The devastating death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin

There was a faint hope that, despite everything, he might actually return home. This hope was fuelled by a series of unexpected images.

Not long after Hersh Goldberg-Polin's kidnapping on October 7, CNN came across a video of terrorists loading the 24-year-old, who was born in Berkeley and grew up in Jerusalem, into a pickup truck. The stump of one of his arms was wrapped in a tourniquet because a grenade had blown the rest away. It was a sign of life.

Read: “How much can this child endure?”

In April, at the start of Passover, Hamas released a propaganda video. Then there was no doubt about his full-blooded existence. As he spoke into his captors' camera, he rested the rest of his arm in his lap. His once wavy locks were cropped short. It was impossible to separate his words from those forced upon him by the weapon. But at the very end of the clip, he turned to his mother and sister: “I know you are doing everything you can to bring me home.”

As Shabbat rolled in last Friday night and his parents turned off their phones for the day of rest, one could imagine that Goldberg-Polin might finally be waking up from the ultimate parental nightmare. Negotiations to end the war and release the hostages are dragging on, despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's apparent determination to delay a deal.

But when Goldberg-Polin's family returned to their devices last night, they learned that the Israel Defense Forces had found six recently murdered bodies in a tunnel in Gaza. Just over a week after his parents gave an eloquent speech at the Democratic National Convention while the tearful crowd chanted “Bring them home,” they learned that their son was one of the bodies.

A disaster is like a bulldozer flattening the victims. Horror sucks every last detail out of the biography. But Hersh's parents, Rachel and Jon, insisted that the world should know their son as a full human being. That's how they wanted Hersh to be remembered at worst – and at best, they believed empathy could exist, even hundreds of feet underground in the tunnels that form Hamas's territory.

They described how Hersh wanted to hug the globe. He loved geography and, even before he reached puberty, he hoarded maps and atlases in his room. His father hoped that he would become a journalist one day. National Geographicbecause the diversity of the planet and the wonders of foreign cultures ignited Hersh's spirit. He loved adventure. Shortly before Hamas kidnapped him, Hersh had traveled around Europe, attending music festivals, bathing in rivers and making friends with strangers.

Emigrating to Israel at the age of seven was a challenge for him. He struggled to learn Hebrew and was desperate to have friends. But as his mother watched him grow up, she marveled at his lightheartedness and how he felt completely at home in the world.

After his kidnapping, Hersh became the most famous hostage in the United States. His American parents were not afraid to repeatedly confront their pain in conversations with any reporter or politician who agreed to meet with them. Like mythological figures, they were doomed to relive their worst day – and doomed to experience it with never-fading clarity. And despite their pain, they also eloquently expressed their compassion for the suffering of their Palestinian parents.

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As the war winds down, Hersh's assassination will haunt Israeli dreams – and Netanyahu's legacy. Morally, the blame lies squarely with Hersh's depraved executioners. But Netanyahu's behavior was grotesque when the opportunity to secure his release presented itself.

More than once this summer, the Biden administration brought Hamas and Israel within reach of an agreement to release the hostages and end the war. On some of those occasions, Hamas has thrown obstacles in the way and derailed the talks. Yet at moments when Hamas seemed inclined to agree, Netanyahu destroyed the possibility of an agreement by insisting on new terms. Frustrated by the prime minister's tactics, the Americans leaked documentary evidence of his intransigence. The New York Times.

Equally damning, Netanyahu's own defense minister has blamed him for the failure of a deal. In a cabinet meeting last week, Yoav Gallant accused him of insisting on new terms that Hamas would never tolerate – and that virtually guaranteed that the hostages in Gaza would remain in danger. Gallant reportedly rebuked him, saying: “There are people living there.”

Netanyahu refuses to Yes because he does not want to face the consequences of a deal that far-right members of his cabinet are determined to reject. He is falling into patterns of behavior he has had all his life: hesitation in the face of a difficult decision, exaggerated subservience to fanatical political bedfellows, putting his own survival above all else. And now a beautiful young man and five other hostages will return from Gaza in sacks – lives cruelly cut short when they could have been saved.