A month ago, I sat at a restaurant to meet up with a close friend who had just returned from her travels abroad. We had made these plans after not seeing each other for so long, and we were both looking forward to catching up and sharing the stories we'd missed.
After ordering our food, she told me about her past few weeks, visiting family and friends back in the US, reconnecting with old faces, and how she now wants to host wellness workshops in Tel Aviv as she settles back into the city. It was the kind of light, warm conversation you'd expect between two close friends.
When it was my turn to share what I'd been up to over the past two months, I suddenly drew a blank. "I don't know," I told her. "I guess I don't have any interesting stories to tell you."
And that felt strange. Life in Israel is always intense, layered, emotional, and sometimes dramatic; there's always something to say. But as the dinner went on and I let her keep talking, I began to understand why my memory felt so empty.
The hostages.
The exact time my friend was away had been the same period when the entire nation was consumed by the agonizing, back-to-back hostage releases from Gaza.
It was a month of stomach-churning horror, meticulously orchestrated psychological torture, designed by Hamas to break the Israeli spirit. And it worked. Every day brought new uncertainty. They refused to provide lists of who was alive or dead. They made us play a national game of Russian roulette, waiting to see who, if anyone, would come home. We watched young, innocent hostages paraded through hostile crowds, forced to wave in a propaganda performance while "aid workers" legitimized the spectacle by attending.
We saw Gaza crowds gather to film hostages like they were zoo animals, some trying to lynch them. We watched emaciated survivors emerge from captivity, triggering collective flashbacks to photos of Holocaust survivors upon liberation. We watched Hamas force hostages to record videos claiming they were treated well.
Even worse were the celebrations when our loved ones returned in coffins, Oded Lifshitz, an elderly peace activist, and Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir, a mother and her two young children. Gazans cheered and brought their children to watch and celebrate. And then, in a final act of cruelty, Hamas forced two Israeli captives, Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa-Dallal, to sit and watch the release of three others.
Psychologists and researchers agree: trauma, especially when prolonged and overwhelming, can distort memory. Entire populations can suffer what's known as dissociative amnesia, where the brain blocks out periods to protect itself. That's what's happening here. Our whole nation is living through collective trauma, and we don't even realize the full extent of it until we sit down at a dinner table and have nothing to say.
We are functioning. We go to work, we see friends, we eat meals, we live. But then a moment comes, a quiet one, and we feel the weight of it all crash down.
Now, Israel has announced that tens of thousands of reservists are being called up for Operation Gideon's Chariots. Experts like John Spencer note that this marks a major shift in strategy. Unlike earlier raids and withdrawals, this time the IDF plans to hold every area it captures in Gaza. It's a move toward sustained presence and long-term pressure.
The government says the goal remains the same: to bring the hostages home. But the families of those still in Gaza are pleading, saying this new strategy is a death sentence for their loved ones. Some Israeli journalists agree. Some analysts even claim the IDF had known the locations of the hostages long before the first ceasefire. And yet, we saw what Hamas did to six of them in the Rafah tunnel when they thought the IDF was getting close.
October 7 was a horror that broke us. But what came after, the hostage nightmare, has continued to gnaw at our national soul. The trauma of watching those releases, of not knowing who would come home, was so intense that many of us couldn't even remember whole periods.
So imagine what it would mean – emotionally, psychologically, morally – if the next phase of this war leads to the execution of the hostages still alive.
The cost would be unfathomable. Not just a strategic failure or diplomatic fallout, but a wound so deep it would scar generations. After months of prayer, protest, mourning, and hope, we would be forced to confront the most unbearable outcome. One that no speech, operation, or commemoration could ever truly heal.
That night at dinner, I didn't tell my friend any of this. I just smiled and let her talk. But later, I realized: I didn't have stories to share because I've been living through something too heavy to turn into words.
Still, one thing is clear: we cannot abandon the hostages. They are still there. Still suffering. And if we stop fighting for them now, the cost won't just be theirs. It will be all of ours.
