Mother of Israeli hostage says she still doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead

The mother of an Israeli man taken by Hamas on 7 October 2023 says she still does not know if her son is dead or alive, but has “real hope” that US President Donald Trump’s peace plan will bring the return of all the hostages held in Gaza.

Herut Nimrodi told BBC News she was “fearing the worst” for her son Tamir, a non-combat soldier, but she was clinging to hope that “he’s still hanging on” two years after his abduction.

She said he was the only Israeli hostage whose family had not been told if they were alive or dead.

The peace plan, proposed by President Trump, has been gaining momentum, with indirect talks now under way between Hamas and Israel to end the war and return the hostages.

“They have been trying to create an agreement for a while but it didn’t take off. This time it feels different,” Ms Nimrodi said. “There is real hope that this is the one, this is the last deal.”

She said it was particularly important that all hostages – living and dead – would be released in the plan’s first phase.

“This is huge, this is a blessing for us,” she said.

“It’s urgent to release the hostages – those that are still alive, and even the ones that have passed. We don’t know what state their bodies are in. We have to release them so the families have some kind of closure. Even the families that got the message that their loved ones are deceased, they don’t accept it because they need proof.”

Tamir is one of 47 hostages kidnapped on 7 October who remain in Gaza – 20 of them are believed still to be alive.

The last time she saw her son was in a video of his abduction posted on social media on 7 October 2023.

“My youngest daughter – she was 14 at the time – came screaming that she had seen her brother being abducted on Instagram,” she recalled.

“I saw Tamir wearing his pyjamas. He was barefoot. He had no glasses on. He can hardly see without them. He was terrified.”

Since seeing her son – an education officer in the Israeli military who was 18 at the time – forced into a jeep and driven away, “fading away into Gaza”, she has received no signs of life.

“He’s the only Israeli with no indication about what happened or where exactly he is,” she said.

The fate of a Nepalese hostage, Bipin Joshi, is also unknown.

Like other families the BBC has spoken to whose relatives were killed or kidnapped that day, Ms Nimrodi said life had been frozen for two years.

“People ask me: ‘It’s been two years, how are you holding on?’ And I say, ‘It doesn’t feel like two years. It feels like one long exhausting day’,” she said.

That day two years ago was the deadliest in Israel’s history, when some 1,200 people were killed by armed men from Hamas and other groups, and 251 others taken hostage, most from southern communities and a music festival.

The attacks sparked a war in which more than 67,000 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli military action, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. Almost the entire population has been displaced and much of its infrastructure flattened.

Ms Nimrodi said she was at her home near Tel Aviv when she received a message from Tamir early on 7 October 2023 from his post at the northern side of the Gaza border.

“He said ‘there are rockets and it’s non-stop’,” she recalled.

Tamir told her he would return soon to the family home, as he usually would during such moments because of his non-combat role.

“I told him to take good care of himself and text me whenever he can and he said he would try. Those were the last words between us. It was 06:49 in the morning, and I found out later on that 20 minutes after our last message he was taken away,” she said.

She has been lobbying for her son’s return, including at rallies with other hostage families.

But she said there were also days when she “can’t get out of bed”.

“I try to listen to my body – what can I do? How much strength do I have?”

The momentum behind the peace plan has brought some hope for the remaining hostage families that their loved ones could soon be returned home.

Ms Nimrodi joined tens of thousands of people – including the families of hostages, and former hostages themselves – who had gathered in Tel Aviv on Saturday night to call for the deal to be implemented.

She wore a T-shirt with her son’s photo on the front, smiling and bespectacled.

“I believe in this deal, and I believe that Trump will not let this slip away,” she said, as she called on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “do the right thing – bring the hostages home and bring peace to this region”.

She said that when she tried to sleep that night, she would be met with the “terrified look” in her son’s eyes as he was abducted, which plays in her head every day.

“To hope for two years – it’s absolutely exhausting.”