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Hostage’s mother hopes to use Hamas propaganda video to secure son’s release

Rachel Goldberg-Polin believes son Hersh’s ill appearance will remind the world that the hostages are real people and raise pressure for a deal.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Rachel Goldberg-Polin thinks it would be helpful for the world to see the latest Hamas propaganda video, which features her son, Hersh, The Telegraph reported Tuesday.

“People have forgotten that [the hostages] are actual, real people,” she told the British daily in an interview.

In the nearly two-and-a-half-minute clip, an emaciated and pale Goldberg-Polin is seen sitting in a chair in a short-sleeved shirt which reveals that his left arm ends in a stump right below the elbow.

According to eyewitnesses, his hand had been blown off by one of several hand grenades tossed by Hamas terrorists into a small shelter where he and dozens of fellow music lovers had hidden at the Supernova dance festival when it was overrun by the marauding men in the early morning invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023.

Out of the 1,200 people they massacred that day, more than 360 were murdered at the rave site, with many of the women brutally gang-raped and sexually mutilated first.

Waving his stump and speaking in an angry voice, Goldberg-Polin repeatedly says the Israeli government “should be ashamed” of itself, blaming only the Israeli side for “leaving us for 200 days” in an “underground hell” and “rejecting all the deals” that have been offered.

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Hamas has so far vetoed all Israeli proposals, even the latest one offered last week that the U.S. has called “extraordinarily generous.”

Sounding at times like he is reading from an off-screen text, Goldberg-Polin also demanded that the ruling coalition do everything in its power to get him and his fellow hostages released, and if that is “too much” for them, then its members should “leave the keys” of government and “go home.”

Rachel Goldberg-Polin told The Telegraph that her family was “very happy” to see proof that Hersh was still alive, while emphasizing that “Before and after is very dramatic. He looks completely different.”

Unlike other hostages’ families who don’t want the media to air Hamas videos of their loved ones, believing that it plays into the terrorists’ hands as part of its psychological warfare against Israel, Rachel and her husband Jon are willing to publicize this one as a possible way to the help get the hostages released faster.

Two weeks ago, Rachel was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People for 2024 “in recognition of the impact she and her husband Jon Polin, along with hundreds of other families of hostages taken by Hamas… have had in raising global awareness of the hostage crisis and their unwavering efforts to continue to fight for the release of Hersh and every hostage.”

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The couple has gone around the globe to speak to everyone from world leaders to Jewish communities about Hersh, wearing a piece of tape they change daily with the number of days their son has been in captivity.

“You know how in America when you go to conferences they put stickers on you with your name on? This is my name. My name today is 207,” she told her interviewer.

“I think it makes people uncomfortable, which people should be because we failed them: Every day is another day of failure,” she added.