From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Tearful Noa Argamani said to tell Netanyahu his comments about long war broke her in captivity
Michael Bachner is a news editor at The Times of Israel
Former hostage Noa Argamani has reportedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in tears that her most difficult experience during her eight months of captivity was hearing the premier declare that the war was going to be long.
“The hardest moment I had in captivity was when I listened to the radio and heard you say the war will be long. I thought, ‘I won’t get out of here.’ It was a breaking point for me,” Argamani told Netanyahu in a meeting yesterday, according to Hebrew media reports.
She then reportedly broke down in tears and embraced another hostage relative who was in the meeting, as Netanyahu’s face remained emotionless.
Argamani, who was rescued last month from captivity in Gaza along with three other hostages, is now accompanying Netanyahu on his trip to the United States alongside her father Yaakov and other relatives of captives. The reported meeting took place in Washington, DC, after the flight from Israel landed.
In the meeting, she also said the remaining 120 hostages “must be brought home as quickly as possibly, before it is too late,” according to the reports.
“I saw death with my eyes,” she recounted, saying that fellow hostages Yossi Sharabi and Itay Svirsky were killed while next to her.
The meeting was also attended by relatives of hostages who traveled to Washington to demonstrate against the premier and urge him to immediately sign a deal with Hamas to free the hostages. Netanyahu told them that the conditions for a deal for their release were “coming together, without a doubt.”
The Ynet news site quotes other relatives of hostages as calling the meeting “shocking.”
“The prime minister avoided lines of questioning regarding the conditions or timing in which he would accept a deal,” Daniel Neutra, the brother of Israeli-American hostage Omer Neutra, says during the meeting. “He said that we are closer to a deal than we have been yet, but he did not give the impression that he is willing to accept a deal in a matter of days.”
