In Gaza and Israel, an exhausting cycle of hope and hopelessness
| Tel Aviv, Israel; and Zawayda, Gaza Strip
Hopes dashed, trust broken, families of Israeli hostages and Palestinians in Gaza are focusing on survival, as another violent phase of the war threatens. The two cohorts have careened from hope to hopelessness, after a week that flirted with a cease-fire yet included an Israeli military incursion into Rafah.
With Hamas announcing two additional hostage deaths, and scores of thousands of Palestinians once again fleeing under Israeli bombs and military orders, for many it feels like a return to the war’s beginning.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onIsraeli hostages’ families and Palestinians in Gaza are on opposite sides of the war yet on the same taxing emotional roller coaster. So how to maintain hope? As one interviewee put it, “We are all human beings at the end of the day.”
“When Israel sent the evacuation orders, I felt that the war is starting all over again,” says Hala Dadah, whose family left Rafah for central Gaza Sunday. “We are on a roller coaster – one moment a cease-fire, the next moment war.”
Many distrust both their leaders and the other side, yet Gazans and hostages’ families unite in one belief: Only a cease-fire and return of hostages can end the suffering; more war leads only to more deaths.
“The only way to end this is to sit around a negotiating table and [be] creative,” says Daniel Lifshitz, whose grandfather is the oldest held hostage. “Both sides have to stay there and not think that using muscle will bring a solution, because it hasn’t.”
Hopes dashed, trust broken, families of Israeli hostages and Palestinians in Gaza are focusing on survival, as another violent phase of the war threatens.
The two cohorts have been on an emotional roller coaster, careening from hope to hopelessness, after a week that saw Hamas’ declared “acceptance” of a cease-fire deal, accusations of deception, and an Israeli military incursion into Rafah.
With Hamas announcing two additional hostage deaths, and scores of thousands of Palestinians once again packing up and fleeing under Israeli bombs and military orders, for many it feels like a return to the beginning of the war.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onIsraeli hostages’ families and Palestinians in Gaza are on opposite sides of the war yet on the same taxing emotional roller coaster. So how to maintain hope? As one interviewee put it, “We are all human beings at the end of the day.”
“When Israel sent the evacuation orders, I felt that the war is starting all over again,” says Hala Dadah, a mother of 10 who left Rafah for central Gaza Sunday. “We are on a roller coaster – one moment a cease-fire, the next moment war.”
Many distrust both their own leadership and the other side, yet Gazans and hostages’ families remain firm in one belief: Only a cease-fire deal and return of hostages can end the suffering; prolonging the war leads only to more deaths.
“The only way to end this is to sit around a negotiating table and [be] creative,” says Daniel Lifshitz, whose grandfather Oded Lifshitz is the oldest held hostage. “Both sides have to stay there and not think that using muscle will bring a solution, because it hasn’t.”
Hostages’ families
The last week has been a blow to relatives of Israeli hostages. Many quit their jobs to work full time to bring their loved ones home through diplomacy, memorials, protests, and endless media interviews.
Hundreds, like Simona Steinbrecher, still live in hotels, displaced from homes incinerated Oct. 7.
Ms. Steinbrecher keeps two photos of her youngest daughter, Doron, who turned 31 years old in Hamas captivity in March.
In one pre-Oct. 7 photo, Doron is smiling with friends; in the other, taken from a proof-of-life video released by Hamas in February, she looks gaunt, haunted, the spark gone from her eyes.
“I am afraid to hope. I am afraid to believe,” Ms. Steinbrecher says. “If I start hoping, then I will stop fighting – and I need to keep fighting until the day my daughter is with me.”
Until then, “we are still trapped on Oct. 7.”
Solace is found in the Hostages and Missing Families Forum – a network of relatives, advocates, media experts, psychologists, and politicians who provide social and emotional support. The forum seeks to pressure both the Israeli government and, through other countries, Hamas, to reach a cease-fire deal.
Yet despite several meetings with world leaders and the support of governments from the United States to Qatar and Sweden to Britain, there has been little progress, casting a pall over Israel’s observances this week of Memorial and Independence days.
Hamas’ reported position that not all hostages released in the first phase of a deal would be alive, followed by its stating that two more hostages had died, was described as “devastating.”
“How can I have trust when the world is not able to help release an 84-year-old man, a great-grandfather? How can we trust anyone?” asks Mr. Lifshitz.
Many share a feeling that Hamas is “playing for time,” and that Israel’s own government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, is not taking talks seriously enough, prioritizing an offensive in Rafah. Mediator Qatar warned Tuesday that due to the offensive, negotiations were heading “backward.”
Many agree: An offensive in Rafah and prolonging the war will not bring the hostages home.
