More than two years after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, Israeli families say the war’s fallout has not ended. Under the ceasefire agreement, 20 hostages have returned alive, and 28 have been confirmed murdered in Gaza. Yet of those killed, only eight bodies have been brought home—and one, in a final act of cruelty, did not even belong to any hostage.
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Boaz Zalmanovich’s father, Aryeh, 86, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz and died in captivity after 42 days. He calls it “a cruelty without end.” Speaking to The Media Line, he added, “Hamas keeps playing with the dead. They return the bodies drop by drop, using them as part of their political theater.”
For Zalmanovich, the final days are hard to recount. He said his father suffered from chronic illness, couldn’t tolerate the food provided, and sustained a head injury during the abduction. “He didn’t die from a bullet or strangulation, but from hunger and sickness, from physical and mental suffering,” he said. “That’s what Hamas did to him.”
The family learned of his death from a short hospital video posted on Telegram and relayed through Al Jazeera. “You see him lying on a hospital bed, connected to some kind of monitor,” Zalmanovich recalled.
“Then he’s gasping, mumbling. … In the third shot, he’s wrapped in sheets. That’s how we found out.” Testimony from released hostages later placed Aryeh in Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital in his final hours, whispering memories of kibbutz life—parents, friends, fields—“about the place he would never see again,” Boaz said.
Now, while other families welcome loved ones home, the Zalmanoviches have no grave to visit. “The hardest part is not only that my father was murdered there,” he said, “but that Hamas continues to control the pace of grief.”
In Nir Yitzhak, Tal Haimi, commander of the kibbutz rapid-response team, told his wife, Ela, to shelter with their twins on Oct. 7. “He said, ‘Do what you can, because there are terrorists,’ and left,” she recalled at a Media Central briefing with the Hostages’ Families Forum.
An hour later, she reached him: “He said, ‘Everything’s OK, you’re bothering me.” She now believes he already grasped the scale of the assault.
Evidence gathered later—his helmet, blood traces, expert assessments—indicates he was shot in the head while defending neighbors. “He was already dead when they took him into Gaza,” she said.
By December 2023, the army confirmed his death. “They called me and said, ‘Ela, Tal is dead.’ In one minute, I had to decide—do we have a funeral, a grave, or nothing at all?” she said.
She chose a burial in the south; beneath the soil lies only his helmet. “It’s a temporary grave,” she said, “but at least there’s a place where the children can talk to him.”
In May 2024, she gave birth to a son, Lotan. “The kids chose the name,” she said with a faint smile. “It has the letters of ‘Tal,’ and it’s also the name of the place where we spent our first year together in the Arava.”
Each day brings calls with a military liaison; nights bring uncertainty. “They said Hamas will deliver four bodies at 10 p.m.,” she told reporters. “I don’t know if one of them is my husband.”
On the terms of the deal, she was blunt: “I don’t have hopes from Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization. My hope is with my country and my government, that they will press Hamas with the help of the international community. We have tools to stop humanitarian aid, to control the number of trucks entering Gaza. We have to use them.” Then, quietly: “I just want him home. To bury him in the land of the kibbutz. That’s what he deserves.”
Second kind of captivity
For families like the Haimis and the Zalmanoviches, the ceasefire has extended limbo rather than ending it. A forum representative whispered after the briefing, “It’s a second kind of captivity. … They are still prisoners of uncertainty.”
Zalmanovich argues the agreement allows foot-dragging. “There were loopholes in the agreement,” he said. “They allow Hamas to play on the edge of violation—returning bodies slowly, pretending to comply. My father and others like him are in southern Gaza, and we hope Hamas hasn’t desecrated them.”
Pressure, he believes, should be intensified without reigniting a broader fight. He referenced President Donald Trump and current policy debates: “We don’t want the war renewed just to bring them back,” he said. “There are other levers—like withdrawals, border openings. But the state must act. Until now, it could have done better.”
On the political front, his anger sharpened over a symbolic dispute before President Donald Trump’s Knesset address. “Before the speech, Speaker Amir Ohana told people they could remove the yellow ribbons—the symbol of our hostages. And he took his own off,”
Zalmanovich said. “It was obscene. … It was sycophancy and cynicism.”
Despite the bitterness, he returns to first principles. “Our agreement is not with Hamas,” he said. “It’s between us and Israel. The deal is simple: The state must bring us home—alive if possible, dead if not.” Then, with resignation: “For two years, they failed to keep it. Now they’re starting to fulfill it, but they could have done it earlier. We want results, not promises.”
Ela’s days are built on endurance: four children, media interviews, the drumbeat of advocacy. “I did almost ten interviews today,” she said. “I have four kids—one is a baby, I’m breastfeeding—but I do it to make pressure.” That pressure, she believes, helped prompt the return of four more bodies. “It’s because of the families and the journalists,” she said. “You must echo this story as much as you can.”
Justice, for these families, means return—not vengeance. “I can handle four bodies a day,” Ela said, “if I know it will be 48 [living and dead hostages] in the end.”
Both households live near the Gaza border and yearn for quiet. “My kids asked me if the world is going to end,” she said. “They just want quiet.” Zalmanovich voiced the same wish through memory: “My father was a man of the land. … Zionism is a word you do with your hands—through labor, settlement, hard work.”
For now, remembrance fills the space where graves should stand. As he put it, “It’s hard to bury a father when there’s nothing to bury. Harder still when those who should protect you tell you to take off the ribbon that reminds the world he’s gone.” The waiting continues—without a calendar, and without a grave.