• Reporter 21
• 08 Apr, 2025

"This week is Passover - the festival of freedom," Liri Albag, an Israeli soldier held hostage in Gaza for 15 months by Hamas, told a crowd of thousands gathered in Tel Aviv last weekend. "But what kind of freedom is it when 59 people are still in Hamas hell?"

In recent weeks, powerful voices have joined the fight to bring home Israel's remaining hostages - those of the captives released during the latest ceasefire deal that began in January and lasted two months.

Despite their ongoing trauma, frailty and grief, a number of ex-hostages have felt compelled to give their harrowing testimony on stage at demonstrations, in long TV interviews or in meetings overseas with world leaders.

They have detailed their own harsh treatment and expressed fears for the fate of others left behind, especially since Israel cut off all humanitarian aid to Gaza at the start of March and restarted its military offensive two weeks later, saying this was to put pressure on Hamas.

Twenty-four of those who have been held captive since the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel of 7 October 2023 are still believed to be alive.

Witnessing the collapse of the ceasefire has been unbearable, the former hostages say.

"We have no time. The earth is burning under our feet," insisted Gadi Moses, an 80-year-old farmer abducted by Palestinian Islamic Jihad from Kibbutz Nir Oz and freed in January, who also spoke at Saturday's rally in Hostages Square.

"I'm not really here. Only half of me is standing here," said Omer Wenkert, another former hostage, in his emotive address. "Part of us, part of all of us, is still captive in Gaza."

He called on Israeli leaders to take action on the hostages saying: "Prime Minister Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, it's on you to get them back."

Many of the released hostages want a return to the original ceasefire deal which brought them home in exchange for some 1,800 Palestinians being freed by Israel.

The agreement was meant to see a second phase in which remaining Israeli captives would be returned and the war would end.

However, Israel now rejects this and is pushing instead for more hostages to be freed through an extension of the first phase of the truce.

Hamas has agreed only to an extension involving the release of fewer hostages than Israel will accept, and ultimately wants to return to the original ceasefire framework.

Since appearing on stage, flanked by masked gunmen and looking pale and thin, at a Hamas handover ceremony in Gaza City in February, US-Israeli hostage Keith Siegel has turned into an active campaigner.

He was part of a group of eight ex-hostages that met President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last month - crediting him with securing the recent deal that brought back 25 hostages and the bodies of eight others and urging him to help get ceasefire negotiations back on track.

"It's urgent and every day that goes on is just more and more suffering and more and more possible death and psychological devastation," Mr Siegel told 60 Minutes on the US network CBS.

Mr Siegel described how he and others with whom he was initially held - including women and children - had been forced to adjust to life in the tunnels.

"We were gasping for our breath," he recalled.

He said there was constant abuse: "I witnessed a young woman who was being tortured by the terrorist. I mean literal torture, not just in the figurative sense."