Until the last moment, Talik Gvili, the mother of Ran Gvili, refused to think of her son, the final hostage in Gaza, as definitely dead.

The counterterror police officer had jumped on his motorcycle on October 7, 2023, with a broken shoulder, and went off to fight marauding Hamas terrorists. His family did not hear from him again.

The intelligence was spotty, but the family held on to broken bits of information: ostensible photos of Ran arriving unconscious at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City; unconfirmed reports that he had been seen in the city’s Zeitoun neighborhood on the back of a motorcycle.

Even when Israel confirmed, a few months after the attack, that the officer had died in battle, his family refused to give up hope. Parents Itzik and Talik (a longtime nickname for Tali), as well as their other children, Omri and Shira, continued to speak of Ran in the present tense.

“It’s a 0.0001 chance [that he’s alive], that’s what my son [Omri] says,” Talik said to this reporter, as we sat in her living room last week. “It’s easier to speak of him as if he’s alive, for sure, because we don’t want to lose that tiny bit of hope.”

The interview with Talik was published in The Times of Israel on Monday, less than an hour before the IDF announced that Ran’s body had finally been found in a Gaza cemetery, following a search based on specific new intelligence.

As part of its campaign for his return, the family had even........

© The Times of Israel