As the hostages Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed returned to Israel Saturday after a collective 20+ years in Hamas captivity – more than 7,000 days in Gaza between them – a great weight was lifted from their families.
Everyone knows their names now, and Israelis are celebrating their release, along with four hostages taken on October 7, 2023, who were also released Saturday.
But for years, their kidnappings were barely an issue, and had it not been for the October 7 attack, it seems unlikely they would have been released.
If you know anything about them, you know why that is: both are mentally ill, and both are from poor communities outside the Israeli mainstream. Mengistu is from an Ethiopian immigrant family, and al-Sayed is Bedouin. Both young men, who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, crossed into Gaza on their own, Mengistu in 2014 and al-Sayed in 2015.
Their decade-long captivity speaks volumes about the worst of human nature, of the depth of cruelty of which humans are capable. No one could seriously have believed that either young man was a soldier. Soldiers don’t wander on their own into Gaza, for one thing. And their schizophrenia would have become apparent quickly.
Learning of the hostages' plights
While attempts were made to get both men back, their plight received little publicity. After several years, Mengistu’s family demonstrated for his release, putting up a tent near the Prime Minister’s Residence, in the spot where the Saturday-night demonstrations in favor of releasing the hostages are now held. This was the first I heard about his kidnapping, and I learned of al-Sayed’s arrest in a news article about Mengistu.
Unlike Gilad Shalit, a soldier kidnapped by Hamas and for whom more than one thousand Palestinian prisoners were released, no one seems to have put much effort into trying to get these guys released.
Gil Elias, a relative of Mengistu, and other family members and friends of his have said in interviews that the family was threatened by officials to shut down the protests and warned that the government would work behind the scenes for his release only if they kept a low profile. A tape of these threats found its way to Israeli media in 2015.
I WAS struck by their stories for several reasons. The first is that one of my sons is on the autism spectrum, so I am especially interested in anything to do with people with special needs.
Autism was actually once called “childhood schizophrenia,” and I’ve encountered people in programs with my son who had a diagnosis of various kinds of mental illness along with autism, including schizophrenia.
Equally important, having a child with special needs means that you are constantly trying to anticipate anything that could go wrong, especially in situations that you can’t control that could imperil your child. My son, like many people on the spectrum, is not able to gauge danger realistically and so must be supervised and protected at all times. If we lived near the Gaza border, he certainly couldn’t be trusted to keep his distance from it.
But unlike Mengistu and al-Sayed, my son is from a middle-class family that can look out for him in a way that their families couldn’t. Mengistu is an Ethiopian immigrant, one of a group that faces a great deal of discrimination, and he is also from a low-income, troubled family.
Al-Sayed is a Bedouin from a town without the level of services that are available in cities. Even in major cities, mental health services are overstrained and often inadequate to cope with the needs of the mentally ill. Neither Mengistu nor al-Sayed should have been out on their own, unsupervised – but they were.
Even before the current hostage crisis during this war, I found my thoughts on sleepless nights drifting to these two young men, a few years older than my son, and felt so deeply sorry for them and their families.
Friends in the Israeli special-needs community, who have been aware of their situation for years, shared celebratory texts following their release on Saturday. One mother said, “I can’t look at Avera without thinking of my own son,” who also has schizophrenia.
It may seem incredible to most Israelis that Mengistu and al-Sayed crossed into Gaza voluntarily, but if anyone feels an impulse to blame their families for their predicament – or the two young men themselves – please think again. Certain kinds of mental illness, among them schizophrenia, are very difficult to treat. Patients often refuse treatment and frequently endanger themselves.
AT THIS POINT, I feel I should mention another reason why their stories hit home for me: My late father suffered from bipolar disorder with psychotic episodes and refused treatment for much of his life.
His illness fluctuated in severity, and he did better in his later years, when he finally began to take medication. But when he was younger, he had manic episodes that flared into psychosis, during which he became violent.
Several times, he was restrained by police and subsequently hospitalized. Had he lived near the border of a hostile territory instead of in the US, who knows what could have happened to him? This was the situation in my family, and this can happen in anyone’s family.
Now finally, Mengistu and al-Sayed are home, which is a great relief, but their stories are catalogs of failure: the failure of the terror group that governs Gaza to take pity on powerless people with no value to them; the failure of Israel’s mental health system to support and protect them and to help their overwhelmed families; and the failure of Israel’s government, and the international organizations that claim to support the mentally ill, to make securing their release a priority.
They were never a cause célèbre, and only their families and a handful of devoted activists worked for their release. For most Israelis and for the Israeli government, they were an afterthought or an embarrassment.
If there is one bright spot in the whole agonizing story of October 7, it is that Mengistu and al-Sayed have been included in this hostage deal. Had Israel not finally displayed the compassion and persistence to insist that they be returned home along with the hostages taken in 2023, they would likely have died in Hamas captivity. Their deaths would have attracted little notice and perhaps would never have even been confirmed.
Now that they have survived a decade of Hamas captivity, including God knows what tortures and mistreatment, it is time for Israel to embrace them in the same way it has all the other returned hostages. And to take this as a wake-up call to overhaul an overloaded mental health system and to begin to treat even the poorest and most ill minority-group members with the love and concern they deserve.