Of the 50 Israelis, alive and deceased, held hostage in the Gaza Strip, only one has been there more than 664 days — the period since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

On August 1, the family of soldier Hadar Goldin will mark exactly 11 years since he was killed and taken captive by Hamas operatives.

“I can’t grasp it,” his mother Leah Goldin told The Times of Israel in a recent interview. “It’s more than a decade, it’s an entire generation.”

On August 1, 2014, Hadar, a 23-year-old officer in the Givati Brigade, was killed when Hamas gunmen opened fire on a group of soldiers in southern Gaza, hours into a humanitarian ceasefire brokered by the UN and US during the 2014 war. Hamas operatives managed to grab his body and drag it into a tunnel.

A day later, the Israel Defense Forces announced that Goldin had been killed in combat before being abducted, posthumously promoting him to the rank of lieutenant.

Since that tragic day, Leah Goldin, a software engineer by profession, has become a voluble, fierce advocate for her son. She, her husband Simha Goldin, and their three surviving children, including Hadar’s twin brother Tzur, have continued moving forward with their lives.

Weeks before Goldin’s remains were abducted, Hamas fighters seized the body of Oron Shaul, who was killed alongside six other soldiers when their armored personnel carrier was hit by rocket-propelled grenades in northern Gaza.

For years their fates were tied together, alongside those of Averu Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, two Israelis apparently suffering mental distress who entered Gaza of their own volition in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and then were held by Hamas.

On October 7, 2023, the number of abducted Israelis in Gaza swelled as Hamas terrorists rampaged through Israeli communities, army bases and a music festival, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 251.

Suddenly the small cadre of hostages’ families, of which the Goldins were often the most vocal, became a cacophonous nationwide society.

In the nearly 22 months since the attack, 202 of those kidnapped on October 7 have been brought back, not all of them alive. Shaul, Mengistu and al-Sayed have also returned — the soldier’s body recovered by troops in January, and the two other released as part of a ceasefire deal weeks later.

Before the October 7 invasion and massacre, few in Israel would have believed the campaign of killings and mass abductions possible. But for the Goldins, the idea that hundreds could be taken hostage was not much of a shock.

“It hurts to........

© The Times of Israel