Thousands at Hostages Square await Hamas’s answer: ‘The longest night’

Thousands of people pack into Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, in tense anticipation of Hamas’s answer to the drafted agreement to bring the captives home.

The Square hosts a regular “Singing for Their Return” event on Tuesdays, featuring Israeli musicians, which usually draws a few dozen people. The crowd tonight is noticeably larger than previous Tuesdays.

Soul singer Evyatar Banai sings his 1997 song “I Have a Chance,” stressing the line: “I have a chance to be saved.”

Captivity survivor Moran Stella Yanai describes her release in the November 2023 hostage deal, 54 days after she was kidnapped from the Reim-area Nova music festival.

“On the 49th day, after weeks of darkness, they put me in a costume. There were two girls with me,” she says.

“They took us to the exchange point,” where Hamas handed the hostages over to the Red Cross, she says.

“Right there, a step away from freedom, they pulled me back,” she continues. “The two girls went on, and I was left behind… in hell.”

“That night was the longest in my life,” she says.

“I imagined them touching the world outside — eating a luscious fruit, drinking clear water, doing what they want to do,” says Yanai. “That was my light in the darkness.”

“But how much hope can a person have after 466 days? she asks.

“I saw the horror, the fear, and I understood something simple — nobody should be pulled into the darkness a moment before the light.”