Hostages’ Release Carries Emotional Impact in Israel
Israel’s former Deputy Consul General in Atlanta reacts to the recent hostage returns from Gaza.

There was a sense of relief and even what Maya Fidelman describes as joy when she heard the latest news about the latest release of hostages in Israel. Fidelman, who now works for an international consulting firm in Tel Aviv, was with the Israel Consulate in Atlanta from 2017 to 2020 as deputy consul general. She was a political adviser as well, having served previously in Jerusalem in Israel’s Foreign Ministry. She returned to Atlanta recently on a personal visit.
For Fidelman, the release of the latest group of four hostages on Saturday, Jan. 25, brought a renewed sense of optimism and hope for the future.

“I am more than happy to see the hostages coming home. We waited over more than 15 months for this, and it is wonderful to see them walking and smiling. But I’m sure they went through so much before they were released. Nobody knows what scars they are going to carry for the rest of their lives.”
The Saturday release brought to seven the number of Israel’s hostages that have been released since Sunday, Jan. 19, when the first phase of a three-step ceasefire plan went into effect in Gaza.

Under the agreement, 30 Palestinians will be released in the coming weeks for each civilian hostage and 50 for each soldier. A total of 33 hostages held by Hamas will be released during the first period of the truce.
The latest release of hostages has taken place 471 days since the brutal attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, that led to the capture of more than 200 hostages. It’s believed that perhaps 87 of them are still alive somewhere in Gaza.
The attack and the subsequent war, Fidelman says, has taken its toll on her and her family. A 25- year-old cousin and her fiancé were survivors of the October attack on the Nova Music Festival at Re’em near the border with Gaza.
They survived for 15 hours in hiding, while Hamas terrorists roamed freely, killing many who tried to escape from the festival, including a couple who were close friends who took the wrong road out of the music site. Only hours before, the two couples had been happily enjoying the music and the infectious happiness of the gathering.
Fidelman describes their deaths on Oct. 7 as “a second Holocaust.”
“The most frightening part of this is that the second Holocaust was not in some far-off place, it was in the state of Israel. It was a Holocaust in our country, our own land and all in a single day.”
A total of 364 died at the festival near Re’em and nearly 800 others died in the 21 communities that were attacked. One of them was a good friend who had studied together with Fidelman, when both were students in the political science program at Tel Aviv University. His body was recovered only a few weeks ago.
Then, last month another cousin, serving with an elite unite of the IDF, was killed in combat in Gaza. Fidelman said he died believing he was fighting for a lasting peace. Her experience she says is not that unusual for the small, closely-knit nation that is Israel today.

“Everything that has happened is personal, in a way. Everybody knows someone who knows someone who has been killed or wounded in these many months. We are a small country with a lot of uncertainty about the future. There is a lot of anger that this war has gone on too long and that decision makers have not done enough about the kidnappings.”
It is widely believed that the agreement that was finally reached this month was essentially the one that President Joe Biden had proposed in May of last year and had been endorsed by the UN Security Council. Foot dragging by both Hamas and Israel’s government was said to have resulted in repeated delays that was only reached just before the new administration took office this month. One report described the ceasefire as the result of a “remarkable” effort by both the old administration and the new one.
It came, as Fidelman describes it, at a time when a sense of political and psychological fatigue was settling in on many of her neighbors in the community outside Tel Aviv where she lives.
“There is a sense of fatigue, but it’s held in check by the fear of survival, The fear of losing that sense of surviving is actually stronger, and it doesn’t let us feel as much of the fatigue that we are experiencing. We all have an inner drive to keep going. not to show that we are too much of the strain that all of this has brought us.”
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