Israeli hostage families protest after Gaza militants release videos of emaciated captives
Billy Stockwell
,
Eugenia Yosef
,
Ibrahim Dahman
,
Mitchell McCluskey
,
Dana Karni
,
Catherine Nicholls
and
Lauren Izso
, CNN
Pictures of Israeli hostages held in Gaza during a demonstration outside the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Photo:
Abir Sultan/EPA/Shutterstock via CNN Newsource
Protesters have gathered in Tel Aviv's 'Hostage Square' to stage an emergency protest, after the release of propaganda videos showing emaciated Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.
Videos released
by militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad this week showed Israeli hostages Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski in a visibly fragile state. In one video, the undated footage of David was juxtaposed with images of starving Palestinian children.
A poster outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art showing hostage Evyatar David.
Photo:
AFP / Getty Images via CNN Newsource
They are among 50 hostages who remain in the territory, at least 20 of them are believed to be alive.
The militant groups released the videos with ceasefire talks stalled and as Palestinians faced a mounting starvation crisis in the enclave.
Steve Witkoff, the United States' special envoy to the Middle East, attended the public plaza on Saturday amid the protests, one day after he visited a controversial US-backed aid distribution site in the Gaza Strip.
Witkoff later held a "very emotional meeting" that lasted nearly three hours with about 40 representatives of the hostage families, a source who was in attendance at the meeting told CNN.
During the meeting, Witkoff said ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas should be "all or nothing", with all 50 hostages in Gaza being returned to Israel in one go, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum cited him as saying.
"The plan is not to expand the war, but to end it," Witkoff reportedly said. "We think the negotiations should be changed to all or nothing.
"End the war and bring all 50 hostages home at the same time - that's the only way,"
"Someone will be to blame" if the remaining living hostages do not return to Israel still alive, Witkoff said, according to the forum.
According to the forum, Witkoff said that the US would "get your children home and hold Hamas responsible for any bad acts on their part" and "do what's right for the Gazan people".
"We have a plan to end the war and bring everyone home," he reportedly added.
Reached for comment, Witkoff's team did not offer any further information on the special envoy's comments.
The hostage families - who have frequently said that ongoing fighting in Gaza endangered their loved ones - on Saturday (local time) called for an end to the war in the territory and a "comprehensive deal" that would see the remaining hostages freed.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets to call for the release of the hostages.
"Against the backdrop of horrifying footage and harsh reports about the hostages' condition - hostage families will cry out this morning in the heart of Tel Aviv," a statement from Israel's hostage families said. "We appeal to the Israeli government and the US administration - look our loved ones and us in the eyes."
A poster outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art showing hostage Rom Braslavski.
Photo:
AFP / Getty Images via CNN Newsource
Ofir Braslavski, the father of Rom, said that he did not recognise his son, when he first saw him in the video.
"My Rom is hungry for bread, thirsty for water, sick, physically broken and mentally shattered," he said. "My child is dying!
"I address you, [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu]: Enough! The phased approach to deals has failed.
"Make the decision already - end the war and bring everyone here - the hostages, the fallen soldiers, the fighters, the reservists and those displaced from their homes.
"We want to rehabilitate, to return to life, to breathe."
David's brother, Ilay, said that the treatment of his sibling was "a brutal, barbaric assault on every shred of basic human decency. It's an act so vile, it scars the very soul of humanity". He called on the Israeli government and US President Donald Trump to do "everything in your power, by any means necessary" to save the hostages.
Netanyahu spoke with the families of the hostages on Saturday evening, and expressed "profound shock" over the harrowing images released by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
"The cruelty of Hamas has no boundaries," he said. "While the State of Israel is allowing the entry of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, the terrorists of Hamas are deliberately starving our hostages, and document them in a cynical and evil manner."
Netanyahu told the families that the "efforts to return all our hostages are ongoing, and will continue constantly and relentlessly", according to the Israeli Prime Minister's Office.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lt General Eyal Zamir said on Friday that fighting would continue "without rest" in Gaza, if there was no hostage deal.
"I estimate that, in the coming days, we will know whether we will succeed in reaching a partial deal for the release of our captives," he said. "If not, the fighting will continue without rest."
On Friday, the armed wing of Hamas released an undated video showing 24-year-old David - who was taken hostage at the Nova music festival on 7 October, 2023 - being held in a narrow cell.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum Headquarters initially cautioned against using imagery from the video, but later said that David's family had authorised the publication of a still image.
On Saturday, Hamas released a new video featuring David, which appeared to be a longer version of the video released on Friday.
A similar propaganda video was published by Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Thursday showing Braslavski also in a frail state. Islamic Jihad said it was the last video taken of the hostage, before the group lost contact in July, with the militants holding him.
Earlier this week, a UN-backed food security agency warned that "the
worst case scenario of famine
" was unfolding in Gaza, its starkest alert yet, as Israel faces growing international pressure to allow more food into the territory.
