Hadar Goldin’s father fears final slain hostage Ran Gvili will share the same fate as his son

Simcha Goldin says he fears that Ran Gvili, the last hostage whose remains are still in Gaza, will face the same fate as his son Hadar, a slain soldier whose remains were returned by Hamas last month, 11 years after he was killed fighting in the enclave.

“I don’t want Ran Gvili to be the next Hadar Goldin, that’s what’s important,” the bereaved father says in an interview with Channel 12 news.

He tells interviewers that he spoke to Gvili’s parents two weeks ago and advised them to ensure that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not travel to Washington to discuss the continuation of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan until the slain police officer’s body is returned to Israel.

“In the deal that was signed with Hamas, it was clear that they [the living and dead hostages] must all be here. Trump knows this, his associates know this and the mediators also know this. In my view, there is not enough pressure on the mediators to bring back Ran Gvili,” he says, referring to the Arab countries that mediated between Hamas and Israeli negotiators during ceasefire talks.

He says that before October 7, there “was no will” to bring back his son’s body for burial. He blames the Israeli public for not exerting enough pressure on the government, saying that they “decided knowingly to erase them, to make them disappear.”

“We went into this struggle with the clear understanding that we need to bring Hadar back, because he is a warrior who fought,” he says, adding that the government’s failure to secure his son’s return led to intrinsic decay in Israeli society that he was sure “would lead to a catastrophe.”

“From the moment the war started, [Israel] wised up,” Goldin says, saying that his family regained hope to bury Hadar during that period, because people began to “see and understand” what happened to their son. “We were sure that if there was a war, they would bring Hadar back — and that’s what happened,” he says.