From hope to heartbreak

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, May 13th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: holding Hamas accountable.

As you heard in the newscast, Hamas has released the last American hostage. Earlier in the year, the terror group freed 33 others as part of a temporary peace deal, 25 returned alive, and 8 came home in coffins.

REICHARD: Families usually get some warning about the shape their loved ones are in. But the full truth of what happened in captivity unfolds slowly. And the trauma never fully resolves.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: When hundreds of people gathered in Hostage Square in January, Noam Safir sat down at an outdoor piano in the middle of the plaza. She and others waited to see if their relatives would be released in a recently announced swap.

NOAM SAFIR: My grandfather is Shlomo Mansour and he’s the oldest hostage in captivity.

Safir talked to IJTV about him. He survived a Nazi-inspired terrorist attack when he was a boy, and Safir held out hope he would survive this attack too. By then, she’d waited two years for any news about him.

SAFIR: I know he’s supposed to be on this deal so I’m allowing myself to be a bit more optimistic.

While Safir waited, she sang a song dedicated to her grandfather.

Safir has spent almost every Saturday in Hostage Square since Hamas kidnapped her grandfather on October 7th, 2023. We talked about the first rounds of hostage releases.

SAFIR: We all yelled, clapped, cried. It was it was tear tears of joy, of course, but it was very comforting to be with other families of other hostages, your friends who know exactly what you're going through.

Two weeks after the January swap, her father showed up at her apartment. The Israel Defense Forces had received intelligence that her grandfather would be part of an upcoming swap.

SAFIR: On day 493. It was February 10.

The news wasn’t good. They would only be getting his body back. Her grandfather was dead.

SAFIR: It was honestly heartbreaking, and all the hope I had was shattered. I was shattered.

In each swap, the living hostages went immediately to the hospital, while the bodies of the dead went to Israel’s National Forensic Medicine Center, the only organization qualified to do forensic autopsies in the country.

When Hamas released the bodies of Monsour and three other hostages, people gathered along the route to the forensics center.

The Center’s goal is to identify the bodies and determine how they were murdered, adding to the testimony of the returned living hostages. But the longer it takes for Hamas to release remains, the harder it is to confirm what happened.

Some worry that time is erasing anything the remaining hostages’ bodies could have revealed, and is making them harder to identify.

SAFIR : We were not allowed to see the body. Even if you are allowed to see the body, what you see is not a body after more than 500 days. So even, even if someone gave me the opportunity, I don't think I would have taken it because of the state of the body.

After examining Monsour's body, the Medicine Center determined that he was murdered in the first days of the war. Safir says Monsour’s wife knows what happened to him, but hasn’t shared any details with Safir.

SAFIR: I do know something happened because that's how they were able to determine that he was murdered.

Hostages that came back alive say Hamas kept them in dark tunnels. Gave them little, if any food, and sometimes beat them. The bodies of those who come back tell much the same story.

Safir and her family buried Mansour near the Kibbutz where he lived before he was kidnapped. It was heartbreaking.

Still, Safir says it’s been better for them than many other families. The IDF told them about Monsour’s death, confirmed his identity, and delivered his body to them.

Meanwhile, other families have grappled with false reports and rumors. In one case, Hamas misidentified a body—leaving a family in limbo—and suffering from whiplash.

One Israeli psychology professor says that kind of scenario could add to “disordered grieving”, where families don’t get to follow the normal course of grieving and that often extends a mourning process that is already lengthy and intense.

Safir thought knowing what happened to her grandfather might give her closure, but:

SAFIR: It’s not closure, because, because of that hope for almost 500 days that you keep hoping that one day you will see your loved one again. I'll see my grandfather again.

She’d watched almost 100 hostages return to their families, many of them walking on their own two feet. She had hoped she’d see her grandfather return the same way.

SAFIR: To get that message during times of high hopes is really breaking, really shattering, because you it's when you least expect it, because he was supposed to be coming back as well in this deal, but we hoped that he'll come back alive.

The day after she learned about her grandfather’s death, Safir went back to Hostage Square. She wanted to support her friends. She watched on screens on the edge of the square as some newly released hostages hugged their loved ones.

SAFIR: Of course, I was happy for the families and the hostages who got released. I-I suddenly understood that I wasn't going to get that kind of feeling like them.

Safir doesn’t go to Hostage Square as often as she used to. When she does, it’s to spend time with other people who understand what the past 585 days have been like.

SAFIR: I had so many things that I wanted to tell him. I wanted to talk to him once again. But terrorists, the terrorists, took it away from me and the entire family, and they took his life.

And with that, a chapter of hope has closed, and a time of mourning opened. Safir doesn’t know how long this chapter will be.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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