Hostages Square volunteers celebrate deal announcement: ‘I hope we can close up and go home’

One group preparing for the end of an era is the self-identified “Shirt Team,” a group of volunteers who have been staffing merchandise tables at Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square for nearly two years. Today, as a crowd in the square awaits further news of a deal to bring home the 48 remaining hostages, a group of women behind a table selling T-shirts, pins, and other apparel is celebrating.

“Friends, Shirt Team! Two years in the fire and water!” one of the volunteers shouts. “We’ll keep doing what we need to do because the nation’s heart is really in the right place.”

Dana Felz-Russo, the lead organizer, says the apparel stations first went up in late October 2023, soon after the massacre. Volunteers set up one table with 200 shirts that someone had printed.

Now, the team has grown to 110 volunteers who staff tables that are open 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Felz-Russo is here 10 hours a week on average, she says. She also has three children and a full-time job at the telecommunications company Partner.

“I hope we can close up and go home,” she says to applause.

She doesn’t know what will happen to the stacks of merchandise after the last hostage comes home.

“We’ll wait and see,” she says, adding, “I think we’ll change the symbols to, ‘We returned them and now we’re living.'”