‘Show the world how Hamas blew my son’s hand off ’
The mother of a hostage on why people need to see the terror group’s footage of her maimed son
THE mother of an American hostage held by Hamas wants the world to see the image of her son missing a hand that was blown off when he was kidnapped on Oct 7.
Hersh Goldberg-polin was seen for the first time since his abduction from the Nova music festival near the Gaza border when he appeared in a video released by the terror group last week. After seven months of war, Hersh has become recognisable thanks to the efforts of his fellow Hapoel Jerusalem football fans, who have adorned his hometown with posters and street art of his name and smiling face.
But the young Israeli-american in the Hamas proof-of-life video appeared pale, agitated and thin, gesturing with his missing left hand as he urged the Israeli government to secure his release and sent love to his family just before the start of Passover.
“We were very happy that he was alive,” said his mother, Rachel Goldberg-polin, but the change the parents saw in their son was pronounced. “Before and after is very dramatic. He looks completely different,” she told The Telegraph.
While the many of the hostages’ families have asked the media not to use Hamas’s videos of them, dismissing them as propaganda, Hersh’s parents want the world to see it.
“People have forgotten that (the hostages) are actual, real people,” she said.
Ms Goldberg-polin and her husband John have turned campaigning for the release of their only son into a full-time job. When she arrived for her interview with The Telegraph, Ms Goldberg-polin, a petite woman with a neat bun of silver hair, wore a plain white T-shirt with the number 207 written in strips of duct tape. She and her husband began wearing numbers to mark how many days Hersh had been in captivity after growing tired of journalists constantly asking how long it had been since their son was taken.
“You know how in America when you go to conferences they put stickers on you with your name on? This is my name. My name today is 207,” she said, adding that the stickers also serve as a reminder of the hostages’ plight – something the family fear is becoming less acute to many as the war drags on.
“I think it makes people uncomfortable, which people should be because we failed them: Every day is another day of failure,” she said.
With Israeli leaders talking up the potential for a breakthrough in the hostage negotiations, Ms Goldbergpolin said she had lived through many such moments in the last seven months of war, moments which seemed pivotal but turned out to be merely posturing.
“There’s a lot of posturing and game playing and theatre – and we’re just extras in the movie we did not sign up for,” she said.
Hersh’s parents feared the worst when Hamas released a preview screen-shot of the video with Hersh an hour before it was released. Other videos released by the group showed hostages dead, supposedly killed by Israeli airstrikes.
Mrs Goldberg-polin remembers exactly when she saw her son last. He was saying goodbye after the dinner marking the last night of Sukkot on Friday Oct 6. Hersh and his friend got their backpacks and went off camping.
“At around 11pm he kissed John and he kissed me. He turned around really casually in the doorway and said ‘Love you, see you tomorrow’,” his mother said. “That was 208 nights ago.”
Like most people in Israel on Oct 7, Ms Goldberg-polin, her husband and their two daughters were woken up by air raid sirens as air defences roared into life in response to a barrage of rockets fired from Gaza.
The family were keeping Sabbath, but Ms Goldberg-polin decided to break it as she had no idea where those attacks would catch Hersh, who did not tell her where he was going.
When she turned on her phone close to 8.30am, she saw two messages pop on the screen. One said “I love you”, the other said “I’m sorry.”
“I already knew something horrible was happening,” she said.
Hersh’s family assumed he had died when they saw the first images of the carnage at the Nova festival – around 260 festival-goers were killed in the massacre. But they later came across a photo showing party-goers huddling in a bomb shelter – before Hamas fighters started throwing grenades inside to smoke them out.
John and Rachel managed to track down the other people in the photo, who told them Hersh had grabbed hold one of the grenades and tried to throw it out of the shelter to save the others.
Then, a grainy video emerged showing Hersh being loaded onto a pickup truck with other captives in a dusty field near Kibbutz Re’im. He was missing the lower half of his left arm and appeared to have fashioned a makeshift tourniquet out of a strip of clothing.
However horrible it was to see their son covered in blood and missing a limb, the Goldberg-polins finally got a hope he was alive.
“This is when you start to live on another planet because our first thought was ‘Oh, thank God, he was kidnapped’, which is not what normal people say.”
The deal offered by mediators to Israel and Hamas reportedly calls on the terrorist group to initially release at least 33 vulnerable hostages – women, children, elderly or wounded, which could potentially include Hersh.
Mrs Goldberg-poline does not count on a sure release as the decisionmaking seems opaque: “They’re not asking the mum. I don’t know who’s going to make the list.”