz Nir Oz – report

24 February 2025, 8:43 pm

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Freed hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen with his wife Avital aboard an IDF helicopter en route to the hospital soon after his release from 498 days in Hamas captivity in Gaza, February 15, 2025. The whiteboard message refers to the then-73 hostages still held in Gaza, and urges 'return all of them to us.' (IDF)

Recently freed hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen encouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit Kibbutz Nir Oz when the two spoke on the phone yesterday, Channel 12 reports.

The Prime Minister’s Office said yesterday that Netanyahu had spoken to Dekel-Chen and Ohad Ben Ami, and told them that Israel had needed to apply great pressure on Hamas to secure their release.

Dekel-Chen, a dual Israeli-American citizen, was freed from captivity on February 15, and Ben Ami was released a week earlier.

In what Channel 12 says is a transcript of their conversation, Dekel-Chen told the premier that he cannot “eat, drink, shower, or play with my daughters while there are hostages that I left behind, some of them my friends, dead and alive.”

“I will not leave anyone there,” Dekel-Chen added.

Netanyahu, in response, told him that he “will not leave anyone behind,” and stressed that “we are working extremely hard to return everyone.”

Dekel-Chen, who had no exposure to the outside world for the duration of his captivity, and did not find out about the vast protest movement in Israel until his return, told the prime minister that the footage from the protests “of my father crying on the stage, of my wife and daughters standing at protests and crying,” have been hard for him to take in.

“I understand that you haven’t visited Nir Oz,” Dekel-Chen said to Netanyahu. “I’m inviting you, with a personal invitation. We will put politics aside and I will take you, without any politics — just you and me on the paths of Nir Oz.”

“Right now, everything is blossoming, but I will show you blood-soaked places and burnt homes,” he said, according to Channel 12.

The prime minister has not visited Nir Oz over the past 16 months, despite appeals for him to do so from its residents, after 117 members of the tight-knit community were either murdered or abducted on October 7, 2023.

“We come from different viewpoints, but I have always believed, even in captivity, that the considerations in Israel are made professionally, and I ask that they are,” said Dekel-Chen.

He told Netanyahu that “the real victory will be returning love to the streets, and that will only happen with the return of the hostages.”