Cartoon by Paolo Lombardi

Suspended in hellish limbo, families of hostages declared dead fight to not be forsaken

By ARIELA KARMEL

Times of Israel: Ruby Chen speaks about his son, Itay Chen, in the present tense, though the Israeli government has officially declared the soldier dead.

Itay, who was 19 when he was kidnapped on October 7, 2023, has always been in a rush to experience everything life has to offer  — family, friends, singing, dancing, basketball, judo, Boy Scouts, and travel, Chen said. He described the family’s beloved “sandwich,” or middle child, as curious and energetic, living as if “he had no time.”

Itay has “a beautiful life” with dreams of the future, he said.

“He should have been out of the army by now. He should be planning for university or traveling with his girlfriend,” Chen added.

Instead, Itay is one of the 48 hostages still being held in Gaza, and one of the 26 who have been declared dead by Israeli authorities. In March 2024, the Israel Defense Forces announced that it had determined that Itay, an American-Israeli soldier serving in a tank, was no longer alive.

According to the IDF, he was killed on October 7, 2023, and abducted from the Gaza border following a battle with terrorists during the Hamas onslaught that saw some 1,200 people in southern Israel slaughtered and 251 abducted to the Strip.

“We were in limbo for five days,” Chen recalled. When the army did eventually contact the family, it was initially to say that Itay was missing. During that period of uncertainty, Itay’s family entered a “living hell,” one they have never left.

The Chens are tragically far from alone in the unique purgatory that they have been forced to endure for the last nearly two years — families that have been informed of the death of their loved ones whose remains are held in Gaza.

Other families have also continued to treat their loved ones as alive. Unlike those stuck in Kubler-Ross’s first stage of grief, the relatives’ disbelief is underpinned by a lack of physical evidence, allowing them to cling to hope, however scant, even as they long for closure.

At the same time, the uncertainty may not keep their son or daughter from being downgraded in the eyes of the government or the public, making families’ already impossible straits that much harder.

“I understand that the army wants to give some kind of certainty to families, but it’s not enough to say that [he’s dead] when there isn’t any additional ability to process that statement,” Chen said, noting that determinations were based on intelligence alone. “We feel like we’re in a suspended dimension. We’re not able to move forward.”

The Chen family has said that they will not hold a funeral for Itay or sit shiva, the traditional seven-day Jewish mourning period, until his body is returned from the Strip.

“When [my father-in-law] passed away last year, we saw him in the hospital, we said goodbye, and we had a funeral. You have those components that help you understand what it means to say goodbye,” Chen explained. “Here, there’s nothing. It’s suspended.”

The absence of physical evidence means that the family is left with uncertainty about his fate.

“You always have doubts,” said Chen. “Even though we were told how [the army] reached their conclusion, there’s always the thought that maybe a doctor showed up [to assist Itay], or somebody did something.”

The parents of Inbar Haiman — the last female hostage in Gaza — also don’t believe their daughter was murdered, according to Inbar’s aunt Hana Cohen.

“They think that she is alive somewhere,” Cohen said. “They can’t accept it. And as long as there’s no burial, there’s no coming full circle, no healing. They live in uncertainty.”

Cohen has taken up the banner for her family, advocating for the return of her niece almost daily in the Knesset, because Inbar’s parents and surviving brother are “broken” over her loss.

“It felt like the sky had fallen,” she said, describing the blow to the family after Inbar’s abduction on October 7. “We stopped living.”

Haiman, 27, was a visual communications student from Haifa and a well-known graffiti artist who went by the alias “Pink.” She was abducted from the Nova music festival, where she was volunteering >>>