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A year without them: The heartbreak of Israel’s Oct. 7 hostage families

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A year without them: The heartbreak of Israel’s Oct. 7 hostage families

It’s a scratchy, out of tune and yes, “cold and broken” rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” song, but it’s her version, and when he hears it now, Shlomi Berger falls apart.

Berger’s daughter Agam, a budding violinist, was kidnapped by Hamas a year ago Monday as the group rampaged through southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and dragging 251 back to the Gaza Strip. The Hamas infiltration on Oct. 7, 2023, unprecedented in modern Israel’s 76-year history, triggered a cataclysmic war in the enclave that has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

For the Berger family, like so many of Israel’s hostage families, it’s been a year of intolerable, engulfing fear, loathing and anxiety. It’s been a year of not knowing whether Agam Berger, 20, is alive or dead, or how she’s being treated by her captors. It’s been a year without a daughter who her father describes as a perpetual “giver” who volunteered to help kids with homework in the family’s neighborhood south of Tel Aviv, or just to play with them.

For the Bergers, it’s been a whole year without “our Agam.”

“What is she doing? How is she holding up? This is what breaks me,” her father said in an interview a few weeks ahead of the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7. Hamas’ attacks unleashed a wave of collective trauma and grief across Israel. In Gaza, whole families and neighborhoods have been wiped out. The war threatens to ignite a wider regional conflict between Israel and Iran, as well as Hamas allies in Lebanon and Yemen. There’s been a fresh spotlight on yearslong Palestinian suffering. A year later, the epicenter of Israeli trauma and grief still lies with the hostage families, as well as the bereaved.

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“To hear her playing the violin, for me it’s just too hard,” Berger, 52, said of a video recording of his daughter playing Cohen’s spiritual, soaring and majestic hymn to the curveballs that life can throw at you.

‘They’re not being held as prisoners of war’

Agam Berger was abducted by Hamas with five other young female soldiers from Israel’s Nahal Oz base just 24 hours after starting her very first job in the military as a border surveillance officer.

It was a junior, yet theoretically vital, role in a location a few miles from Gaza.

She was part of a unit composed chiefly of 18- to 21-year-old female soldiers whose job it was to sit on the base for hours and look out for anything suspicious. Agam Berger was to be a lookout, a spotter, a job that has taken on added significance in Israel in the wake of Oct. 7 after it emerged that several members of her unit had tried to warn their superiors that they were noticing unusual activity inside Gaza in the days and weeks before the attack.

Members of Agam Berger’s unit informed their Israeli military bosses that Hamas appeared to be training with explosives and rehearsing attacks on a replica tank and mock observation post.

If those warnings were heard, they went unheeded.

Being a spotter was not a role Agam Berger coveted.

In fact, to fulfill Israel’s compulsory requirements for military service, she had hoped to be a basic training officer. When she failed to convince the Israeli military of that she told her parents she would still do her best with what she was given.

The last time her family heard directly from her was in a seven-second call from a phone number they didn’t recognize. She was in a safe room on the Nahal Oz base and said she could hear shooting and explosions.

Then the line dropped.

The Berger family only learned of their daughter’s fate when she was pictured bloody and distraught in body camera footage released by Hamas on Oct. 8, the day after its assault. Her hands are handcuffed behind her back. She sits on the floor with other four hostages. They had just witnessed 15 of their friends and colleagues murdered in and around the base and a nearby kibbutz. Hamas launched its attack in the early morning.

Berger and some of the girls in the video were still wearing their pajamas.

“You’re beautiful,” one of the Hamas militants tells one of the terrified soldiers in the video.

Capturing soldiers is not technically a war crime, though mistreating them is, and experts in the rules around warfare agree that no grievance can justify holding anyone hostage, whether from civilian or military life.

“There’s no difference between these young women soldiers and civilians,” said Laurie Blank, an international law professor at Emory University. “They’re not being held as prisoners of war,” a category of detainee that is legal and requires giving them access to medicines, humanitarian aid and holding them in good faith.

Over the past year, the Berger family has had two further “signs of life.”

The first one came in November. It was Shlomi Berger’s birthday. Another hostage who his daughter had been held with in Gaza was released as part of a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas.

This freed hostage, with whom Agam Berger shares a first name, called the family with a message for her dad.

“She asked me to say happy birthday,” Agam Goldstein-Almog, then 17, said.

It was a message she delivered even as Goldstein-Almog herself had only just escaped Gaza.

In the call she says she is in a car, she is safe, and about to board a military helicopter.

“I will believe she will get out of there,” Meirav Berger, 49, Agam’s mother, can be heard saying in a muffled cry.

“She will get out,” Goldstein-Almog says in response.

The next sign of life came in May.

An Israeli intelligence officer called the Bergers out of the blue to say there was fresh information indicating their daughter was still alive. But the officer said no other details could be shared with them.

Since then, nothing.

“Your faith was strong but you needed proof,” Cohen sings in “Hallelujah.”

Agam Berger’s been playing the violin since fourth grade

Over the course of the last year the Berger family have been doing their best to mark birthdays, anniversaries and special occasions with as much energy and excitement as they can muster.

It hasn’t been easy as the war has dragged on with no emerging hostage deal acceptable to both sides. In recent weeks, Israel has appeared to open a new front in the war to fight Hamas ally Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. It has done this because since Oct. 7 last year, Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets and missiles at Israel, displacing residents of northern Israel.

