“Imagine seeing your worst nightmare come true. You see your child dying right in front of your eyes. You see him gaunt and frail. Sobbing, crying his heart out, withering away, tortured, starved to death, shouting for help, and you can’t do anything. Absolutely nothing. … I can tell you firsthand, the feeling is unbearable. It drives you crazy. It drives you mad.”
There aren’t a lot of Israeli fathers left who understand the horror Ofir Braslavski is going through. While hundreds of sets of parents have buried their children — or wait in agony for the bodies to return so they can — his son, Rom, is one of the less than two dozen hostages believed to be alive in Gaza. But only barely. In the last video released by his Hamas captors, Rom was clinging to life, starved, tortured, and crying. As tears streamed down Rom’s face in the footage, Ofir could only stare, pain etched on his face. “This is not the boy I raised. This is a boy who has been broken.”
Like the hostage families beside him, at least those still clinging to hope, Ofir struggles with a “fierce sense of helplessness.” In a gut-wrenching piece, he tries, with raw emotion, to get through to the world. “As I write these words, he has been held captive by Islamic Jihad in Gaza for 670 days. Rom is in hell. I am a father in hell.”
Not unlike so many other victims, Rom was at the Nova music festival — not as a concertgoer, but as a security guard. In what has become a small comfort to his struggling parents, he didn’t run when the bullets started flying. He chose to stay, Ofir says with pride. “He stayed to treat the wounded, evacuate the injured, shelter the terrified, and did his best to somehow preserve dignity amid chaos.”
Snatched and hauled the three miles into Gaza, Rom has spent almost two years in the dark and suffocating tunnel network of the terrorists. But even four months ago, his parents agree, he looked better than he does now. “At least there was still something in his eyes,” Ofir wrote somberly. “A glimmer of hope. A belief that he might still get out. In this latest harrowing footage,” he admits painfully, “that spark is gone. His eyes are turned off. He looks like he is waiting for death. This is not a metaphor. It’s a father watching his child die in real time.”
The world caught a glimpse of that evil when the images of Evyatar David surfaced, another young, skeletal-looking hostage forced to dig his own grave underground. Bones sticking out of his lifeless frame, Evyatar’s condition is so severe that doctors warn he’s probably lost half of his body weight. His family worries the light has gone out of his eyes. “… They actually managed to break his spirit using these horrible terror tactics of starving him deliberately, of giving him no stimul[i], of having no sun, of having no hope of being [rescued],” cousin Matan Eshet shakes his head.
“I think [the terrorist’s] forearm is the same [size] as Evyatar’s legs, basically.” Matan pauses. “Evyatar is the missing piece of the puzzle for our family. Every person has this family member that fits just right into the family, mak[ing] sure everything goes smoothly as it should be. And this is the piece we’re missing right now.”
In a brief pause from the media’s around-the-clock anti-Israel prejudice, even otherwise unsympathetic reporters seemed horrified to see Evyatar’s hollowed face, writing on a calendar of the hot cement wall what he’s eating — if he’s eating. Beans, maybe, or lentils — sometimes nothing.
“What can I say?” Rom’s dad told reporters. “He’s dying.”
In a desperate plea for people to take the suffering of the hostages more seriously, Rom’s wife Tami admits, “The fear we live with has become more tangible than ever, and it’s important that the whole world sees this, despite my personal difficulty in publicly showing my Rom in the dire condition he’s in.”
As the Western world splits and cracks over Israel’s strategy in Gaza, the hostages’ stories are the one poignant reminder that Hamas is the villain, not the Jewish state frantically working to free them. “It is Hamas and the terrorists who attacked Israel without mercy and unprovoked on October 7th,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “This Week on the Hill.” They are the ones responsible for “the continuing saga and unspeakable human tragedy that has followed,” he insisted.
For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the situation has been virtually impossible to navigate. As the families pressure him for the return of their loved ones, the reality is that Hamas has no real interest in sitting down and negotiating. By Tuesday night, the longtime leader had heard enough.
“We realized that they were basically misleading us and, in any case, would keep many hostages in their hands,” the prime minister said, “both alive and dead.” He paused, “We want them all, I want them all, both the living and the dead,” before adding, “I want to bring them all back as part of ending the war, but under the conditions of ending the war on our terms. … We are at the stage of a single deal; there is no going back,” Netanyahu warned.
Rep. Pat Harrigan (R-N.C.), who was part of the Army’s Special Forces, has great sympathy for the prime minister and the global pressure he’s been under. “This is a really tough one,” he agreed on this week’s “Washington Watch.” “It’s kind of a catch-22, because Netanyahu and Israel are really down to no good options, in my opinion. If they continue to move towards peace the way it is, they’re going to perpetuate the cycle of violence. They have experienced terrorism for the last 40 years. If they go into Gaza, which looks like they want to do, they’re going to have a massive insurgency on their hands. And I think history has proven it is very, very, very difficult to quell an insurgency, if not genuinely impossible, particularly over a protracted period of time.” He stopped and reiterated, “It’s a really tough one.”
The idea that the two sides could actually arrive at a deal to return sons like Rom and Evyatar in good faith after all of the upheaval in Gaza seems more elusive than ever. Asked whether he thought Israel and Hamas would ever come to an understanding, Johnson replied, “Well, hope springs eternal, and there’s still a lot of work being done on that.” In the meantime, he reiterated, “our prayers remain with the hostages and their families and for all the Israelis here who live under threat of attack all the time, every day, every moment. It’s lost on most Americans,” he stressed, “but it is a real fight for survival here, and they need their friends.”
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared here.
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