Rounding the corner of a hospital corridor, nine-year-old Ohad Munder breaks into a run, hurling himself into the arms of his father after being held by militants in Gaza for nearly seven weeks.
The reunion took place at a hospital near Tel Aviv after the boy, his mother and his grandmother were freed along with 10 others on the first day of a four-day truce and hostage swap deal with Hamas that also saw dozens of Palestinian prisoners freed.
After a process followed by millions on television, the hostages were flown to meet their families at two Israeli hospitals that released clips of their poignant family reunions. The brief images have brought a glimmer of hope to a nation still reeling from the Oct. 7 attacks.
Photo: Israel Defense Forces via AP
On that day, Gaza militants stormed southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping about 240 others, among them mothers, babies, children and the elderly, according to an Israeli count. In response, Israel has hit back with a vast military campaign that Gaza’s Hamas rulers say has killed more than 15,000 people.
Awaiting the hostages was an army of Israeli medics, child protection experts and trauma specialists who had battened down the hatches to protect the former captives from the media spotlight as they start to process a seven-week ordeal that is likely to have left many of them deeply traumatized.
“Did you miss me, did you think about daddy?” asked Yoni Katz-Asher as he sat on a bed at the Schneider Children’s Medical Center holding his four-year-old daughter Raz who was snatched with her two-year-old sister Aviv and their mother, Doron.
Photo courtesy of the Schneider Children’s Medical Center via AP
“I dreamed that we came home,” she told him, her blonde curls pulled back in a ponytail, her mum and her little sister also cuddling in close. “You dreamed you came home? Look, the dream has come true,” he told her, promising the family would go home very soon.
“I am happy that I received my family back, we’re allowed to feel joy and to shed a tear, that’s a human thing,” Katz-Asher later said in a video released by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum.
“But I am not celebrating,” he said. “I will not celebrate until the last of the hostages returns home.” Although Noam Peri’s elderly father was not among the hostages brought home on Friday, those who returned brought welcome news.
“We have a sign of life from my father, we know he’s alive from other people from the community who were released yesterday,” said Peri, whose 79-year-old father Haim was snatched from his home in Nir Oz kibbutz near the Gaza border.
All but one of the hostages released on Friday — among them six elderly women, three mothers and their four children — were from Nir Oz, one of the hardest hit communities on Oct. 7.
In Nir Oz, 75 people were seized and 29 killed, Peri said.
“So one out of four people from this community were either murdered or kidnapped,” she said.
Hearing that her father was still alive has given the anguished family fresh hope, but they have no guarantees he will be getting out soon, if at all — the hostages to be released under the ceasefire deal are women and those aged 18 or under.
“It brings a lot of hope, but we don’t know how much time they’re going to be able to hold on there,” she said, describing her father as “a brave man, but not a healthy man” who survived a heart attack and “depends on medication to survive.”
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