If the leadership in Israel or of Hamas wanted a hostage deal to go through and the hostages to come home, such a deal would occur, said Liz Naftali, the great-aunt of released four-year-old hostage Abigail Idan.
Naftali has been advocating for the hostages all around the world since October 8, knowing that the stories of what happened in the South on October 7 needed to be shared.
Idan was kidnapped from Kibbutz Kfar Aza during the October 7 massacre, after witnessing the murder of her mother and father, Roy and Smadar. She took shelter with her neighbors before they were all taken hostage by Hamas.
She was released on November 26, after 51 days in Hamas captivity and two days after her fourth birthday.
Hostage negotiations up for debate in the Middle East
As part of her advocacy for the hostages, Naftali spoke at a conference in Doha this week, participating in a panel at the Global Security Conference that addressed the impacts of hostage-taking by state and non-state actors.
This kind of advocacy and meeting with people from different backgrounds and with different worldviews is vitally important, said Naftali, saying that her reception in Doha has been warm and welcoming and that she has found people in Qatar to be thoughtful and invested in the fate of the hostages.“We need to be talking and listening,” she said, adding that this was even more important when having the hard conversations with those who are different from ourselves.Naftali expressed her gratitude for US President Biden and his administration and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and his government for facilitating the hostage negotiations that successfully freed over 100 hostages in November.
The success of this deal highlights the fact that if the remainder of the hostages are not released in a deal, it is “about the interested parties,” she said.
“If there was an interest of the leadership to bring home the remaining hostages, it would have been done already,” she said.
“Every day is a day we could lose more people,” she said, explaining the urgency of the situation.
Though Idan was released from Hamas captivity, Naftali said that she won't stop advocating for the other 130 hostages to be freed and putting a human face to a humanitarian crisis she says can be disregarded by the news.
Idan coming home allowed our family to begin healing, said Naftali, “other families can’t until their loved ones return to them.”
Brooke Sarah Borden contributed to this report.