In late September, Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It has launched what it has called “limited” ground incursions into Lebanon to further destroy Hezbollah infrastructure and weapons systems. Israel’s major military operations in Gaza appear to be slowly winding down. It appears on the verge of an all-out war with Iran, which backs Hezbollah and Hamas.

In March, the Berger family celebrated the bar mitzvah of Agam’s younger brother, Ilay.

A bar mitzvah is coming of age ceremony that’s intended to be a joyous and life-affirming milestone. The Bergers wanted to acknowledge that, but it was difficult.

“We celebrated as much as we could,” Shlomi Berger said.

Ilay Berger spent part of this past summer in the U.S., at a camp in Massachusetts that caters for Jewish children. A wealthy donor paid for his trip and that of other siblings of Gaza hostages.

In late August, family, friends and several musicians marked Agam Berger’s 20th birthday − on her 321st day in captivity − with speeches and performances of some of her favorite music pieces on the violin, piano and oud.

Agam Berger has been playing the violin since the fourth grade.

“You are far from us on your birthday, in the dark, but so close to us always,” her mother said at the event.

Around the same time, Agam Berger’s twin sister Lee Yam, enrolled in Israeli military officer school after delaying it partly because of the situation with her sister. Another sibling, Bar, will turn 18 in February and soon join the military, too.

Of the original 251 hostages, more than 100 were freed during the Israeli-Hamas cease-fire in November in exchange for the release of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. Eight have been rescued by Israeli forces.

Israeli troops mistakenly killed three Israeli hostages who escaped Hamas captivity in Gaza in December. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli health officials said six hostages whose bodies were located on Aug. 31 in a Hamas tunnel in Gaza were shot multiple times at close range including in the head.

In addition to the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel’s military since the start of the war, the war has displaced the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people.

Israel has fought multiple wars with Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups as well as coalitions of Arab-nation forces as part of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that’s one of the longest running in modern history. At the center of this conflict is a dispute over territory, security, Israel’s right to exist and Palestinian rights and self-governance.

But the most recent war, the bloodiest in their shared history, began when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

“Every event is hard. The 100th day. The 150th day. The 200th day. You can’t believe the days are passing by and they are still there. We have a lot of moments that are very, very hard,” Shlomi Berger said.

Some solace in returning to work

In the early days of Agam Berger’s captivity, her parents, who are both engineers, adopted very different approaches to dealing with the ordeal. Shlomi Berger found some solace in quickly returning to work as he tried to keep his mind free from speculating about how his daughter was being treated in captivity.

He attended meeting after meeting with senior Israeli officials, the prime minister and members of his security and war Cabinet. He met regularly, and still does, with families of other hostages.

He traveled to the U.S. to lobby members of Congress to pressure the Biden administration to “do more.”

Meirav Berger rarely left the house, refused to read the news or watch the Hamas video of her daughter. She was overcome with sadness, feelings of powerlessness and would spend hours weeping.

“I was very afraid for her in those early months,” Shlomi Berger said of his wife.

“I told her, ‘You can’t just put your hands on your ears and say I don’t hear anything. I don’t want to see anything.'”

In recent months Meirav Berger has gotten that message. She now fills her day with going to appointments where there’s an opportunity to speak about her daughter so she is not forgotten.

“I realized I needed to take action,” she said. “To talk about Agam and spread her message, which is about love.”

In mid-September she flew to Budapest, Hungary, so she could say some prayers for Agam − “to defend her” from her captors, she said − at the burial place of a prominent Jewish rabbi from the 19th century.

A few weeks before that, she and her husband did something they had not done in nearly a year.

They did something together as a couple.

They went to the beach at sat alone for several hours.

“After the murder of the six hostages I got a point where I couldn’t breathe. I needed to clear my head. When I got in the water it felt like going to the mikvah,” she said, referring to the Jewish ritual bath.

“I felt pure again.”

‘Each one stands − and doesn’t move’

Fridays, generally speaking, are a good day for Shlomi Berger.

He goes to the synagogue in his apartment building to mark the start of Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath that takes place from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday. The neighbors are there. He’s with his family.

They sit together. Eat together. Converse together. There are few distractions.

“This is a time that holds me,” he said.

Unlike many other hostage families, Agam Berger’s parents have not felt particularly compelled to attend regular demonstrations and large-scale protests in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other cities aimed at pressuring Netanyahu to make a deal with Hamas, and at forcing his resignation.

They have no ready explanation for this. Shlomi Berger said he found it hard to accept that not all of Israel was on the streets protesting day and night for the release of the hostages. He prefers to stay at home.

He described the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage negotiation efforts as like “two mountains.”

“Each one stands − and doesn’t move.”

He said the news of the six hostages who appeared to be executed at close range has made many hostage families realize that “we really are running out of time to save them” and that death, for his daughter, can come at any time.

A dozen or so flights up from his building’s synagogue, in his daughter’s room, there are books, cards, drawings and various tokens that have been sent to his family. They lay propped on her bed. Some of his daughter’s friends have written well-wishes and personal notes on the walls in her room. For a year they have been accumulating.

But he doesn’t like to go in there either. Like listening to her play violin, he finds it unbearable.

His daughter, he said, is like many other girls her age. She’s into “having fun,” going out with friends to get their hair and nails done. She likes to travel. She loves the beach. She’s got a big heart, he said.

He hopes none of that has changed.

Illustrations by Veronica Bravo and Ariana Torrey, USA TODAY

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