They arrived in two groups—first seven men, then thirteen—standing and smiling, as they made their way from Hamas captivity to freedom. On Monday morning, all twenty living hostages returned to Israel and were reunited with their families at the Re’im military base, near the Gaza border. Each family had been given a private room to await the reunions, but the relatives couldn’t sit still. So, instead, they gathered as a group. It was a fitting moment—people from all sectors of Israeli society, whose fates had crossed under the worst of circumstances, and who say that they now feel like a single family.

“The war is over,” Einav Zangauker cried out to her son, Matan, on the phone, calling him “ haim sheli ”—my life. At the time, he was still with his Hamas captors, before being handed ove

See Full Page