Simcha Goldin reflects on 11-year fight to bring son Hadar home

Goldin described the feeling of political abandonment and the moment his family finally received the body for burial.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

In his first interview with the press since burying his son Hadar last month after an 11-year fight to retrieve him from Gaza, Simcha Goldin told Ynet on Tuesday about the family’s values, their feelings of abandonment by politicians, and the strong sense of closure when the body was finally returned.

Goldin said his whole family came to the Shura camp after he received the phone call that his son had been positively identified, including Hadar’s former fiancée, who “has been with us all these years” even after marrying in the interval.

“There we realized that we had not been running for 11 years for nothing, that we had brought him intact for burial,” he said. “There was a very strong sense of acceptance that it was him.”

He said Hamas had kept the body carefully since stealing it after killing the 23-year-old soldier at the start of the cease-fire in 2014’s Operation Protective Edge.

“He was dressed. The shroud is actually clothing. I won’t go into details, but they preserved him,” Goldin explained.

“The feeling was crazy. At first we all approached him, then each of us went up separately to be alone with him.”

This had not been possible, he said, when traces of his remains were discovered by fellow soldiers who ran into the tunnel where the terrorists dragged Hadar, and were later buried in a military funeral.

“The feeling was that my son had come home. That the fighters had brought him, that we had completed the mission. The farewell was very authentic because this time there was no empty coffin. There was Hadar. There was a father saying goodbye to his son,” he said.

The family had felt abandoned by both sides of the political aisle when they were in power, none of whom answered their constant demand to treat Gazans exactly as they treated Hadar.

For more than a decade, the Goldins said from every platform they could that if Hamas didn’t act humanely and return his body, Israel should not supply electricity or allow in humanitarian aid, anti-COVID vaccines, money from Qatar, or anything else permitted in exchange for quiet from Gaza.

“The principle should be that you apply pressure on Hamas so that the kidnapping becomes a burden and not an asset,” he said.

Goldin attributed the “resistance to what we said” to “cowardice.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who led the government for almost all 11 years of their struggle, “was very afraid of confrontation” with Hamas, he said.

But the “weakness,” as he called it, started at the beginning, noting that the coalition in 2014 also included left-wing figures such as Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni.

“Everyone was there, everyone abandoned him.”

Nothing changed when the left-center unity government was in power from mid-2021 to mid-2022, he said.

Their attitude was “just leave us alone from these crazy people.”

The Goldins never asked for the release of terrorists in exchange, believing this was utterly wrong, and Goldin harshly criticized politicians of his national-religious sector for claiming their protests would lead to such an outcome.

“For years they said that what the Goldin family is doing will lead to the release of terrorists,” he said. “But they released terrorists throughout these nine and a half years.”

“From 2014 to January 2022, the State of Israel released over 700 terrorists, okay? We discovered this on Hamas’ Facebook. Hamas’ Facebook is the most reliable tool, everything is there. Every Friday at 2 p.m., two are released, and they have a party in the afternoon. If they had applied pressure on them here, they could have brought Hadar and Oron.”

The body of Oron Shaul, kidnapped earlier in the same operation, was found in January in Gaza based on intelligence information and returned for burial in Israel.

“[Finance Minister and Religious Zionism party head Bezalel] Smotrich will be remembered in history as the greatest terrorist liberator who ever existed,” he said, seemingly referring to the hostage deals during the just-concluded War of Revival in which thousands of terrorists were released in exchange for the 251 Israelis and foreign nationals kidnapped during the Hamas-led invasion and massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.

The sector and its leaders should have been guided by the fact that Hadar’s return was mandated by the Torah, he said.

“In both the midrashim and the Torah, the value of bringing a body to the grave of Israel is absolute, there is no room for interpretations,” he said.

It is also a value that the army’s senior echelon should have held dear but did not, he said, even if bringing the fallen back for burial is part of the official IDF ethos.

Until hundreds of men, women and children were taken hostage on Oct. 7, Israeli society as a whole “did not want to understand” this value as well, Goldin added.

If the country had listened to his family and stood firm on its values, perhaps the horrors of Oct. 7 would not have happened, he said.

fallen IDF soldiersHadar Goldinhamas hostageSimcha Goldin