Mother of captive soldier: State scared us into silence after our sons were abducted
Before meeting with PM, parents accuse government and IDF of neglecting their children, leaving them to ‘rot’ in Gaza; Netanyahu tells them he wont leave anyone behind
Family members of male IDF soldiers held hostage by Hamas in Gaza were for months “scared” into silence by the government and security establishment, the mother of a captive soldier charged Thursday ahead of a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Anat Angrest, whose son Matan was abducted on October 7, accused the country’s leaders of trying to keep her and other parents of soldiers silent in the nearly six months since the October 7 Hamas massacre.
“At the request of the state and the security forces, we’ve stayed silent until today. They scared us,” she said at a press conference held at the IDF’s recruitment center in Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. “Today we understand that as the number of days of silence grows, the number of boys who return home alive decreases.”
Speaking at the meeting with the families later in the day, Netanyahu promised to “not leave anyone behind.”
“I know that every day that passes is hell,” he told the families, according to a readout from his office. “Your sons are our heroes. Israel’s heroes.”
Netanyahu told the families that only military pressure would secure the release of the hostages, declaring that Israel was “preparing to enter Rafah,” Gaza’s southernmost city, where over a million Palestinians have sought shelter since the beginning of the war. The city is also Hamas’s last major stronghold in the enclave.
Netanyahu met separately with parents of female soldiers held hostage in Gaza several weeks ago. The two groups are likely to be in separate categories in any hostage release deal.
The family members said before the meeting they’d demand that Netanyahu and the government work to ensure the release of their children and provide assurances that they will not be left by the wayside amid efforts to release other hostages.
Recent reports on negotiations for a hostage deal have seen talk of dozens of women, children, the sick and the elderly being freed in a first stage, while young men, and particularly soldiers, would only be freed in a second phase.
“Our sons were neglected as they were tasked with defending the country,” said Angrest at the earlier press conference. “Most of them paid for it with their lives and are kept as rotting corpses.”
Recounting testimonies given by freed hostages, Anat said the soldiers who did survive are being kept in “inhumane conditions” by their terrorist captors.
“They are suffering, tortured underground in small cages in the freezing cold, starving and without daylight,” she said.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu, the responsibility to bring our sons home is yours,” said Orna Neutra, whose son Omer Neutra, 22, was seized on October 7 while serving as a tank commander near Gaza.
Charging that no government minister had so much as contacted her, let alone scheduled a meeting with her, Orna asked Netanyahu to “try and imagine your sons being held by the devil for six months.”
“There is no more time. Our boys must return with all the living hostages,” she said. “There is no time for partial deals.”
Appealing for her son’s release, Orna told the crowd that Omer — a New York native — had not been required to enlist in the IDF, but chose to out of his love for Israel.
“Among the soldiers, there are those who, like my son, left their comfortable lives in the US and immigrated to Israel to enlist for Zionism and out of pure love for their country,” she said. “They didn’t have to.”
“Among them are those who paid with their lives after hours of hard fighting, and their bodies are now held captive. Among them are those who were stationed without weapons, with broken tools and who weren’t prepared for battle, and yet they helped the wounded in the field even when they knew it would cost them their lives.”
Appealing to the emotional connection that many in Israel share with the hostage soldiers, Anat said that “every home in Israel knows the feeling of sending a child to the army.
“The pride, the concern, waiting for the weekend when your child will show up in uniform at the door, and we, the mothers, get a big strong bearhug — and we’re recharged, and become the world’s best cooks.
“For six months, we’ve known that our children are suffering and we have no way to help them,” she said. “We don’t even know if they’re still alive, if they’re surviving hell.
“These are children who just finished school, they still live at home. Their younger siblings walk by their empty rooms, asking the most innocent, most difficult, most heartbreaking questions,” she added.
“Why is the government agreeing to put their heroes last? Are they less important than the others?” she asked.
The soldiers were among 253 people who were kidnapped during the October 7 attacks, when thousands of terrorists carried out a brutal massacre on Israeli soil, murdering some 1,200 people.
It is believed that 130 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza — not all of them alive — after 105 civilians were released from captivity during a weeklong truce in late November. Four hostages were released prior to that and three hostages have been rescued by troops alive, while the bodies of 11 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military.
The IDF has confirmed the deaths of 34 of those still held by Hamas, citing new intelligence and findings obtained by troops operating in Gaza.
Hamas is also holding the bodies of fallen IDF soldiers Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin since 2014, as well as two Israeli civilians, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who are both thought to be alive after entering the Strip of their own accord in 2014 and 2015 respectively.
