The father of Almog Meir Jan, 21, one of the four Israeli hostages rescued from Gaza on Saturday, died hours before his son came home.
“My brother died of grief and didn’t get to see his son return. The night before Almog’s return, my brother’s heart stopped,” Almog’s aunt Dina Jan told Israeli media. “We are very happy about Almog’s return, but the brain is unable to absorb that this is the end. We are broken.”
Almog’s father Yossi had been “glued to the television” since October, “clinging to every piece of information” about his son who Hamas captured from the Nova music festival, Dina said. Dina received a phone call notifying her that Almog was rescued by the Israeli Defense Forces this weekend in an expansive military operation in central Gaza and she “was so happy [she] didn’t know what to do.” Officers hadn’t been able to reach Yossi, so Dina went to his house to tell him the good news. When she arrived, she found him in the living room, dead. Yossi was 57.
“He loved Almog so much, cared for him so much, wanted to know what was happening to him and what he was going through. He could not bear it, every [potential hostage deal] that exploded in his face broke his heart,” Dina said.
Almog’s mother Orit Meir said that she “couldn’t stop hugging him” when the two reunited. ‘Tomorrow is my birthday so I got my present.”
The IDF rescued Almog, Noa Argamani, 25, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40, from Nuseirat on Saturday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the military’s “heroic operation,” which he called “complex and dangerous.”
“Our heroic warriors charged as one man into the fire, they eliminated the terrorists and freed the hostages,” he said.
Anti-Israel foreign entities began to criticize the IDF’s operation just hours after the hostages were rescued from terrorists; Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said that the country “strongly condemned the heinous crimes,” Lebanon’s foreign ministry condemned the “massacre committed by Israel in the Nuseirat camp,” and Egypt’s foreign ministry condemned “in the strongest terms the Israeli attacks on Nuseirat Camp.” Hamas terrorists and Palestinian jihadists had been hiding out in Nuseirat, in a United Nations-operated school building. The rescued hostages were held in two separate civilian apartment buildings.