Hospitals across the Gaza Strip were overwhelmed, with bed occupancy reaching more than 200 percent at several facilities, according to the enclave's health ministry. Beds were being placed in corridors and on floors to accommodate increasing numbers of patients and casualties, it said.
Seven people had died from malnutrition in the past 24 hours, the health ministry said Saturday, including one child, bringing the total death toll from starvation since the conflict began in 2023 to 169.
In addition, at least 39 people were killed and more than 800 injured in the same period, while waiting for aid in different parts of the territory, the ministry added.
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Israel's PM vows to expand military operations to occupy all of Gaza
Witkoff told hostage families in Tel Aviv that his proposal for a temporary ceasefire and the return of about half of 20 living Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza 'doesn't work and we've tried everything'. Trump, Witkoff said, 'now believes that everybody should come home at once. No piecemeal deals.' He said the Administration was formulating a new 'all or nothing' plan. Both sides have rejected elements of the Witkoff proposal that has been on the table. The State Department declined to comment. Details of the Administration's new approach - or the extent to which it is related to Netanyahu's new military plans - remain unclear, according to diplomats and hostage families who have been briefed by United States officials. Officials in Qatar and Egypt, which along with the US have been mediating talks between Israel and Hamas almost since the nearly two-year-old conflict began, said they were not aware of any new US ceasefire deal. 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'Netanyahu has decided to occupy the Gaza Strip, meaning that military operations will also take place in areas where hostages are being held,' said a person familiar with the prime minister's decisions who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Hostages freed from captivity have said in interviews with Israeli news media that their captors were under orders to kill them if they thought Israeli troops were approaching. Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is still held hostage in Gaza, wrote on X: '667 days that the hostages are enduring a Holocaust in the tunnels, and instead of reaching a full agreement to end the war - a feasible one - Netanyahu is preparing an operation that will turn the living hostages into bodies and make the fallen disappear.' Videos released by Hamas late last week of two hostages showed them extremely emaciated. 'You see your child dying before your eyes and you can't do anything,' Ofir Braslavski, whose son Rom Braslavski was shown in one video, told the Associated Press. Some family members who met Witkoff in Tel Aviv said they thought the new plan he outlined in broad strokes was the best chance to lead to the release of all the hostages and an end to the war. 'This Administration inherited this phased framework,' which led to two temporary ceasefires and the release of more than 200 hostages under the Biden Administration, 'and were convinced by the Israeli Government that this was the best option for getting to a deal,' said Ruby Chen, the father of 19-year-old American Israeli Itay Chen, who was abducted by Hamas during its October 7, 2023, attack in southern Israel that sparked the war. 'But this Administration has taken six months and realised it's not a plan that they can execute, and they decided to shift and come up with a plan that has a better probability of success,' Chen told the Washington Post. The Israeli official said that 'the Prime Minister is pushing for the release of the hostages while pursuing a military resolution, combined with the delivery of humanitarian aid to areas outside the combat zones and, to the extent possible, to areas not under Hamas control'. Hamas' release of the videos of skeletal hostages came as international outrage has grown over images of emaciated Gazan children amid what the United Nations has said are near-famine conditions. Israel has restricted delivery of humanitarian assistance by international groups, instead supporting the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which runs four distribution sites in southern Gaza. Hundreds of Gazans have been killed as they pass close to IDF positions to reach the GHF sites, which are guarded by US security contractors. A number of Arab and European countries, joined today by Canada, have air-dropped food into Gaza. Jordan, which has also sent aid by road, today condemned what it called 'the deliberate obstruction' of convoys by Israeli settlers as the trucks travel through the West Bank en route to Gaza. 'This is not the first time such violations have occurred,' Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani said, according to the official Jordan News Agency. Aside from the settler attacks, he said, Israel has placed severe restrictions on the number of trucks allowed to cross daily and has imposed convoluted approval processes, chaotic border inspections and newly added customs fees.