A poll released last week showed, for the first time, that a clear majority of Israelis prioritize a hostage deal over a Rafah offensive.
Thousands protested across Israel and at Memorial Day events attended by Mr. Netanyahu and Cabinet officials.
“Many people have said that the hostages can only come back through war, but there has been fighting and our hostages still have not come back,” says Ms. Steinbrecher who, along with her elder daughter and two grandchildren, survived the Hamas assault on Kibbutz Kfar Aza. “We must try something else: The only thing left is to make a deal.”
“What will happen if we go into Rafah?” asks Mr. Lifshitz, whose best friend also was kidnapped by Hamas. “The result will be more hostages dead. It has been proven before and will be proven again.”
Udi Goren is a photojournalist and activist whose cousin Tal Haimi was killed Oct. 7. He says families are caught between a government that continues to pursue its political interests that “go against our goal of bringing the hostages home” and a cynical “Hamas who could end the war today by releasing the hostages.”
“I feel a sense of urgency on one hand and on the other an overwhelming sense of failure because our families are not here and they are dying,” he says.
“I don’t feel that the hostages are the priority for everyone,” Mr. Lifshitz adds, “but I feel they are the solution to everything.”
Return to October
The past week brought a stark change for Palestinians in southern Gaza who went from celebrating in the streets to migrating under fire in 48 hours amid Israeli military offensives that are under way simultaneously in northern and southern Gaza.
With the coastal al-Mawasi “safe zone” full and lacking basic sanitation, many of the estimated 450,000 Palestinians pushed from Rafah in recent days are winding up in central Gaza, such as in the town of Zawayda near Deir al-Balah.
They arrive in beat-up, crammed cars with mattresses tied to the roof and whatever remaining possessions they could fit in the trunk or on their laps. Others arrive on donkey carts. Tent encampments are popping up everywhere.
When Hamas announced suddenly last Monday it had agreed to a cease-fire, Heba Zaqqout, a nongovernmental organization worker and displaced mother of three, was at her apartment. Like many, she took part in impromptu celebrations.
“We cheered. We celebrated. We hugged each other,” she says Sunday as her family, freshly arrived from Rafah, pitches their tent on the sandy ground. “Two days later, the Israelis dropped leaflets on some areas in eastern Rafah telling us to leave.”
The apparent failure of talks has only deepened the mistrust of displaced Palestinians – war-weary, underfed, and exhausted.
“We do not trust anyone or any party,” Ms. Zaqqout says, shoveling muddy sand on their tent site. “I can’t trust the media or spokespeople. Because what is being said on the news is one thing, but what is happening on the ground is something else.”
Many of those fleeing Rafah had originally been displaced from Gaza City in mid-October and are reliving their flight.
“When the Rafah invasion began, I felt like we returned back to Oct. 13,” says Ms. Zaqqout. “We are all living in a sea of darkness. I wish for the sun of peace to rise again.”
When Israel began military operations in eastern Rafah, Ms. Dadah and her family went from Rafah to al-Mawasi and then to Khan Yunis, finding neither space nor shelter nor safety from intensified Israeli shelling and bombing.
“We are running from one place to another, from one fate to another,” she says.
“My children are burnt out. They no longer have dreams or wishes; they only search for water,” says Ms. Dadah. “We have lost all types of hope. When you see people running after food handouts, there is no room to think of hope – all you can think of is how humiliating our life has become.”
“Why should I be optimistic?”
Kifah Mohammad Abdulhadi, a mother of five, was displaced from northern Gaza, fleeing to Nuseirat in central Gaza, Khan Yunis, Rafah, and back to central Gaza.
“Why should I be optimistic?” she says. “Even when Hamas signed on and agreed, I wasn’t that happy. I knew that without Israel’s agreement, it meant nothing.”
Nimat Abu Jabal and her family had been living in Rafah for four months, and previously Khan Yunis, after they were displaced in late 2023 by fighting in Gaza City.
On the way to central Gaza, limited to one car, she was forced to throw away much of their clothes and few remaining household items. She is tired, wary.
“I wish I had been killed” instead of being uprooted again, Ms. Abu Jamal says. She, like most Gazans, says her family is trapped in a “full cycle of displacement.”
“When there were discussions of a cease-fire, I felt hopeful the war might end. Now we do not dare plan or think of the future,” she says.
As negotiations stall, hopes are scarce, yet on both sides people try to cling to bright spots.
“I have hope because we have so many other families whose relatives may still be alive,” Mr. Lifshitz says, “But personally, for both my grandfather and my best friend, I feel a bit lost and hopeless.”
“They gave us a bit of hope when the cease-fire talks were extended,” says Ms. Zaqqout. “I feel we will have a cease-fire eventually. We are all human beings at the end of the day.”
