‘A few nights ago I heard her calling for me,’ says medical secretary Ira Ariev. ‘I woke up in such a panic, because I really heard her voice.’
The mother-of-two was talking about her youngest daughter, Karina, and while she undoubtedly recognised her distinctive voice she knew her girl was not in the room.
Because the 20-year-old was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and is still in Gaza today, almost certainly inside one of its many squalid, cramped tunnels dozens of feet underground.
It is hard to imagine how a mother could get through just one day knowing her daughter is held by monsters who gleefully broadcast the rape and slaughter of 1,200 men, women and children that day.
But for Ira, she has had to endure this nightmare for a year, every waking hour of which has been spent imagining what these men, alone with her child, are capable of.
Even in her sleep she hears Karina, she tells The Mail on Sunday from her apartment in Jerusalem. ‘It was hard,’ she says of the dream in which her daughter called out, ‘because this gives me confirmation that she’s there, in a bad place.’
Karina was taken alongside Naama Levy, Daniela Gilboa, Liri Albag, and Agam Berger from the Nahal Oz base on the Gaza border where they were completing compulsory national service as unarmed observers.
They are the youngest women still held hostage in Gaza, each turning 19 or 20 this year without those they love around them. Instead, they are under the constant gaze of Hamas guards.
No one knows whether they are being held together or alone, though it is believed they could be in the tunnels that other hostages have been held in, so narrow that the spines of some who were executed by Hamas last month were found to be misshapen and bent.
But as these five young hostages endure unimaginable torment in captivity, their mothers are determined that they should know one thing – that their mums are still fighting for them and will not stop until they are home.
In extraordinarily powerful interviews today, the mothers detail how their families have flown around the world on this mission, meeting presidents, prime ministers and even the Pope.
They tell of their own insufferable battle just to get through each day, as they question why, after a year of empty promises, the international community has so utterly failed them. And they ask every parent reading this to not let their leaders forget about the hostages, to speak for these young women whose voices have been so cruelly snatched.
The girls were taken after seeing their friends shot dead in front of them. On that same day the bloodied, battered faces of Karina, Liri, Daniela, Agam and Naama were filmed by the terrorists. Videos uploaded on to the social media site Telegram show them leering over the girls, who were lined up against a wall, their hands bound. Some terrorists were screaming that their new captives were ‘vile dogs’, others called them ‘beautiful’ and ‘Sabaya’ – an ancient Islamic term that can mean female sex slave.
Later, footage of Naama limping in blood-soaked pyjamas as she is dragged by her hair and thrown into a Jeep at gunpoint went viral, but the earlier images were not picked up by the media. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF), however, monitored these channels, and this awful footage was passed to the hostages’ families to let them know that their daughters were not dead. Small comfort.
As Israel reeled from the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, for these desperate parents to find out their daughters were now being held by such barbarians was too much to bear.
‘I was paralysed for about six weeks, maybe longer,’ says Meirav Berger, 49, mother of Agam, 20.
‘I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t understand what was happening, couldn’t leave the house, couldn’t communicate with anyone.’
For the fiercely religious mother-of-four, an industrial engineer who lives with her engineer husband Shlomi, 52, in Holon, it was a visit by a rabbi that awoke in her what she now calls her ‘holy mission’.
‘He asked me what I thought was hardest for Agam at that moment, and the answer was clear – that she was worried about me, about us,’ she said. ‘He then said a formative sentence that moved us to action. He said: ‘Don’t give her a reason. Don’t give her a reason to worry…’
‘And that’s the moment I started to embark on my special journey to bring Agam back.’
Now, every evening she goes to talk at events in Israel to fight for the hostages, refusing to leave the country in case her daughter is freed. In the meantime, she sends her family around the world to campaign. Relatives have met the Pope, spoken with diplomats in Washington DC and given testimony in Parliament in London.
None of this comes easily to Agam’s father, Shlomi. He is determined to do everything for his daughter, and has toured America and Europe, but he is not someone who would choose the spotlight, and at times the pain appears too much to bear. ‘I don’t think he ever prepared for such a role,’ said Meirav. ‘He’s doing what he can. But he is in a state of complete helplessness, almost as chained and bound as Agam.’
Naama’s mother, Ayelet Levy-Shachar, 51, a doctor from Ra’anana, near Tel Aviv, also struggled with the publicity at first. But as she spoke she drew strength from her daughter, a young, aspiring diplomat who had volunteered with Palestinians to build bridges before she was taken captive.
‘I feel that I have become, over these past months, more like Naama,’ says the mother-of-four, who has since held court with Tony Blair, ex-French President Nicolas Sarkozy and top UN executives.
‘Naama, she’s more of a public speaker than I am. Now, when I speak in public or give an interview or speak with world leaders, I find that I’m doing that with her voice. My normal me, before October 7, is very shy, timid and intimidated by figures of power. So that has changed for me, and I’ve become more Naama.’ Orly Gilboa, 49, has spoken movingly in the circles of power, nearly reducing to tears the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Foreign Secretary David Cameron in London in January.
But the first days after Daniela was taken were surreal.