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Soaring food prices prove the Gaza famine is real – and will affect generations to come
By Ilan Noy of Palestinians crowd at a lentil soup distribution point in Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on July 27, 2025. Photo: AFP / Omar Al-Qattaa Analysis: The words and pictures documenting the famine in the Gaza strip are horrifying. The coverage has led to acrimonious and often misguided debates about whether there is famine, and who is to blame for it - most recently exemplified by the controversy surrounding a picture published by the New York Times of an emaciated child who is also suffering from a preexisting health condition. While pictures and words may mislead, numbers usually don't. The Nobel prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen observed some decades ago that famines are always political and economic events, and that the most direct way to analyse them is to look at food quantities and prices. This has led to decades of research on past famines. One observation is that dramatic increases in food prices always mean there is a famine, even though not every famine is accompanied by rising food costs. The price increases we have seen in Gaza are unprecedented. The economic historian Yannai Spitzer observed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that staple food prices during the Irish Potato Famine showed a three- to five-fold increase, while there was a ten-fold rise during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. In the North Korean famine of the 1990s, the price of rice rose by a factor of 12 . At least a million people died of hunger in each of these events. Now, the New York Times has reported the price of flour in Gaza has increased by a factor of 30 and potatoes cost 50 times more. As was the case for the UK government in Ireland in the 1840s and Bengal in the 1940s, Israel is responsible for this famine because it controls almost all the Gaza strip and its borders. But Israel has also created the conditions for the famine. Following a deliberate policy in March of stopping food from coming in, it resumed deliveries of food in May through a very limited set of "stations" it established through a new US-backed organisation (the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation), in a system that seemed designed to fail. Before Israel's decision in March to stop food from coming in, the price of flour in Gaza was roughly back to its prewar levels (having previously peaked in 2024 in another round of border closures). Since March, food prices have gone up by an annualised inflation rate of more than 5,000%. The excuse the Israeli government gives for its starvation policy is that Hamas controls the population by restricting food supplies. It blames Hamas for any shortage of food . However, if you want to disarm an enemy of its ability to wield food supplies as a weapon by rationing them, the obvious way to do so is the opposite: you would increase the food supply dramatically and hence lower its price. Restricting supplies and increasing their value is primarily immoral and criminal, but it is also counterproductive for Israel's stated aims. Indeed, flooding Gaza with food would have achieved much more in weakening Hamas than the starvation policy the Israeli government has chosen. The UN's top humanitarian aid official has described Israel's decision to halt humanitarian assistance to put pressure on Hamas as "cruel collective punishment" - something forbidden under international humanitarian law. Cormac Ó Gráda, the Irish economic historian of famines, quotes a Kashmiri proverb which says "famine goes, but the stains remain". The current famine in Gaza will leave long-lasting pain for Gazans and an enduring moral stain on Israel - for many generations. Ó Gráda points out two main ways in which the consequences of famines endure. Most obvious is the persistent memory of it; second are the direct effects on the long-term wellbeing of exposed populations and their descendants. The Irish and the Indians have not forgotten the famines that affected them. They still resent the British government for its actions. The memory of these famines still influences relations between Ireland, India and the UK, just as Ukraine's famine of the early 1930s is still a background to the Ukraine-Russia war. The generational impact is also significant. Several studies in China find children conceived during China's Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-1960 (which also killed millions) are less healthy , face more mental health challenges and have lower cognitive abilities than those conceived either before or after the famine. Other researchers found similar evidence from famines in Ireland and the Netherlands , supporting what is known as the "foetal origins" hypothesis, which proposes that the period of gestation has significant impacts on health in adulthood. Even more worryingly, recent research shows these harmful effects can be transmitted to later generations through epigenetic channels . Each day without available and accessible food supplies means more serious ongoing effects for the people of Gaza and the Israeli civilian hostages still held by Hamas - as well as later generations. Failure to prevent the famine will persist in collective memory as a moral stain on the international community, but primarily on Israel. Only immediate flooding of the strip with food aid can help now. Ilan Noy is the chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. This story was originally published on The Conversation.
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File photo. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and US President Donald Trump. Photo: AFP Hundreds of retired Israeli security officials including former heads of intelligence agencies have urged US President Donald Trump to pressure their own government to end the war in Gaza. "It is our professional judgement that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel," the former officials wrote in an open letter shared with the media on Monday. "At first this war was a just war, a defensive war, but when we achieved all military objectives, this war ceased to be a just war," said Ami Ayalon, former director of the Shin Bet security service. The war, nearing its 23rd month, "is leading the State of Israel to lose its security and identity," Ayalon warned in a video released to accompany the letter. Signed by 550 people, including former chiefs of Shin Bet and the Mossad spy agency, the letter called on Trump to "steer" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu towards a ceasefire. Israel launched its military operation in the Gaza Strip in response to the deadly 7 October, 2023 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas. In recent weeks Israel has come under increasing international pressure to agree a ceasefire that could Israeli hostages released from Gaza and UN agencies distribute humanitarian aid. But some in Israel, including ministers in Netanyahu's coalition government, are instead pushing for Israeli forces to push on and for Gaza to be occupied in whole or in part. The letter was signed by three former Mossad heads: Tamir Pardo, Efraim Halevy and Danny Yatom. Others signatories include five former heads of Shin Bet -- Αyalon as well as Nadav Argaman, Yoram Cohen, Yaakov Peri and Carmi Gilon -- and three former military chiefs of staff, including former prime minister Ehud Barak, former defence minister Moshe Yaalon and Dan Halutz. The letter argued that the Israeli military "has long accomplished the two objectives that could be achieved by force: dismantling Hamas's military formations and governance". "The third, and most important, can only be achieved through a deal: bringing all the hostages home," it added. "Chasing remaining senior Hamas operatives can be done later," the letter said. In the letter, the former officials tell Trump that he has credibility with the majority of Israelis and can put pressure on Netanyahu to end the war and return the hostages. After a ceasefire, the signatories argue, Trump could force a regional coalition to support a reformed Palestinian Authority to take charge of Gaza as an alternative to Hamas rule. - AFP
