Thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square to listen to relatives of those still captive a year later tell their stories at a memorial event as the first anniversary of the attack approaches from October 7.
Hagit Chen, whose son Itay was killed and whose body remains captive, recalls speaking with him exactly a year earlier while serving as a soldier near the Gaza border and hearing that he seemed ill .
“I thought maybe he was hungry, so I asked if I could order him a pizza from Nahal Oz,” she told the silent crowd. “He wasn’t hungry, but he said he would be happy if I ordered him something to eat tomorrow. The next day we woke up, turned on the TV and saw that the war had started. »
Chen was killed on October 7 and his body was dragged to Gaza, although he was listed as a captive until March, when the army determined he had been killed.
“We have been in this situation for a year and we still have no place to mourn,” she said.
Ziv Abud, whose boyfriend Eliya Cohen remains in captivity, and Noam Peri, the daughter of captive Chaim Peri, also speak at the event.
Peri remembers that the night before her father was kidnapped, the family gathered to listen to him recount for the first time his experiences of the Yom Kippur War, exactly 50 years earlier.
“That night was sad, but it was an emotional night that we were all together,” she said. “We listened to him and that’s how we left him at the end of the evening, with hugs, a kiss and lots of love. »
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