HOSTAGE FAMILIES GROW DESPERATE

Relatives of Israeli hostages held in Gaza are angry with the government they accuse of failing to do enough to bring them home

- MATTHEW TOSTEVIN

THE PAIN STRUCK DEEP FOR SHARON LIFSHITZ as the truce between Israel and Hamas broke down early this month. Her 85-yearold mother, Yocheved, had been among the first hostages to be freed by Hamas in late October, even before the brief halt in hostilities a month later to swap some of the captives it seized in its unprecedentedly bloody October 7 raid on Israel in exchange for Palestinian security prisoners held in Israeli jails. Her 83-year-old father, Oded, is still in Gaza somewhere. She does not know if he is alive.

"Our loved ones are dying slowly in Gaza. My father is probably a mile from here. He's not far, he's not in another world. You can walk it in half an hour," Lifshitz told Newsweek in the burned ruins of her parents' house in Kibbutz Nir Oz, just three fields away from the Gaza Strip. "They are there. They are dead or they are dying. We don't even know," she said.

"If a ceasefire is the way, then why start the fire again?" she asks, tearing up. "Why are they not back? Why are we not turning every stone? Why are we not saying 'Yes we will do what we take to get them home?"

"We are being failed at the moment, I feel, by all agencies, by all governments and especially the Israeli government," she said. "We do not have this time."

Like many other family members of the hostages still held in Gaza, she is not convinced that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet are doing all they can to prioritize getting their relatives out over the other mission of destroying Hamas in a war that has brought devastation to Gaza and killed thousands of Palestinians.

The fears were underlined by the announcement on Friday, December 15, when the army said it had accidentally killed three hostages after erroneously identifying them as a threat.

Red Cross Accused