When Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists returned to Gaza after their Oct. 7 rampage across southern Israel, they took approximately 250 hostages with them. Dozens of hostages were released as part of a short-lived truce, but an estimated 133 people remain in captivity, including eight of the 11 Americans seized that day. Three of those people — a married couple, Gad Haggai and Judy Weinstein, and Itay Chen — were killed on Oct. 7 and taken into Gaza.
Another five U.S. citizens remain alive in Hamas’s custody, according to the latest available information.
Here are their stories.
Keith Siegel, 65
Keith Siegel set out for Israel in 1980, following his older brother Lee, who had moved to a kibbutz in central Israel four years earlier as a young member of the Labor Zionist movement. Their father, Earl, was the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, born in 1924 and raised to dream of the founding of an independent Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine — a vision made real by the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Earl Siegel, who embarked on a medical career with the U.S. Navy before taking a professorship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, passed that devoted Zionism to his children.
“We were a politically informed family. Social justice was very important to my parents, and they instilled that in us — along with the importance and significance and love for the state of Israel,” Lee Siegel told the Washington Examiner. “And we, you could say, were the culmination of a dream for the family.”
They entered the kibbutzim — the agrarian communities whose residents tried to bring into reality, along with the state of Israel, the socialist ideal of communal living. Keith and his wife, Aviva, whom he met on the kibbutz where his brother and sister-in-law lived, moved to Kfar Aza, another community closer to the Gaza Strip, where they raised four children, one of whom chose to join the kibbutz as an adult, as Keith pursued a career first in occupational therapy and then the pharmaceutical industry.
“He is a very sensitive person. He is very generous,” Lee Siegel said of his brother. “He is very engaging. If he were in a room with you and there were 10 other people and he was speaking with you, you would know that he’s speaking with you. … He loves music — loves folk music, hard rock, rock. Even though he was born in ’59, he could have been a child of the ’60s, you know, a teenager of the ’60s, let’s say — and a very loving man.”
Their community of about 900 people suffered heavy losses on the morning of Oct. 7, with 62 killed and another 19 taken hostage, including Keith and Aviva Siegel. “That’s a nightmare that most people who live on kibbutzim down there saw as something that could happen,” Lee Siegel said.
The couple were forced into their own vehicle and driven into Gaza as hostages. Aviva Siegel was released in November, on the fourth day of a short-lived truce that saw daily exchanges of Israeli women and children for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The truce broke down after seven days, for a given reason that feels flimsy from the perspective of the hostages’ families: Hamas proposed to include men in the eighth tranche of hostages, and the Israeli government took that as a violation of the truce deal, which had prioritized women and children. “Rather than Israel deciding, ‘You know what, it’s better to just keep the hostages coming home alive,’ Israel decided, ‘You’ve broken the agreement. We’re going back to war,’” Lee Siegel said, citing communication from the Israeli government. “That was the justification that they gave.”
Sagui Dekel-Chen, 35
Sagui Dekel-Chen has a wife and three daughters, only two of whom he has ever met. The son of a Connecticut native who migrated to Israel in 1980 and teaches history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dekel-Chen inherited his father’s sharp mind and love of the Boston Red Sox; he played center field when Israel’s junior national team faced Team USA in the 2005 Maccabiah Games. Around Kibbutz Nir Oz, however, he was better known for his ingenuity and leadership. “He is an extraordinary athlete, that’s for sure, but more importantly … growing into manhood, he became a true builder and creator of things,” his father, Jonathan, told the Washington Examiner.
Sagui is the national project coordinator for the Jewish National Fund, United Kingdom, tasked with helping to coordinate the charity’s efforts to aid the development of southern Israel’s Negev desert. In his spare time, he enjoys overhauling old buses and putting them to a new use. The first of those projects was a mobile home. He has converted two others into mobile grocery stores, deployable to food deserts across the south. “Having grown up in the countryside, he understood the importance of [having] good food suppliers in our geographic periphery,” Jonathan Dekel-Chen said. “On Oct. 7, that morning, he was off and working on his latest rendition of converting old buses into mobile technological classrooms for Bedouin and Jewish communities here in the south.”
