Ahead of Netanyahu Address, Families of Americans Held in Gaza Plead Case to House Foreign Affairs Committee

As Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, parents of the eight American citizens held in Hamas captivity — three of whom have been confirmed to be dead — appealed to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday to help bring their loved ones home.

Those remaining hostages — Edan Alexander, Sagui Dekel-Chen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Omer Neutra, and Keith Siegel — and the three who died in the tunnels — Itay Chen, Gadi Haggai, and Judith Weinstein Haggai — promise to be top of mind for those in attendance at Netanyahu’s speech.

Keith Siegel’s wife, Aviva Siegel, spent 51 days in Gaza before being released. While she ultimately came home, her husband did not return.

“We cannot allow ourselves as humans to let them go through one more day like I went through,” Siegel said. “I was starved while they ate in front of me. I was thirsty, because I didn’t get any water. I was not allowed to stand or walk or move. Most of the time, I had to keep silent completely, and the only thing we were allowed to do was decide if we were going to lie on our back or on our side — that’s the only human right we had. We were taken underground and just left there with no oxygen.”

Siegel implored committee members to attempt to understand the torturous experience of having been a Hamas hostage.

“I want everybody in this room just to think about trying to figure out how to take another breath of air and looking at your husband that you love — that you’ve been married [to] for 43 years — hardly breathing, and just praying to yourself, ‘let me die first before Keith,'” she told the committee. “‘I don’t want to see Keith dead.’ We were with people that tortured us, hit us. I saw the girls being beaten. I saw the girls coming back after they were touched.”

Now home, Siegel said that not a moment goes by in which her mind is not with her late husband and the girls in the tunnels.

“Now, I’m here, thinking about Keith and the girls, and it’s too much for me to handle,” she said. “Because I know where they are and who they’re with.”

Daniel Neutra — brother of 22-year-old Omer who, like the other hostages, has spent 291 days with his terrorist captors — recalled in excruciating detail the moment at which he learned that his brother had been abducted.

“On the day that I found out he was kidnapped, I was at college,” Neutra told the committee. “My dad woke me up at 7:00 a.m. with a phone call, telling me he hadn’t heard from Omer since the night before. I spent the whole day in my dorm room reading the news and seeing the images of the gruesome atrocities that were happening, wondering if he was okay. I called him more times than I can remember. When I finally left my room to go eat something, I looked around, and no one in the entire building seemed to know what had happened. It was like living in a different reality.”

That sense that Americans have not fully grasped the extent of the horrors of October 7 — and the fact that American citizens are among those currently held by Hamas — persists, Neutra said.

“To this day, many Americans are completely unaware that any Americans are still even held hostage to this day,” he told the committee. “Omer is my best friend; he’s always someone I can talk to. And oftentimes, I find myself overwhelmed by the pressure of this situation and the bizarre reality, and my first reflex is to pick up the phone and talk to Omer. But, of course, his WhatsApp still says ‘last seen ten months ago.'”

Neutra then turned his focus to Netanyahu, who met with the families on Monday after arriving in the United States. The prime minister, Neutra argued, in sentiments shared by more than one other relative of those abducted, did not appear to share his belief that the release of the hostages is a more pressing issue than destroying Hamas.

“I have to say the urgency of the matter did not seem to resonate with him,” Neutra said. “We must continue to put pressure on all parties involved, including Hamas, to accept this deal now before more people die in captivity.”

The families of hostages held in Gaza have long argued in favor of a ceasefire, believing that ending Israel’s retaliatory operation may be enough to convince Hamas to release their loved ones in exchange. A deal that President Joe Biden erroneously claimed had been accepted by the Israeli government would have had Hamas release Israeli hostages in exchange for the freeing of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, alongside Israel withdrawing troops from “populated areas” in Gaza.

In a statement correcting Biden’s assertion that Israel had acceded to those terms, Netanyahu said the Jewish state’s conditions for ending the war had “not changed,” requiring the “destruction of Hamas military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages, and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel” in order to end fighting.