For more than 300 days, Adi and Yael Alexander have felt a bond with Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, parents of US-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. As parents of Edan Alexander, a 20-year-old US member of the Israel Defense Forces who's been held hostage in Gaza since Oct. 7, they shared the same sort of pain. No longer. Sunday's news that Goldberg-Polin was found dead means "two people who have become family to us have paid the ultimate price," the Alexanders write in an opinion piece in the New York Times, questioning whether they'll be next to pay that price as a "result of Hamas' cruelty and Israel's indifference."
The New Jersey couple refer to reports indicating Goldberg-Polin and five other hostages were executed by Hamas "not long before Israeli forces recovered their bodies" and accuse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of continuing to put hostages at risk. "Netanyahu is reportedly prioritizing keeping Israeli forces deployed on the Philadelphi Corridor, a strip of land on the border of Gaza and Egypt, a condition many say threatens the chance to bring home the remaining hostages," they write. "Our window to rescue the hostages is closing, and the prime minister is fastening the latch."
During a July meeting in Washington, Netanyahu "promised he would get a deal done to secure a ceasefire and the hostages' release," write the Alexanders. But there has been "delay after delay," and hope that their son and other hostages will be found alive is now "running out," the couple write. "Hersh's brutal killing has us racked with ... fear that our own son Edan will soon meet the same fate." Indeed, "his murder is becoming the more probable outcome, and we have no faith in Mr. Netanyahu's will to change that." Regardless, they call on the prime minister to end their "agony" and the "suffering" of so many others. Read the full piece here. (More Israel-Hamas war stories.)
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