He looked pale, but he looked calm. And somehow he looked younger and older than his 23 years.
“Mom, Dad, Leebi and Orly, I love you, I miss you,” said Hersh Goldberg-Polin, looking directly into the camera and addressing his parents and two sisters. “And I think about you every day.”
The Palestinian militant group Hamas on Thursday night released a one-minute, 42-second video of the Berkeley-born Israeli-American citizen who was killed last week along with five other Israeli hostages in a tunnel under the Gaza Strip. They had been held for nearly 11 months, kidnapped by Hamas-led attackers in the early hours of the war. In the undated video, Goldberg-Polin said she hoped to see her family again.
According to Israeli authorities, the six hostages were shot dead by their captors last Thursday or Friday, while Israeli troops were carrying out operations in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The news of the discovery of the bodies and the subsequent confirmation of the identities of the six plunged the country into mourning.
The killings sparked massive street protests, with demonstrators demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reach a ceasefire deal to free dozens of Israeli captives believed to still be alive in Gaza.
Hamas has made frequent use of such videos throughout the war. The Israeli government denounces them as crude propaganda, intended to demoralize and divide the country. Israeli media rarely broadcast them, except for clips specifically approved by families for general viewing.
Videos produced by Hamas, which are presumed to have been made under duress, invariably show captives pleading with Israeli leaders to reach a deal to free them, and sometimes offer harshly critical commentary on the Israeli government’s failure to do so. This video did so as well, with criticism also directed at the Biden administration.
It is not known when Hamas made the individual recordings of the six, but there is at least one indication that the videos could be several months old: One of the dead hostages, Carmel Gat, said she was 39 years old. She had turned 40 in May.
On Sunday, Hamas released initial video clips of the hostages, just hours after Israeli authorities confirmed the killings and the names of the dead. Those images, which show each of the six reciting their names and places of origin, were posted on a channel on the Telegram messaging app affiliated with Hamas’s armed wing, as were longer versions posted throughout this week.
In the first, a 24-year-old hostage named Eden Yerushalmi, who appeared emaciated and had dark circles under her eyes, told her family she loved and missed them, but also raised her finger in warning as she complained about her continued captivity and the Israeli government's inaction to free her and the others.
His family, in a statement, called it a “shocking video of psychological terror.”
Goldberg-Polin’s American-born parents had mounted a high-profile international campaign to try to secure her release, and to much of the outside world she was a familiar face, a well-known symbol of the hostages’ fate. Perhaps because of that prominence, Hamas saved the release of her video for last.
In it, the young man, with a light beard and dressed in a dark red shirt, describes the harsh conditions of captivity.
“Since I arrived in Gaza, I have survived with little medical care, little food and little water,” she said. “I don’t remember the last time I saw the sun or had fresh air.”
But he expressed hope for his freedom, saying: “I think I'll be home soon.”
In April, another video of Goldberg-Polin had offered his family the first evidence that he was alive in captivity. Until then, they were not sure that he had survived the day of his abduction, when a grenade that the attackers threw into a bomb shelter where he had taken refuge with other people attending an outdoor music festival blew off his left arm below the elbow.
In that video, with his bandaged arm visible, he called on his parents to stay strong.
Most of the six, including Goldberg-Polin, were kidnapped during a nighttime desert party that was taking place when Hamas attackers breached the border fence and struck southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages. Gat, from Tel Aviv, was visiting his mother in a small farming community that was one of those attacked.
Israel's retaliatory strikes in Gaza have killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to the territory's health ministry, whose figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants. Nearly all of Gaza's population has been displaced, hunger and disease are rampant and entire neighborhoods have been bombed into rubble.
Thousands of people turned out for Goldberg-Polin's funeral in Jerusalem on Tuesday, where he was eulogized by speaker after speaker, including the country's president, Isaac Herzog, who asked for forgiveness on behalf of the State of Israel.
His mother, Rachel Goldberg, delivered a heartbreaking lament.
“My sweet boy,” she said. “At last, at last, at last, you are free.”
Staff writer Nabih Bulos contributed to this report from Washington.
