As more and more hostages are released by Hamas, slivers of information about the previously unknown fates of some hostages still in captivity have come to light.
As the end of the first phase in the deal between Hamas and Israel approaches, and Israel anticipates the return of slain as opposed to living hostages, public attention has increasingly shifted to the realities of the families still waiting for their loved ones.
Some families have been told by Israel’s intelligence organizations that their relatives are dead and are still waiting for the chance to bury their loved ones and the closure that comes with this. Others don’t have any new information about the fate of their captive loved ones.
Speaking at a rally last month, Ofir Sharabi, whose father Yossi was killed in captivity and whose body is still held hostage, touched on the anguish these families feel.
“The only way I can close this circle is by them bringing my father back, so we can [all] sit by his grave and cry together,” she said.
“Until then, I am stuck. A 15-year-old sitting in class, but whose thoughts are in Gaza.”
The Bibas family has also been trapped in this horrible state of uncertainty for over a year, with horrifying rumors circulating about the fate of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas.
In spite of Hamas stating that they were killed in captivity and announcing that their bodies were those returned as part of the hostage deal Thursday, the family maintained that they would not accept that the three were killed until the state officially identified their remains.
Their insistence on waiting for absolute certainty regarding the fate of their loved ones highlighted how significant the impact of uncertainty is on the families waiting to hear about the fate of their captive relatives.
Two family members of hostages who experienced this extreme, unbearable uncertainty before learning the fate of their loved ones spoke with The Jerusalem Post, shedding light on the impact of the hostage situation on those families who have yet to learn the status of their relatives or to achieve the certainty of their loved one’s body being brought home.
Shani Louk
On October 7, Nissim Louk saw images of his daughter Shani slung in the back of a pickup truck driven by Hamas into Gaza.
Photographs and footage of Hamas taking Shani captive were seen around the world, and she became, in many ways, a face of the hostage crisis.
Louk described seeing the truck entering Gaza and crowds around it cheering, “Allahu akbar,” saying that “we understood that our girl is in Gaza and the situation is as bad as it could be.”
He emphasized that the family did not know if she was alive or dead – explaining that there appeared to be no blood on the truck in which she was taken into Gaza.
“We thought if she had been shot, there would have been blood all over the car, and there was no blood. And we thought maybe there is a chance that she is alive.”
SHANI’S FAMILY sent a friend in Gaza to look for her, her father said, adding that the family friend told them he had managed to find out that she was in a Gazan hospital with a head injury.
This made sense to the family, given that someone had tried to use Shani’s credit card near the hospital.
A few days later, Louk received a screenshot of what was allegedly a conversation between doctors and nurses at the hospital, confirming that Shani was there.
In hindsight, Louk said he thinks this was all a plan by Hamas, meant to keep Israel from attacking hospitals for fear hostages were being held there. His family friend later disappeared, and Louk thinks he was killed.
At the time, however, it only served to add to the confusion surrounding Shani’s fate.
“We still really don’t know what is happening [at that stage],” he explained. “She is injured, but where is she? Who is around her? Where are all the Israelis who were taken hostage?” Louk described the extreme uncertainty the family was facing.
The first weeks, when the family knew nothing, were “unbearable,” Louk said. “That period was a time of total uncertainty because you don’t know where she is at all.”
This situation left him brooding on horrifying possibilities. “You always think [about], what will happen and: Where is she ? Maybe she is in the tunnels, maybe she is in some room, maybe they made her into a prostitute, maybe she is being raped, maybe she is being abused.”
“You don’t sleep well, and you are constantly thinking about what will happen and what you can do, and you need to keep your family strong all the time,” he added.
“Is she eating? Is she not eating? Is she getting treatment? Is she conscious? Is she alive?” he continued to list the questions that plagued him while the family knew nothing of Shani’s situation.
“You simply don’t understand what is happening. You just live from second to second. You don’t sleep well, you don’t eat well. You don’t really have a life, you are always thinking only of it – of your daughter.”
