Released hostages and families of hostages return to visit destroyed homes in Be’eri

On her first visit to Kibbutz Be’eri since October 7, 13-year-old Oran Sharabi says she is afraid to be in the kibbutz where she grew up.

“I’m coping with the fear because the scariest thing to me is that my dad, Yossi, who’s being held hostage in Gaza, is still there,” Sharabi tells a few dozen journalists gathered in Be’eri for a press conference with survivors and released hostages.

The survivors and three released hostages — Raaya and Hila Rotem and Amit Shani — tell the journalists of the need to bring back their relatives and the other hostages abducted on October 7.

“I want us to have the soccer practice we said we’d do on Friday [October 6],” Oran Sharabi says about her father, Yossi, 53. His brother Eli, 51, is also presumed to be held hostage in Gaza.

The speeches take place in front of the burnt-down home of Raaya Rotem, where she and her daughter Hila were abducted. The two were released on November 29 and 25, respectively. The journalists inspect the charred interior, where molten plastic covers much of what used to be a domestic interior.

Raaya Rotem recalls eating an orange in captivity, before her release during the weeklong ceasefire in late November that facilitated an exchange of over 100 Israeli hostages in exchange for more than 200 Palestinian prisoners.

“We divided it among ourselves. Each of us got a tiny slice,” she says. “Time is running out for the hostages. Food is running out. Water is running out. We need to bring the hostages back.”

The tour, organized by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, is part of a campaign by that group to promote an exchange of prisoners with Hamas for the retrieval of more than 100 hostages presumed to still be held in Gaza. Other families of hostages object to freeing Palestinian prisoners for the release.