Freed hostage launches fundraiser to rebuild life

An Israeli woman who was held hostage in Gaza with her two young daughters says she has launched a fundraiser to help rebuild her life, collecting more than $600,000 in a single day.

Doron Katz-Asher, 36, was among 251 people abducted during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that triggered the war in the Gaza Strip.

She was released in November of that year during a series of prisoner-hostage exchanges that accompanied a brief truce.

“Today, I’m putting shame aside. I refuse to let my captivity define me. I choose to heal and to rebuild. But now, at my most vulnerable point, I realise I can’t do this alone,” she says in an Instagram post with a link to the fundraiser.

“The emotional burden is heavy, and the financial fears are real. I never thought I would ask for help,” Katz-Asher writes.

By Thursday afternoon, the donation counter showed she had raised more than 2.3 million shekels (about $640,000), close to her target of 2.5 million shekels.

Katz-Asher was abducted along with her two daughters, aged four and six, from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where she had been visiting her mother.

Her mother, Efrat Katz, was killed during the attack, as was her brother, Ravid.

Her mother’s partner, Gadi Moses, 80, was also taken hostage and freed during a second ceasefire in January this year.

During her captivity, which Katz-Asher described in her Instagram post as “the heart of hell,” she was treated for a gunshot wound without anesthesia.

“I didn’t know if we would survive,” she says in the post.

She also describes how, after her release, she separated from her husband Yoni while pregnant with their third child.

“I separated from my partner and realized that I would be giving birth alone — without the mother who had always stood beside me,” she writes. “I may have been freed from captivity, but have not regained my previous life.”