During this period, he always had hope, Louk said. “You say maybe there is hope, maybe she is okay. Maybe someone is taking care of her; maybe it’s doctors.”
“We did not think she was dead,” he added, explaining that, naturally, as her family, he, his wife, and children wanted “to find the life more than the death.”
Three weeks from October 7, Shani’s family was told that a bone from the base of Shani’s skull had been found and that it was a bone no one could live without. DNA testing had proven the bone belonged to Shani, and her family was informed she was dead.
Louk said that, along with the tragedy of this news, there came a great deal of comfort. “At least we know. We are not in ongoing uncertainty because, as far as I was concerned, it would have been the very worst if we had never known ever.”
They were told Shani had been killed on the first day, meaning her family could also take comfort in knowing that she had not suffered for long in captivity.
While getting the news she had been killed brought solace to the family, the fact that her body remained in Gaza left some question marks.
The chaos of October 7 and the ensuing days meant that mistakes had already occurred in which some people had been announced dead when they were not, Louk explained. “There were a ton of question marks regarding if what they are saying to you is correct or not.”
“We got the DNA opinion on that bone, but we still had question marks,” he said. “Maybe there was a mistake because mistakes were made. Maybe it is not true, so let’s wait and wait and wait, and maybe we will have a happy surprise in the end.”
This meant that when the family was later told that Shani’s body had been found – around seven months after it was determined she had been killed – the first thing Louk wanted was a picture so he could be sure they had found Shani.
They showed him a picture right away, and Louk knew that it was her.
“We closed a circle,” he said, adding that “Before that, we had doubts that maybe the DNA was not exact, the blood splattered, all kinds of thoughts that maybe she was alive, but the second they showed us the picture of the tattoo and her skin and her body, it [was] closed.”
This closure and burying Shani were very, very important, Louk emphasized.
WHILE GETTING Shani’s body back was an important moment for the family, Louk stressed that he would not have wanted to endanger soldiers in order to bring Shani’s body home. “I was very worried that soldiers would risk themselves going in to get a body,” he said. “I am not ready for any soldier to risk themselves to bring the body because it is not worth it – if a soldier dies [for her] and she is a body.”
He emphasized how devastating the uncertainty surrounding his daughter’s fate had been. “When you don’t know, when there is uncertainty that great, it is the hardest. Like many people in the country today who don’t know anything.
“What will happen if we never know? What will happen if, even in 50 years, we don’t know?” he asked.
This would leave the families of those about whom information never becomes available with “an ongoing question mark, maybe for their whole lives,” he said, adding that “that is the worst.”
“I really have compassion for all the families who don’t know anything till this day,” he said, adding that this is “the evil of Hamas. Hamas does not give details on purpose.”
Louk said that his family is strong.
“We understand what happened, and today we are spreading Shani’s light.”
Michel Nisenbaum
THE FAMILY of slain hostage Michel Nisenbaum also had to contend with the enormous uncertainty caused by the Hamas attack and ensuing hostage crisis.
On the morning of October 7, soon after Michel set out to rescue his granddaughter from the IDF base at Re’im where she was spending the holiday with her father, he disappeared.
Intelligence services were able to place him near the Sha’ar Hanegev junction in the early morning, and recordings of phone calls indicated that he was alive around 7 a.m. near Kibbutz Mefalsim, but beyond that, there was no evidence of what happened to Michel. He was eventually classified as a hostage by process of elimination.
“We told [the family] that with high likelihood, he was held hostage. We didn’t know anything beyond that,” said Col. “Nun” – an IDF intelligence officer who handled Michel’s case.
Michel’s status change to hostage came only after security forces had scanned the entire area around his car – which they had found completely burned, with no viable evidence left intact.
“It was not possible to take anything from there – DNA, blood residue, or any sign that would allow us to say what happened.”
“For many months, five or six months, there was nothing,” Nun added.
Michel’s family was left in a horrible limbo, with no information about what had happened to him, for months on end, without even information on whether he was living or dead.
“In some ways, there was a bit of relief in the fact that he was probably a hostage because it meant that maybe he is alive,” his niece Ayala Harel explained.
