Twenty freed after two years: faces and small artifacts of a long national grief
When word reached Tel Aviv that 20 living hostages had been released from Gaza under a ceasefire deal, the city’s already taut air broke into song, sobs and the kind of relieved, stunned silence that follows long waits for a miracle. Families who had camped for months outside government offices embraced strangers. At a central square, a woman who had been at almost every protest sat down and laughed with disbelief. A radio blared an old pop tune. Two years of war felt, for a few hours, as if it had shifted.
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The releases — the first sizable group freed since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 assault, the deadliest in Israeli history — arrived as the U.S. president made a brief, high-profile visit to Israel and ahead of a regional summit in Egypt. Donald Trump declared the war “over” on arrival; for many Israelis, the declaration will mean little until each family is whole again. For the families who received their loved ones back, the moment was both private and public, intimate and immediately politicized.
Not just names: the habits and homes hidden inside headlines
One of the most striking things about those freed is how ordinary their lives were before they became the focus of an international standoff. The group includes students, musicians, a masseur, festival staff, security guards and several dual nationals whose ties stretch across borders. They are emblematic of a generation that traveled, worked and loved across languages and loyalties — and who were caught up in one of the most brutal chapters in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Small objects, big meanings
Families have clung not only to legal avenues and protest routines but also to small artifacts that became talismans. Nimrod Cohen’s mother keeps a Rubik’s cube found, partially burned, in his tank. Dani Miran, whose son Omri appeared in a Hamas video pleading for negotiations, said he had started growing a beard after seeing footage of his son — a private, visible act of solidarity that became public. These tokens, banal and human, have been the scaffolding of hope.
Dual nationalities and diaspora threads
Many of the freed — and the hostages who remain — had passports that stretch beyond Israel: Argentine, Colombian, German, British, Serbian ties thread through the roster of names. Colombian President Gustavo Petro had granted nationality to Elkana Bohbot after the Supernova festival attack, a gesture that underscored how this conflict rippled through families and governments far from Gaza’s fence.
For the relatives, these multiple national ties were not abstract labels but lifelines. International pressure, consular lobbying and media attention often hinge on these connections, shaping the pace and tenor of diplomatic efforts. They also complicate the calculus of any ceasefire or prisoner exchange, because multiple capitals demand answers, not only Tel Aviv and Ramallah.
The long rawness behind each biography
Read closely, the short biographies of those released read like a map of contemporary Israeli youth and the unpredictability of life along a contested border. There is the festival worker who had planned to study music after a backpacking trip to Asia; the army sergeant seized from his tank trying to stop an incursion; the bakery worker and the therapeutic masseur taken from their kibbutz homes; the twins who produced music and followed teams from Maccabi Tel Aviv to Liverpool.
Many of the hostages were at the Supernova music festival — a single place that became, for several families, the locus of apocalypse and endurance. Witnesses who escaped described friends staying to help others, shelter doors set aflame, and people forced into tunnels. In several cases, relatives learned of abductions from social media videos — the same platforms that later amplified propaganda showing emaciated, weakened captives in footage their families could barely watch.
From advocacy to insistence
For two years, grief and activism braided together. Relatives became relentless advocates, occupying public spaces, confronting ministers, and keeping the hostage question ever-present in the media. Movements formed across the political spectrum: parents demanding a deal, others refusing any compromise with Hamas. The result has been a politicized national conversation about sacrifice, dignity and what negotiations should cost.
What this release means — and what it does not
The immediate consequence is relief: 20 people returned to arms and faces that had not been seen in years. But broader questions remain. How will a temporary ceasefire translate into durable safety? What guarantees will there be that those still held will be freed? And what part will outside powers — from the United States to regional Arab states — play in shaping any long-term arrangement?
There are also harder personal reckonings. Survivors bear scars that are not only physical; the videos of captives — often circulated as propaganda — have been part of a new psychological theater of war. Families will face years of recovery and advocacy, and the legal and political efforts to account for those who were killed continue alongside negotiations for the living.
The release is a reminder, too, of a global pattern: modern conflicts increasingly involve civilians whose lives cross borders, whose captures generate viral imagery and whose fate cannot be contained within a single nation’s diplomacy. It forces a reckoning about the limits of military power, the shape of humanitarian law in urban conflicts, and the role of media in both amplifying suffering and pressuring for solutions.
As families reunite and funerals continue for those who did not come back, a question will linger in Israeli living rooms and in diplomatic backchannels: can the fragile reprieve that returned these 20 people become a step toward a different future — or will it be another pause in a cycle of violence where lives, small objects and grief are repeatedly read out like inventory?
For now, in Tel Aviv and in towns across Israel, the songs and tears of the day were a reminder that behind every political claim and each headline there are people who simply want to return to work, to music, to a barbecue on a summer evening. The rest — negotiations, guarantees, accountability — will take longer.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
