‘The contract has been breached. Close the deal’: Hostage’s brother slams government at Tel Aviv rally

Nissan Calderon, who survived Hamas’s October 7 massacre and whose brother Ofer Calderon has been held in Gaza since, is speaking to a crowd of thousands in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, charging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with procrastinating on the signing of a hostage deal.

Calderon is speaking incisively against the premier and calls on the government to renew the “basic contract between the citizens of the country and the state.”

“The contract has been breached. Close the deal,” he says. “Again and again, you are not doing what you should’ve done 300 days ago, to stop everything and do only one thing, to return 115 citizens of the State of Israel, immediately.”

“A 17-year-old girl shouldn’t have to live her life with this terrible anguish that her father is there!” he shouts. “I want my brother alive, not a sign of life, not a video, alive! And today!”

The rally Calderon is speaking at is organized by the avowedly apolitical Hostages and Missing Families Forum and marks 300 days of captivity for the hostages still held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.