Episode 5: When your family is taken hostage

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2025

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a podcast about history, but also about this moment in history.

Today's episode is a special one. Many of you asked about the hostages, about the activism of their families, about their shattering experiences on October 7 and how they have worked to piece their lives back together since.

I can think of no better way to begin to answer these questions than by posing them to our good friend Shaked Haran.

There's no one story of the hostage families. Their experiences vary, their opinions on the war differ. All their stories are powerful and excruciating, and often also unexpectedly inspiring; all are worth hearing.

And Shaked's voice stands out among them for its clarity and courage.

Shaked lost three family members in the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Be'eri, including her beloved father Avshalom, or Avshal. Seven more family members, including sister Adi, brother-in-law Tal, three-year-old niece Yahel, eight-year-old nephew Naveh, and 12-year-old cousin Noam, were dragged into Gaza as hostages.

Just two weeks ago, the last family member still held by Hamas, Tal Shoham, was finally released, closing a long and painful chapter in the life of this extraordinary family.

We sat down to talk about that day, about what it feels like to search desperately for your family after a massacre, about finding the strength amid the pain and fear to launch a globe-spanning fight to rescue your loved ones. We looked at Israel's social fractures and at what holds us all together, about a morally confused world and an enemy territory that could still, she believes, flourish if it managed to come out from beneath the shadow of the murderers of her family.

Thank you to Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring this episode in honor of those we lost on October 7th.

Please join me on Patreon to support this project: https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything

If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [email protected].

A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone. Welcome to Episode 5 of Ask Aviv Anything.
0:08.6	A lot of you have been asking me about hostages, about the deep and profound and complex questions that Israelis face, the disagreements, the pain, the suffering, the trauma, the strength, the resilience,
0:23.6	the whole thing. We're going to dive into that today with a friend of ours, friend of my wife's
0:30.6	Shaked Haran, who unfortunately, has become one of the great experts and activists on this issue,
0:42.6	because seven members of her family were taken hostage on October 7.
0:47.5	Tal Shoham came out two weeks ago.
0:50.4	He was the last member of the family still inside Gaza.
0:54.4	And we're going to have a conversation.
0:56.6	Shaked, thank you for being with me.
0:59.8	Thank you for having me.
1:02.1	The hostages are back in the news.
1:05.7	Trump's envoy is meeting to get out maybe 10 hostages for a 60-day ceasefire in Doha with Hamas representatives.
1:15.8	We often see hostage families on TV. We see them at rallies.
1:22.7	I think one of the extraordinary things when people talk about hostages around the world now, though.
1:27.9	And the thing that people miss is that hostages are ordinary people, utterly ordinary people.
1:35.0	What decided whether you got attacked, taken hostage, killed, your house was burned down in Beir,
1:42.2	for example, where your family is from, what made
1:45.7	that decision was basically how close you were to the fence on the Gaza side of the kibbutz.
1:51.4	And so it was the luck of the draw.
1:53.7	It was just being in an environment where the IDF had failed to be there, to protect, to show up
2:00.2	on time.
2:02.1	And ordinary people got swept up into this.
	...

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