Brett McGurk, a top Middle East adviser for President Joe Biden, reportedly met with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani earlier this month to discuss in part efforts to secure hostage releases.
The White House has continued to signal its intent to help facilitate the release of hostages.
“We’re not going to stop hoping to try to get all those hostages home,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a press conference earlier this month.
Others are working to ameliorate the plight of the hostages who remain in Gaza. Qatar was this week reportedly “engaged in high-level discussions with Hamas to deliver vital prescription medicines to Israeli hostages” in Gaza, according to the New York Times, while the American Red Cross said this month that it was working to both “secure the release of all remaining hostages” and to gain “urgent, immediate access to all those detained.”
As diplomatic and humanitarian efforts continue, the hostage crisis remains at the forefront of the conflict. At the outset of the war, news related to Israelis taken hostage by Hamas was shared around the world by families of the abducted.
Shortly after the conflict began, Israeli citizen Noam Perry, for one, told reporters that in the initial invasion, her father encountered Hamas fighters in his home and that he was “able to push [them] away, giving my mother precious minutes to hide,” after which he was captured.
In November, Pope Francis met with families of hostage victims and heard family members describe the heartbreaking anguish of knowing their loved ones are being held captive.
“We haven’t seen or heard anything since. It’s been 47 days,” one said at the time. “And I’m alone. Every day I wake up … and I wait a minute or two for the familiar sounds that I’m used to hearing and there’s nothing.”
In December, freed Israeli hostage and mother Yarden Roman-Gat told CBS News of her own experience as a captive, telling the network that she was “watched and seen at all times” and was aware that her captors “could do anything to me.”
“My kidnappers could not help themselves, showing me off as a trophy and showing my face as an object,” she said. “I was not a person.” She was eventually freed during the brief cease-fire.
Earlier this month, former hostage Aviva Siegel told the Knesset’s Caucus for the Hostages that she witnessed the torture of a fellow captive.
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“They tortured her next to me,” she said, according to the Times of Israel. “And I witnessed it. I witnessed what happened there. What’s happening there is simply a catastrophe. It can’t go on.”
Family members, meanwhile, have struggled to make contact with captive loved ones in Gaza. The Times of Israel reported this week that relatives were using “powerful loudspeakers to broadcast messages to their loved ones” still being held hostage, calling out in the hopes that they might be heard.
“I hope you hear us Omer, be strong,” one father said. “I know you’re strong, I know your faith keeps you strong. Everyone at home is waiting for you.”
“Romi, my Romi, we miss you terribly, but we are strong,” another woman called out to her daughter, who was reportedly kidnapped at the outset of the conflict. The mother said over the loudspeaker that she was “so sure you would come back the same week.”
“Don’t lose hope,” she called out. “We are turning the world upside down to bring you back.”
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