In a poignant moment, the Israelis welcome some hostages home

It was a moving moment for many. In the October 7 Hamas-led attack in southern Israel, armed attackers crossed the border from Gaza and killed about 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, according to Israeli officials. history. The attackers also captured about 240 others in the Palestinian coastal enclave.

“It is allowed to feel joy and also to shed a tear. That’s human,” Yoni Asher, 37, said in a video recording shortly after being reunited with his wife, Doron Katz Asher, 34, and their daughters, Raz, 4, and Aviv, 2. Mrs. Katz Asher and the girls had been kidnapped while visiting Ms. Katz Asher’s mother in Nir Oz, a pastoral kibbutz, or communal village, near the Gaza border.

“But I don’t celebrate it and I won’t celebrate it until the last hostages return,” Mr. Asher said, adding: “From today, the families of the hostages are my new family.”

Many Israelis remained glued to television screens throughout the afternoon and evening, catching the first glimpse of those being released through the windows of the Red Cross ambulances transporting them across the Gaza border into Egypt, and then watching their first steps when they came from captivity to freedom. Israeli authorities confirmed their identities only after they were freed.

The nation watched in amazement as Hanna Katzir, 76, a grandmother of six from Kibbutz Nir Oz who usually uses a walker, was helped out of an ambulance on unsteady feet.

Islamic Jihad, an armed Palestinian group that took part in the Oct. 7 attack, had recently claimed that Ms. Katzir died in captivity and said she would provide evidence but never did.

Even Ms. Katzir’s relatives were surprised to learn that she was still alive when Israeli authorities informed them late Thursday that she was on the list for release on Friday, said a niece, Dalit Katzenellenbogen.

Echoing the mixed feelings of many, Ms. Katzenellenbogen said shortly after her aunt’s release that she felt “happiness about Hanna’s return from captivity, but also concerned about her physical and mental health.”

Like many of the hostages, Ms. Katzir, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, returns to a very different life. Her husband, Rami Katzir, was killed in the attack on Nir Oz. Her son, Elad, 47, was also kidnapped and remains in Gaza. And like all residents of the devastated communities along the border, Ms. Katzir will have no home to return to in the near future.

Twelve of the thirteen Israeli hostages released on Friday were captured by Nir Oz. The 13th was one of five taken from Nirim, another kibbutz along the Gaza border.

Nir Oz was one of the hardest hit communities. About a quarter of the approximately 400 residents were murdered or kidnapped.

At a hotel in Eilat where many Nir Oz residents are staying after their evacuation from the border area, elation was tempered by a broader sense of loss.

“There are children here without parents, parents without children and grandparents with grandchildren but no parents,” said Larry Butler, 73, a Nir Oz resident who survived the attack.

Founded by the pioneers of socialist worker Zionism in 1955, seven years after the establishment of the State of Israel, the wheat and potato fields of Nir Oz extend to the security fence that Israel built around the Palestinian coastal enclave and which was breached in 1955 .approximately 30 locations on October 7. Beyond the fence rise the apartment buildings, water towers and minarets of the Palestinian village of Abasan.

Elad Katzir was born in Nir Oz. As a farmer responsible for the irrigation systems and a member of the kibbutz’s fire brigade and emergency response team, he felt unprotected for a long time. After a deadly three-week Israeli offensive against Hamas in Gaza in response to Palestinian rocket fire, which ended with a shaky ceasefire in January 2009, he had a nagging feeling that something was missing or incomplete.

As he drove through the lush fields with this reporter that month, he stopped the car only behind clumps of trees or bushes for cover in case of sniper fire.

“I don’t feel any victory,” Mr. Katzir said at the time. “I still don’t feel safe.”

Ms. Katzenellenbogen, his niece, who lives in Tel Aviv, said Friday evening that she remained concerned about Mr. Katzir and the other prisoners still in Gaza, noting that Israeli soldiers were on the ground there.

“I hope the war will end soon,” she added, “for the Israelis and for the Palestinians who do not support Hamas.”

“We will have to learn to continue to live side by side,” she said. “No one will disappear.”

Adam Sella contributed reporting from Eilat, Israel.