“When you don’t know anything, and they haven’t found anything, and they didn’t find his car, and they didn’t find his telephone – not any trace, then the feelings are more difficult,” she added.
Before she was updated about Michel’s new status, Harel was fairly sure that Michel had been killed on October 7.
“He’s kind of heroic,” she explained, saying she figured that Michel would have gone out to help someone or to fight the terrorists, and this left her relatively convinced that he had been killed – until his classification was changed to hostage.
THE FAMILY heard recordings of conversations from the morning of October 7, from when Michel ran into two couples on the way to Re’im. The couples told Michel there were terrorists in the direction they were coming from, and he told them that there were terrorists in the direction they were headed. He explained to them how to get away through the fields in the area, saving their lives.
In the recording, Michel is heard racking the slide on his firearm. “He wasn’t afraid, or he would have run away along with them,” said Harel.
Michel, a Magen David Adom and police volunteer, “was the kind of person who, if you call him in the middle of the night and say ‘I need something [or] I have a flat tire, I am stuck outside my house, whatever,’ he will start his car and will come,” she said.
“Even if you aren’t a very good friend or a relative. He is one of those people who just helped everyone; he was always there for everyone,” she added, saying that this left a clear narrative in her head in which he went out to help and was killed.
Discovering that he was likely held hostage challenged this narrative.
“It gave me some hope that maybe he is alive after all – that he was taken alive.”
Seeing the November 2023 hostage deal happen gave Harel a new kind of hope, showing her that it was possible for the hostages to come home to their loved ones alive – a realization that caused her to throw herself into the fight to bring back the hostages.
As the months went by, intelligence about Michel slowly trickled in, but the family still knew next to nothing about what happened to him.
“Every finding gave me a push to keep fighting,” she explained.
“There was no forensic evidence from Michel in his car, there was no blood or DNA or anything, near [where his] phone [was found], so again it only strengthened my feeling of more hope, that maybe [he was alive], in spite of the fact that deep inside I knew that he likely wasn’t.”
“Until they come and tell you that the man isn’t alive, you continue to believe he is,” she explained.
THIS LEFT Harel and her family in an impossible situation.
Harel explained the deep fear she felt about the possibility of never learning Michel’s fate and the impossibility of continuing on without certainty about what happened to him.
Not knowing what happened to Michel “is not something that you can live with in peace,” she said, adding that this is just not possible.
“It occupies you daily,” she explained, adding that once you are done dealing with it during the day, “it comes to you at night, in your dreams. It’s not something that lets up.”
Michel’s loved ones needed to see him brought home and needed an ending to this terrible story, Harel explained.
She recalled that around the 100th day of Michel’s captivity, the family was told by Maj.-Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon, who headed intelligence efforts regarding the hostages and is part of Israel’s negotiating team, that it was possible the family would never know more about what happened to Michel.
They were told that they should “take [this possibility] into account,” Harel explained.
She struggled to find the words to describe the feeling of being prepared for this option, settling on “horrible.”
Maj. “Mem,” the IDF officer who was the family’s liaison, also described the difficulty of the situation and the impact on the family of the fear that Michel might never be found.
Without getting into the details or talking about any particular hostage, Mem explained that there are tunnels that have been destroyed or are inaccessible in which the bodies of hostages or living hostages may have been held. This means that there could be hostages whose fate we may never know of, or only know in years [to come], he explained.
“That is the most frightening, paralyzing thing.”
Nun also described the family’s pain, saying that the difficulty Michel’s family was experiencing due to the uncertainty of Michel’s status was palpable.
He described his first meeting with the family: “I get to the family, and the sadness in their eyes is deep, the question marks are never-ending, and there is just as much anger, if not more.”
The family expressed to him their fear that they might never know what happened to Michel. That the war could simply end one day, “and they would not know where he is and what is going on with him and what happened,” he recalled. “There is nothing harder in life than doubt and question marks.”
