Hostage family, Palestinian man reflect on 2 years since Hamas attack on Israel

Here & Now Anytime

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4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage. Two of those hostages were Daniel Lifshitz's grandparents. They were kidnapped from their kibbutz. His grandmother was released in 2023, but his grandfather was killed in captivity. Lifshitz shares more, two years after the attack.

In response to the attack, Israeli forces launched a war in Gaza that has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. We check in with Mohammed Hatem, who lives in Gaza and uses fitness to cope with the violence around him.

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0:00.0	Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science.
0:13.8	Learn more at MathWorks.com.
0:17.6	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:25.6	He tried to change the world as much as possible. That is one of the legacies that he passed for us,
0:30.6	that we have to do whatever we can to make this world a better place with the tools we have.
0:38.2	Two years after the Hamas attack on Israel, one man remembers his grandfather, taken hostage
0:44.7	and killed, and hopes for peace.
1:01.6	It's Tuesday, October 7th, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBOR.
1:02.7	I'm Chris Bentley.
1:12.9	Today on the show, it's been two years since Hamas militants attacked Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people. We'll hear from an Israeli whose grandparents were taken hostage.
1:17.9	Look, I knew about more than 90 of the first 251 hostages been kidnapped on October 7.
1:26.4	So it was even difficult for me to count how many people I knew that been murdered.
1:33.1	It's really like being in hell.
1:35.2	And two years later, the U.S. and Arab countries are pushing the leaders of Israel and Hamas
1:40.9	toward a potential end to the war.
1:43.8	But even with negotiations underway,
1:46.5	Israel is still shelling Gaza, killing civilians, and restricting how much food and medicine
1:52.7	get to a population that is suffering from famine. We'll talk to a 19-year-old in Khan Yunus
1:58.9	about living through two years of war.
2:01.9	This mentality of not only wanting to survive, but also wanting to thrive and to get better in life,
2:09.3	that is like the thought that has been really haunting me.
	...

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