San Francisco Frontiers - For some, Israeli hostages' return brings tears of relief but fight goes on

The reunion took place at a hospital near Tel Aviv after the boy, his mother and his grandmother were freed along with 10 others on the first day of a four-day truce and hostage swap deal with Hamas that also saw dozens of Palestinian prisoners freed.

After a process followed by millions on television, the hostages were flown to meet their families at two Israeli hospitals that released clips of their poignant family reunions.

The brief images have brought a glimmer of hope to a nation still reeling from the October 7 attacks.

On that day, Gaza militants stormed southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping about 240 others, among them mothers, babies, children and the elderly, according to an Israeli count.

In response, Israel has hit back with a vast military campaign which Gaza's Hamas rulers say has killed more than 15,000 people.

Awaiting the hostages was an army of Israeli medics, child protection experts and trauma specialists who had battened down the hatches to protect the former captives from the media spotlight as they start to process a seven-week ordeal that may have left many of them deeply traumatised.

"Did you miss me, did you think about daddy?" asked Yoni Katz-Asher as he sat on a bed at Schneider children's hospital holding his four-year-old daughter Raz who was snatched with her two-year-old sister Aviv and their mother, Doron.

"I dreamt that we came home," she told him, her blonde curls pulled back in a ponytail, her mum and her little sister also cuddling in close.

"You dreamt you came home? Look, the dream has come true!" he told her, promising the family would go home very soon.

- 'Happy but not celebrating' -

"I am happy that I received my family back, we're allowed to feel joy and to shed a tear, that's a human thing," Katz-Asher later said in a video released by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum.

"But I am not celebrating," he went on. "I will not celebrate until the last of the hostages returns home."

Others echoed that sentiment, among them Adva and Alon, grandchildren of 85-year-old Yaffa Adar.

"Our grandmother returned home yesterday after almost 50 days in captivity, we got to hug her, we are very moved by her strength and from the way she was able to survive this experience," they said in a video statement.

But they vowed the fight would not end "until all of the hostages are back".

Although Noam Peri's elderly father was not among the hostages brought home on Friday, those who returned brought welcome news.

"We have a sign of life from my father, we know he's alive from other people from the community who were released yesterday," said Peri, whose 79-year-old father Haim was snatched from his home in Nir Oz kibbutz near the Gaza border by Hamas militants on October 7.

All but one of the hostages released on Friday -- among them six elderly women, three mothers and their four children -- were from Nir Oz, one of the hardest hit communities on October 7.

In Nir Oz, 75 people were seized and 29 killed, Peri said. "So one out of four people from this community were either murdered or kidnapped," many of them neighbours or lifelong friends of her parents, kibbutz veterans.

Hearing that her father was still alive has given the anguished family fresh hope, but they have no guarantees he will be getting out soon, if at all -- the hostages to be released under the ceasefire deal are women and those aged 18 or under.

"It brings a lot of hope but we don't know how much time they're going to be able to hold on there," she said, describing her father as "a brave man but not a healthy man" who survived a heart attack and "depends on medication to survive".

- 'Beyond pain' -

For most, the wait goes on.

Nadav Rudaeff has had no indication of life for his 61-year-old father Lior, an ambulance driver and volunteer medic who suffered a heart attack two years ago.

And Ruby Chen has also had no news about the fate of his son, 19-year-old soldier Itai, snatched while on duty protecting kibbutzim in the area.

"It's hard to describe the feeling of not knowing if your kid is alive or not," he said. "It's something beyond pain."

For days, the family did not know where he was. Their middle son listed as "missing in action" until at 6:00 am one morning, when two army officers knocked at their door.

Immediately they suspected the worst.

"That means someone's going to give you a very bad message. Your heart stops," he said.

"But we are the lucky ones: the notification we got was that Itai was abducted," he went on, "not the other notification that many others got that day."

G.Allen--SFF