After discovering that his son, Sagui, taken hostage by Hamas and held for nearly 500 days, was set to be released, Jonathan Dekel-Chen was finally able to breathe a little.
At the same time, he said, “Having experienced everything the hostage families, and really most of the country, had been experiencing, there was no absolute certainty.”
Even though Hamas said Sagui was alive, “it’s difficult giving any faith to a murderous terrorist organization,” Dekel-Chen said.
This was made more intense during the week before Sagui’s release, he said, because it was full of “noise coming from Hamas and from our own government about the stalled [hostage deal negotiation] process and new demands and all sorts of things like that.”
It was also made more frightening by horrifying scenes from hostage releases in the previous weeks, which saw emaciated Israelis freed from Hamas captivity, having obviously lost huge amounts of weight, Dekel-Chen said.
“How these men looked upon their release – for me, it was doubly daunting, really, because part of my background is that my dad was a Holocaust survivor, [and] my mom was a Holocaust refugee from Nazi Germany,” he said. “My dad survived, somehow, six years of Nazi occupation, ghettoization, slave labor, and death march, and by the time he was freed in late April of 1945, he looked very much like the hostages who had been released two weeks before Sagui.
“Quite honestly, my mind was full of all sorts of scenarios: What if Sagui also came out looking like those men?”
Sagui's return
Dekel-Chen struggled to find the words to describe the feeling when he eventually saw Sagui emerge from the Hamas vehicle, standing on his own two feet.
“There aren’t words, really,” Dekel-Chen said. “I don’t have the vocabulary to describe that feeling, and I am a man of words.”
“It’s like having a 36-year-old son be born again,” he said, adding that he watched Sagui “emerging from the valley of death, quite literally... Joy, it’s such a thin word to describe that, and we are still experiencing it now.”
Despite seeing Sagui walking on his own two feet because it was from so far away, Dekel-Chen said it was still hard to know how he truly was.
He said it was also “horrific” watching his son and the two men he was freed with forced through the Hamas release ceremony.
“You just sit there helplessly,” he added. “It’s agonizing for them – the agony is for them – that they would be put through this.”
When Dekel-Chen was finally reunited with his son, he “saw immediately that that was him because Sagui has always spoken with his eyes since he was a little kid.”
“I could see my boy’s eyes, and I knew he was OK,” he said. “That was him. Surely, lots to overcome, but that was him.”
A lot of what Sagui experienced in captivity was common to many hostages, Dekel-Chen said.
“He never saw the sun for 497 days,” he said. “That does something to the human body.”
The hostages contended with chronic malnutrition, very little medical treatment, sanitary conditions better left unsaid, and a constant fear of death, Dekel-Chen said.
Sagui was also taken captive while seriously wounded, he said, adding: “He had to deal, over those nearly 500 days, with keeping himself healthy and not contracting infections that could kill him – every moment, of every second, of every day. Sagui calculated that he was there for 43 million seconds and felt that any of them could be his last.”
The danger was both from his captors and possibly from friendly fire, Dekel-Chen said.
“He had near-death experiences from friendly fire as a result of aerial bombings or perhaps artillery shells from the IDF,” he said. “As [best] as I know, they tried to avoid anywhere in Gaza that hostages may be held, [but] things happen.”
Dekel-Chen said Sagui told him he had been very close to death by friendly fire on a number of occasions.
This only “emphasizes the need to get the hostages out in some sort of negotiated way,” he said.
“Continuing warfare – the very warfare itself puts them at risk,” Dekel-Chen said, adding that this is both “from direct fire and the threat of Israeli encroachment on the places where the hostages are being held, which would lead, and has led, to hostages being executed.”
Regarding where he and his family are today, “For anyone whose hostage comes back alive, there is the joy of rebirth,” Dekel-Chen said.
This was compounded by seeing Sagui back with his daughters and meeting his youngest, who was born while he was in captivity, he said.
“The best way to describe it is that there is oxygen again in the air, and light around us where there was only darkness, and an inability to breathe for 497 days,” he added.
Along with the incredible joy of his son’s return, Dekel-Chen said, he and others from southern kibbutzim are also facing unimaginable layers of loss.
“Among the hostages, there are so many murder victims from our kibbutz,” he said. “We have been attending funerals of kibbutz people for a year and a half now.”
Especially since the end of the first phase of the most recent hostage deal, “it seems like every other day, we are attending a funeral of someone who was murdered in captivity,” Dekel-Chen said.
“These are people who were taken alive from Nir Oz,” he said. “Whether it was just a few weeks or months, they were alive and could have been saved. They were allowed to die in Hamas captivity.”
There is no doubt that Hamas is to blame, Dekel-Chen said.
“There is no question that they are [Hamas’s] murder victims, but they could have been saved,” he said. “Had we been able to reach an agreement, they didn’t have to die like this.”
For members of the kibbutzim, “Nothing is over – nothing,” Dekel-Chen said, describing the “horror of having to bury these people, knowing they were alive when they were taken.”
“I watched Shiri [Bibas] grow up,” he said, and her son Ariel came regularly to his house for sweets or some ice cream. “We can’t really begin to live again until they are all home,” he added.
There is an additional layer of loss – the loss of their homes, Dekel-Chen said.
“At Nir Oz, there was total destruction,” he said. “It is uninhabitable and will be uninhabitable for years. Our way of life is gone. We lost everything we knew – people, our way of life, property.”