The banker, who lives in the city of Petah Tikva in central Israel with her sports therapist husband Ran, 53, and their younger daughter Noam, 15, remembers her first encounter with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu on the mission to get her 20-year-old daughter back.
‘I was sitting in this big room, the big table, and just looking around me and saying to myself, ‘What the f*** am I’m doing here?’
‘You know, meeting the Prime Minister. Who am I? I just didn’t know what I was doing there. It was like in the middle of a dream – a very bad dream.’
Such worries have long gone. ‘I don’t know if it’s actually a sad thing to say,’ she explains, ‘but we have met [Netanyahu] so many times that now he just seems like one more person.’
The pressure from the families and from world leaders has been, to some extent, successful – it forced a brief ceasefire for hostage release in November, for instance. But agonisingly these brave women had to watch on as other more fortunate families were reunited with the 105 captives who were freed.
‘It’s becoming more and more difficult,’ says Shira Albag, 52, the mother of 19-year-old Liri who lives in Yarhiv with husband Eli, 54, a businessman, and their three other children.
‘This is our daily job. But if we don’t have any meetings, I’m just staying home in bed, crying.
‘It’s difficult to understand that our girls – that Liri – have been there for one year.’
Such was their anguish in January that the mothers decided to release to the Mail those awful Hamas images of the daughters after they had been captured.
The story went around the world, was shown at the UN and The Hague and taken to No 10 and Washington, where copies hang in the offices of key senators. ‘It was the first time people could see the faces of these young girls who had witnessed death in front of their eyes,’ Orly said. ‘It made a change in decision-makers’ minds.’
But there was no release this time. Just weeks later, Hamas paraded Orly’s daughter on camera alongside Karina and fellow captive Doron Steinbrecher, 30, in a sadistic hostage video.
‘The blood went from my body,
I couldn’t stand,’ says Orly. ‘I didn’t realise what she was saying because I was crying too much.’
‘I felt like I couldn’t breathe,’ said Karina’s mother Ira. ‘I saw in her eyes a spark. I knew that she was very, very worried about us. She asked us to be strong for her, to fight for her.’
Since then there has been little word of the girls. While the IDF has managed to rescue six hostages, many more have been killed. Only half of the 101 who remain in Gaza are believed to be alive.
The toll this has taken on the mothers is unimaginable. In August, on a trip to the border where families called out to their loved ones by loudspeaker, Shira was overcome and tried to run into Gaza. ‘I felt like I could almost touch Liri – she was so close,’ she says. ‘I just felt that maybe, just maybe, I could come and take her by myself.’
Then, on September 1, came the darkest day since October 7. Hamas executed six hostages: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Carmel Gat, 40, Alexander Lobanov, 33, Almog Sarusi, 27, and Ori Danino, 25.
When Eden’s body was recovered, it weighed just five and a half stone. Her spine was bent from cowering in the cramped tunnel 65ft underground. The hostages had been forced to go to the toilet in bottles. ‘It has shattered any illusion that Liri is in a nice place,’ Shira said. ‘Now, from that day, I cannot sleep. Every night I’m thinking of them.
‘I know which child they took on October 7, but I don’t know what child I am going to get back after one year. I know Liri is a strong girl. But now, in my heart, I feel she has become weak and I don’t know how to help her get stronger.’
A sense of hopelessness is growing. ‘We screamed, we cried, we pleaded,’ says Ira. ‘We did everything we could, but nothing seems to be working. I’m exhausted. There are days when I don’t even leave my room. I just stay in bed, not going out. Because I have no energy left. You don’t aspire to anything; you don’t dream of anything. The only thing is that we want her home. Alive.’
With fears now mounting of regional war, the hostages risk being forgotten. Ira holds little hope. ‘What I feel is that the hostages are not really the top priority,’ she says. ‘Because if it truly was, they would already be home.’
Each day the mothers try to stay close to their daughters in any way they can. Orly reads psalms to Daniela but admits ‘it’s not a long conversation, because I’m just crying. I shut down’.
Shira writes to her daughter in a notebook every day, but even this has become a reminder of how long they have been apart. ‘We didn’t think it will take a year, and now I’m on a second notebook,’ she says.
As summer turns to winter once more, they cannot escape how long their daughters have been gone. ‘You realise how much time has passed,’ says Ira.
‘How terrible it is and how powerless you are, despite how much we have done – everything we could.’
Ayelet agrees. ‘I feel like I want to resist the change of the seasons.’ ‘Same here,’ says Shira. ‘Everyone is together in the winter, sitting together, and we cannot. It is the hardest time of the year.’
The mothers are also enraged. ‘Yes, I’m angry,’ says Orly. ‘Our daughters are waiting every minute for us to take them out of this nightmare. I hope that the one-year mark wakes up the international community. I hope they do more.’
None of the mothers have plans for tomorrow, other than to ‘survive it’. But as they mark the sombre anniversary, they ask parents to feel their pain and join their fight.
‘I want every mother in the world to put yourselves in our position,’ says Shira. ‘Not knowing how their child is for a month, for just 24 hours even. Then to understand they are with murderers.
‘Put yourselves in our position. Then perhaps you will understand what we want you to do.’