Released hostages and families of hostages remaining in Gaza blasted the war cabinet in a fiery meeting on Tuesday evening.
“The hostages are going through a holocaust, including severe sexual abuse,” one audience member can be heard saying from recordings of the meeting. “Men are also being raped there, not only women. The places where the hostages are kept are being bombed.”
The meeting was highly emotional as the returned hostages told the cabinet, consisting of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Minister Benny Gantz, what they had gone through in captivity while the families of the remaining hostages expressed their concerns for their loved ones.
“My father may be a man, but he is still in captivity, and they are humiliating him,” said one young woman.The deal that facilitated the release of more than 100 hostages in the last couple of weeks excluded all men over the age of 18.
Hostages denied basic needs in Gaza
Meanwhile, the released hostages told the cabinet that they were denied basic needs like water and that in some locations targeted by airstrikes, hostages were being held.
“Hearing what you went through in the strikes is shocking, and it is still continuing,” Netanyahu told the meeting’s attendees. “It penetrates our hearts and all our considerations. If you wanted to send the message, you succeeded.”He also assured them that getting back the rest of the hostages is still a prime objective of the war.
A fight erupted when some families demanded a halt to the fighting and others supported its continuation.
After the meeting ended, the Hope Forum, which represents the hostage families, said that the cabinet had emphasized that only military and diplomatic pressure against Hamas facilitated the last hostage deal and that only continued pressure could win future deals for the remaining hostages.“The Hope Forum backs the War Cabinet,” said the statement. “Every demand for the IDF to halt the war weakens the chances of releasing more hostages and endangers the soldiers on the frontlines. The only way to bring our loved ones home is to continue fighting in full force against the Nazi enemy.”
Some participants leave angry
Several of the relatives who attended the meeting left bitterly critical of the government, however.
Dani Miran, whose son Omri was taken hostage on October 7, said he felt his intelligence had been insulted by the meeting and had walked out in the middle of it.
"I won't go into the details of what was discussed at the meeting but this entire performance was ugly, insulting, messy," he told Israel's Channel 13, saying the government had made a "farce" out of the issue.
"They say 'we've done this, we've done that.' [Hamas' Gaza leader Yahya] Sinwar is the one who returned our people, not them. It angers me that they say that they dictated things. They hadn't dictated a single move."
Maariv contributed to this report.