Hostage’s mother: IDF chief told me army is bombing area of Gaza City where my son is

Anat Angrest, mother of captive soldier Matan Angrest, says in the Tel Aviv pro-hostage deal protest that IDF Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir told her in a meeting on Rosh Hashanah eve, Monday last week, that the military was bombing areas of Gaza City where Matan was being held.

“He is sending soldiers to kill their brothers and he is complicit in the crime as far as I’m concerned,” she says of Zamir. “A brave commander would at this stage stop and withdraw the forces until there was a plan to bring everyone home and win the war.”

Angrest speaks atop a jeep on King George Street, a block north of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party headquarters. The building itself, known as Metzudat Ze’ev, is blocked off due to construction.

She says the ceasefire-hostage deal announced yesterday in Netanyahu’s press conference with US President Donald Trump filled her with hope but with a familiar dread.

“When I’ve felt that I’m almost getting Matan back, the prime minister has found how to scuttle [the deal], and he’ll search again for a way to make Hamas look like the rejectionist,” she says. “He’ll look again to bomb in Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis — he’ll find all the reasons in the world not to do the one thing he should have done long ago.”

Viki Cohen, mother of captive soldier Nimrod Cohen, says the parents of soldiers and hostages are here today to hold Netanyahu to his endorsement of Trump’s plan.

“We’ve already heard from a few ‘good Jews’ in the government today who don’t agree,” she says, possibly referring to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s statement that he thinks the deal “will end in tears.”

Other parents of combat soldiers currently in service also get up to denounce the war.

“Enough of the abandonment of the hostages, enough of the abandonment of the soldiers and yes, enough of the destruction and killing and flattening and erasure and looking at Gaza as a ‘real estate bonanza’,” says one father, referring to a recent comment by Smotrich.

Another father notes Trump’s allusion to Israeli protesters’ frequent appeals to him.

“We saw yesterday that you see us,” says the father. He warns Trump to be wary of Netanyahu.

“Be careful,” he says. “Don’t let him fool you.”