That diligence put him in position to be the first to catch sight of the terrorists, warn the kibbutz, and speak to his pregnant wife before leaving home again to resist the attack. “He looked at me and said, ‘If they come in, it’s over,’” Avital Dekel-Chen told an Israeli broadcaster, per a Tablet magazine translation. “I’ll do everything I can, OK? But they can’t come in.”
In the event, Nir Oz was the scene of one of the worst disasters of the day: 46 people murdered and another 71 residents taken hostage, including Sagui. “No soldiers got to the kibbutz” while the attack was underway, his father said. “The IDF never fired a shot. … All of the fighting that was done that morning was done by very, very brave young and not-so-young men from the kibbutz.”
His mother was captured and wounded but managed to escape and make her way back to the kibbutz, where she was tended to by Sagui’s sister and brother-in-law, who hid in their safe room throughout the day. Jonathan Dekel-Chen, who was traveling in the United States at the time, credits the new construction of their house with saving them from the flames that Hamas attackers applied to older houses.
Others were far less fortunate. Hamas fighters managed to break into about half of the safe rooms, whose residents faced execution or captivity. The Simon Tovs, an Israeli American family of six, were massacred when Hamas fighters shot the father and mother and burned the house down around the three children inside. Their grandmother was murdered separately. Jonathan Dekel-Chen gave their eulogy. Avital Dekel-Chen gave birth to another girl and named the child after one of the Simon Tov family’s 5-year-old twins, as Tablet noted, but Sagui still has not returned to meet his newborn. The sense of abandonment felt in Nir Oz on Oct. 7 has been reinforced by a perception that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is unwilling to make the compromises necessary to free the hostages for fear of alienating his coalition partners from further to the right.
“There was a moment not too long ago when it did seem that at least our prime minister had shifted somewhat in terms of his willingness to, grudgingly, prioritize the lives of the hostages over his own narrow interests to remain in power and, perhaps, avoid prosecution,” Jonathan Dekel-Chen said. “Over the course of the last few days, I’ve begun to doubt that again.”
Omer Neutra, 22
Ronen and Orna Neutra thought that life in New York City would free their family from at least the kinds of terrorist threats that had loomed on the horizon when they served in the Israel Defense Forces. Instead, she found herself walking, eight months pregnant, across the Queensboro Bridge on Sept. 11, 2001, astonished at the destruction of the World Trade Center. She gave birth to Omer on Oct. 14 of that year.
A native of New York City, Omer was the captain of his high school volleyball team and basketball team at the Schechter School of Long Island. “In many ways, he’s an all-American kid and went through the regular route of his friends, although he did go to Jewish day school,” Orna Neutra told the Washington Examiner.
After graduating from high school, Omer moved to Israel with the intention of taking a gap year, only to realize while there that he “couldn’t just go back to his kind of cushy life in New York,” as his mother put it, leaving his friends to join the Israel Defense Forces.
“He’s a serious but very casual guy. He’ll walk into the room, he’ll see 200 kids, and in his mind, he’ll think, ‘OK, who here is going to be my friend?’” Orna Neutra said. “He’s this combination of, on one hand, very lighthearted and, on the other hand, very serious and with a strong sense of duty and leadership. And that’s what makes him, you know, very special.”
Omer was serving as a tank commander near Nir Oz on the morning of Oct. 7. His was “one of the first tanks, if not the first,” to mobilize in response to the attack, his father said, but the tank “had a malfunction” that slowed it down enough to be surrounded by Hamas terrorists. “They managed to put explosive on the tank and basically forced the team out or else they’ll be burnt alive inside. They opened the tank, and they were taken out,” Ronen Neutra said. “At that time, some videos were taken, so we can see our son being dragged out, and that’s the last we’ve seen.”
Edan Alexander, 20
Edan Alexander was born in Tel Aviv and raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, the oldest of three siblings and a student at the local public school. When he heard a presentation about “a program that helps young Jews around the world to move to Israel and serve a significant service in the Israeli IDF as Lone Soldiers,” as the Tzofim Garin Tzabar website puts it, he was “very excited” about the chance to serve in the military and live closer to his grandparents, his mother explained in a recent interview with Israeli media.