“When it comes to a question mark regarding the status – living or dead or injured – of a person who is more dear than anything to the family, the intensity of the pain, frustration, and suffering that the family is experiencing at any given moment is indescribable. It doesn’t go away.”
“I SAW the pain and I sensed it and heard it when they talked to me,” he said.
“I saw that huge pain in each movement – how they opened the door to me, how they said goodbye, how they talked to me and how they sat on the chair or the couch, and how they held the glass of tea or water we drank. That pain is indescribable.”
Making the situation even more complex was the fact that those tasked with finding information about the hostages are part of the same system that failed Israelis on October 7, Mem added.
When Mem first met the family, “the uncertainty also came along with lack of trust in the system to a great extent because at the end of the day, the system failed,” he said.
There was such a significant time period without news about Michel that the family asked Nun not to return without something new to tell them, he said.
IDF intelligence kept trying to find any piece of information that could possibly shed light on what had happened. Eventually, they made a breakthrough.
“For half a year, we were in a black hole and total fog,” Nun described, adding that eventually, intelligence started coming in rapidly, and within around a month and a half, Michel’s body had been recovered in a tunnel in Gaza and brought back to Israel for proper burial.
The family was then told that Michel was killed on October 7, likely in the very first moments of his encounter with Hamas terrorists, and that he did not suffer.
When the family was given confirmation that Michel had been killed on October 7, they were also told that his body was already back in Israel, meaning they did not have to rely on the intelligence alone to be certain about what had happened.
Asked if she would have been able to accept and believe that Michel was killed even if his body had not been recovered, Harel said she would have.
“I know they hid things from us during those months,” Harel explained. “But what they hid was actually to protect the intelligence, the living hostages. No one hid information from us for no reason or just to hide things – so I totally [would] believe.”
According to Nun, everything he knew was conveyed to Michel’s family. He explained that when he kept things from the family, it was “mainly to protect them and not raise some sort of false hope” if he had a theory without confirmation.
There are also “things that come from super sensitive sources which you can’t say,” he added, saying that if these things were to get out, it could seriously harm national security.
There is always tension surrounding “what you say, mainly how you say it,” he explained.
“Coming and throwing all the question marks I have in my head on the family won’t help,” he added.
Harel touched on what she thinks she would have done had Michel’s body not been brought back. She estimates that she would have continued to fight for Michel, but would have fought even harder for the hostages alive in captivity.
“For those who are dead, there is not much that can be done. I wouldn’t want to make a deal that would free tens of thousands of terrorists for bodies,” she explained.
“With all the pain and grief and desire to bring them [back] for burial in Israel, I was very, very afraid of that. I am a resident of the Gaza border area, I am very very scared, I won’t lie.”
At the same time, she expressed her gratitude that Michel’s body was brought back and her wish for a deal to be made that would see everyone brought back – living and deceased.
“When they found Michel and the six other bodies [of the hostages Shani Louk, Amit Buskila, Ron Benjamin, Yitzchak Gelernter, Hanan Yablonka, and Orion Hernandez] in those two tunnels, I think that for the family, on the one hand it was of course a huge disaster, but on the other hand, I think it also was a chance to start mourning and start healing,” Mem said.
The certainty allowed them to not be afraid of every phone call, he explained, adding that for the families, the certainty means “getting out of the crazy limbo that they were in.”
“Losing a loved one is hard, but not knowing and being afraid to [never] know – it’s paralyzing.”
When the soldiers who brought Michel’s body out of Gaza visited the family, they apologized for being too late, Mem recounted. The family told the soldiers that while they didn’t bring Michel back alive, they did bring the family their lives back, he said.
“There is no solace like the resolution of doubts,” Nun said – in a twist on an older Jewish teaching. “There is something to resolving doubt, even with the worst news.”
Now, over 500 days from October 7, “There are many families who have this huge doubt, and even those who got a sign of life today – it doesn’t say anything about tomorrow, and what they get tomorrow doesn’t say anything about two days from now,” Nun said. “The ongoing lack of information is a massive pain that can’t be put into words.”