No chance for goodbyes – American hostage’s mother dies

Gladys Siegel, 97, never knew her son was abducted on Oct. 7 or that he was held captive in Gaza ever since.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Gladys Siegel, the mother of American-Israeli hostage Keith Siegel, died Monday night at age 97 without her youngest child getting the chance to part from her.

“My father’s mother died and my father can’t say goodbye to her because he is in Hamas captivity for more than a year,” Siegel’s daughter Elan wrote in a Facebook post.

“My father can’t stand with us tomorrow in the cemetery, he can’t say goodbye to the woman who loved him and raised him his whole life,” she added. “A violent and murderous terror organization dictates our lives — from Gaza to the great United States and the whole world is silent.”

Living in an assisted-living facility in North Carolina, Gladys was never informed that her son, Keith, 65, had been abducted by Hamas terrorists last October 7 and has been held in Gaza ever since.

Siegel and his wife, Aviva, members of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, were forced into their own car to be driven into the Gaza Strip by the terrorists who invaded their pastoral community as part of a coordinated surprise attack by thousands on dozens of locations in Israel, in which they massacred 1,200 and took 251 people in all as hostages.

The terrorists also forced a neighbor and her two children into the Siegel car as well.

Aviva was released among 86 kidnapped Israeli women and children during the week-long hostage-for-Palestinian prisoners exchange and ceasefire in November 2023, in the only deal to date with the terrorist organization.

Out of the 101 people Hamas and other terrorists are still holding, Keith, 65, is still believed to be among those alive.

Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer reportedly told President-elect Donald Trump last month that the Israeli government thinks that 60 are still living, although officially the number stands at 76.

Besides Siegel, there are seven other hostages with American citizenship. Sagui Dekel-Chen, 35, of Kibbutz Nir Oz, is the only other American civilian still thought to be alive.

Hamas released on Saturday a video of lone soldier Edan Alexander, 20, looking gaunt and pleading in both Hebrew and English for Israeli and U.S. leaders, including president-elect Donald Trump, to get a deal done to free him and his fellow abductees.

Judi (70) and Gadi Haggai (73) of Kibbutz Nir Oz, and another soldier on duty that day, Itay Chen (19), were murdered on October 7 and their bodies taken by the terrorists.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin (23) was kidnapped from the Nova festival and murdered in August along with five other hostages as IDF soldiers neared the tunnel where they were being held captive.

On Monday, the IDF confirmed that American-Israeli lone soldier Omer Neutra had been murdered on the day of the invasion after he and his tank crew battled the terrorists, with his body still being held in Gaza.

That evening, Trump posted a demand on his social platform that all the hostages be released by the day of his inauguration, January 20, 2025.

If they aren’t freed by then, he promised, “there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.”