“I come from a very large, very warm and welcoming family,” his mother, Yael, told Haaretz. “We’re four sisters and one brother, and I have amazing parents who live in Tel Aviv. Edan knew he’d have a caring family here and that he’d feel safe.”
And that was how a kid from Tenafly ended up an infantryman in the Israel Defense Forces, where he befriended a tank commander from New York, of all places. “We didn’t know the family beforehand, but after the fact, we’ve been told that our boys knew each other and that they shared a lot, being that they had a similar background,” Orna Neutra told the Washington Examiner.
Edan managed to speak with his mother that morning, in the early stages of the Hamas attack. “He said, ‘Mom, what’s happening here is really war. We’re being bombarded. I got a piece of shrapnel in the helmet, but don’t worry, I’m protected,’” Yael Alexander said. “So I sat down and said to myself, ‘What do you mean shrapnel in the helmet? What the f***?’ I told him to take care of himself, not to be Rambo. He told me not to worry, but I could hear that he was stressed.”
Yael and her husband, Adi, attended the 2024 State of the Union address as guests of Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), their hometown congressman. It was just one event in a relentless itinerary as they’ve joined the relatives of other hostages as advocates for the release of their loved ones. The Israeli government has been a difficult interlocutor — “I haven’t met with anybody from the Cabinet. … I also feel that they don’t want to meet with us,” Yael Alexander said — but President Joe Biden’s administration has shown more empathy. The people of Tenafly, for their part, have conducted weekly marches on Friday evenings in solidarity with the Alexanders and the other hostage families.
“America is our home,” she told Haaretz when asked about antisemitism in the U.S. “I love Israel, but our home is [America]. … In our area, I feel that there’s a lot of sympathy, and the community has really embraced us. Everybody wants to help, and everybody is very upset about it. Everybody wants to do what they can to be supportive, and it’s very moving.”
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23
“I love you.” And then: “I’m sorry.” That is not a pair of text messages that a mother wants to receive from her son early on a Saturday morning. Rachel Goldberg-Polin looked at her phone and “knew something horrible was unfolding in my world,” as she would tell reporters at the United Nations later that month.
Rachel had moved to Israel with her husband, Jonathan Polin, when her son Hersh was 7 years old. He soon developed a love of soccer that his parents, who migrated to the Jewish state as adult Americans, couldn’t quite share — a fan especially of Hapoel Jerusalem, a century-old soccer team associated with the Israeli Left.
“He was always teased for being a lover of peace, a crunchy granola dreamer,” his mother told the Lever in December.
Hersh grew into a young man enthusiastic about travel and music. He left home on the evening of Oct. 6 to attend a music festival in southern Israel, just a few miles from the Gaza Strip. That festival would end in carnage as Hamas terrorists surrounded the remote site and murdered more than 250 attendees, according to first responders.
Hersh and one of his best friends, Aner Shapira, managed to reach a roadside bomb shelter where 27 others also sought refuge. Hamas terrorists surrounded the place and tossed 11 grenades through the door. Shapira, whose great-grandfather reportedly was a signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, “managed to pick up eight of them and throw them back out,” as Rachel Goldberg-Polin emphasized during that October press appearance, before succumbing to his wounds.
A video recorded by Hamas confirmed the account and showed Hersh being forced into the bed of a pickup truck, bleeding from the stump of his left arm. Rachel Goldberg-Polin has emerged as one of the most internationally prominent advocates for the release of the scores of hostages held by Hamas.
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“There are many of the 133 [hostages] that the world never hears about because there is so very much noise,” she told the attendees of an April 7 rally in New York City. “I don’t hear a lot about the eight Muslim Arabs being held hostage or the eight Thai Buddhists or the two black African Christians. There are hostages from Mexico and Nepal who are Catholic and Hindu. We do an injustice when we erase these people when we are talking about who is still being held hostage.”
A few weeks later, her son appeared in a new proof-of-life video released by Hamas amid fraught negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage deal. “We’re here today with a plea to all of the leaders of the parties who have been negotiating to date,” Jonathan Polin said after seeing the video. “That includes Qatar, Egypt, the United States, Hamas, and Israel. Be brave, lean in, seize this moment, and get a deal done.”
This story was updated to correct a photo.
