Hostage’s mother – ‘I received a sign of life’

At a rally demanding the release of all the hostages, Anat Angrest said the IDF had recently found a video of her son in the Gaza Strip.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

At a rally on behalf of releasing the hostages, a mother of one of soldiers held by Hamas disclosed that she had received a sign of life from him.

Anat Angrest told the crowd of thousands that in recent weeks, officers from the IDF had shown her a video of her son.

“I received a sign of life from Matan in a video that our soldiers found in Gaza,” Angrest said at Hostages’ Square.

“In the video we see Matan, my son, staring into the camera with a wounded look and turning to you, the Prime Minister. He shouts: ‘Netanyahu, I don’t understand how this happened, but I trust you to get me out of here.’”

Angrest demanded that her son be considered just as important as those whose release is part of the first stage of a possible hostage deal currently being negotiated between Hamas and Israel.

“You’re not a child because you’re over the age of 18, not a woman, not elderly and not chronically ill,” she said. “You’re ‘just’ a soldier who fought and was ready to sacrifice himself.”

“So you are staying there, in the tunnels, in the dark when you’re wounded, bleeding, who knows if you’re still surviving,” she continued. “I turn to you, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and remind you: Matan is a heroic soldier, but first of all he is a child who grew up in the State of Israel and on its values.”

Male soldiers are supposedly to be freed only at a later stage of the deal, reportedly for a higher “price” than the first group, in terms of the number of Palestinian prisoners released in exchange.

In a Channel 12 interview on Thursday, Angrest had said that in the video footage she had seen shown, Matan had “looked like he’d been through serious trauma” on October 7th.

The 21-year-old staff sergeant had been badly injured in the battle for the Nachal Oz military outpost that hundreds of Hamas fighters broke into during the surprise invasion of some 3,000 terrorists into Israel on the day Israelis call “the Black Sabbath.”

His solitary tank had rushed into action against the enemy. His three crewmates, Tomer Leibovitz, Itay Chen and Daniel Perez, were killed when the terrorists shot an anti-tank missile at them.

While Leibovitz’s body was found, the others were abducted to Gaza, with Matan unconscious at the time.

They were three among the 252 Israelis and foreign nationals kidnapped during the brutal killing spree in which 1,200 people were massacred, raped and burned alive.

Angrest said she was “considered lucky among the families of the hostages,” she said, in that she has a recent sign that he is still among the living of some 116 men, women and children still being held captive.

The IDF believes that at least a third of them were either taken after being murdered on the day of the invasion, or died in captivity, whether from lack of medical attention, being shot by their captors, or, in some cases, as an accidental result of IDF airstrikes.

The first time the family received word that he was still alive was in late November, during a hostage deal that saw just over a hundred female and underage abductees released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and humanitarian aid.

Some of the freed hostages told the family that they had met him.

“He was recovering from a severe wound he had received on October 7,” Angrest told Kan News’ Keren Neubach last month, reconstructing the event. “He had received medical attention but was being held in subpar conditions, because he was a soldier and a man. In the [Hamas] tunnels, without food, without air, without daylight. How can one describe a soldier sitting in a cell just a few meters in size? And that’s how he’s already spent 262 days.”

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