Yoni Asher, father of freed Gaza hostages Raz and Aviv, revealed that he received several ransom demands while his daughters were held in the Gaza Strip by Hamas terrorists alongside his then-wife, Doron Katz-Asher.
"They were all taken very seriously. One very specific one was taken seriously. And there was a week-long email correspondence. In the end, they refuted it," Asher told Walla, explaining that he cooperated with the IDF’s cyber unit for every ransom request received.
His daughters were two and four years old when they were taken by Hamas from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where they were visiting family alongside their mother. They spent 49 days inside Gaza until being freed during the first humanitarian ceasefire in November 2023.
Nightmares in first hostage-prisoner exchange
The comments came after Asher published a post on Facebook where he criticized the Israeli society and wrote: “Yesterday, two years ago, November 24, 2023, children, toddlers, mothers, and elderly women were released from Hamas captivity as part of the first deal. In exchange for them, teenage women and young men, terrorists, were released from prison in Israel."
He then wrote, “In the 48 hours leading up to the exchange, when the IDF confirmed my daughters were on the list, tensions became unbearable. Thoughts were running wild. Someone would try to disrupt, someone would try to kill the hostages at the last minute... There was no certainty.”
At one point, an official told Asher that he “shouldn’t be happy until the IDF told him that his daughters were with the IDF, had crossed the border, and that their identity had been confirmed officially.”
"At one point, it seemed like the nightmare was coming true - the intelligence officer calls and announces - 'There is a delay in the release of 24 hours.' Having learned from experience, I no longer ask why, because the unofficial answer is that I am not allowed to know. As I have been told quite a few times before," he concluded.