Don’t be grateful two hostages’ bodies were recovered. Be furious.

A supporter of Israel holds a picture of kidnapped Israeli hostages Gadi Haggai and Judith Weinstein Haggai during the “Flood Wall Street for Gaza” rally outside the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 26, 2023. Photo by Bryan R. Smith/AFP

Columnist Dan Perry June 5, 2025

Judi Weinstein Haggai and Gadi Haggai — gentle, artistic, and beloved members of Kibbutz Nir Oz — were murdered during Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and their bodies were dragged across the border into the tunnels of Gaza. Now, their bodies have been recovered; the Israeli government is calling the return of their remains “closure.”

But it is no such thing. The Haggais’ delayed funeral is an unmitigated tragedy, and yet another reminder that the nearly 60 hostages who remain in Gaza, many of whom are believed to be dead, have been abandoned by a shockingly cynical and inhumane Israeli leadership.

I heard the recording of Judi’s final moments several times today, as news of the recovery played out across Israel. I am generally a very composed person, and as a journalist who has reported from all over the world, I have witnessed every kind of horror. Yet, in the face of all that the Haggais’ story represents, I’m having trouble maintaining composure.

Israel’s moral obligation to use every mechanism possible to seek the return of the hostages — dead or alive — is not optional. It is the foundation of the national ethos: We do not abandon our own.

And yet, for nearly 19 months, that principle has been suspended, so Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can gain more time to figure out how to avoid consequences for the responsibility he bears for the tragedy of Oct. 7, and all that has followed.

When terrorists arrived in Nir Oz on Oct. 7, Judi and Gadi were setting out on a morning walk. Then, terrorists arrived on motorcycles with automatic weapons. Judi, shot in the hand and face, somehow managed to call emergency services. Her voice in the recording of that call, trembling but composed, describes the carnage: “We were shot,” she said. “It hurts. In the hand and face. There were many motorcycles with live fire.”

When told help was coming and that she should take cover, she replied, “I will try.”

But no help came.

The army did not reach the kibbutz until hours later, long after the worst of the terrorist rampage. This itself is shocking and inexplicable in a small country that maintains military bases just a few miles away from where Judi and Gadi were attacked. The inquiry commission that most Israelis expect has been delayed by the government’s strategy of pursuing a prolonged war and arguing that wartime is no time for recriminations.

Judi, a 70-year-old mother of four and grandmother of seven, was also a citizen of Canada and the United States. She had come to Israel from the U.S. and crafted a life rooted in empathy and education.

She taught English to children with special needs. She helped guide children with anxiety through meditation and mindfulness. She was a poet and a teacher, a puppeteer and a peacebuilder, known in her community for the haikus she posted each morning to Facebook — short verses that somehow captured both clarity and calm.

Her husband, Gadi, 72 at the time of his death, was a dual U.S.-Israel citizen, a jazz saxophonist and retired chef.

Together, they lived out the kibbutz ideals.

But the ideals they held for their country failed them. Initially, their families hoped the couple was alive; later, it became clear that they were likely murdered on Oct. 7, shortly after Judi’s call, and their bodies removed to Gaza as bargaining chips by the Palestinian Mujahideen Brigades — a relatively minor faction, aligned with Hamas, that also held and killed the Bibas children and their mother, Shiri.

Israel failed the couple in its inept response to the attack that killed them; in the inexcusable security failures that led to that attack taking place in the first place; and by refusing to take actions that would have helped their loved ones be able to mourn their deaths long ago.

Instead, as the war in Gaza dragged on, and the government appeared to deprioritize the cause of returning the hostages, those who loved Judi and Gadi were left in limbo — by an enemy without a heart, and a government without a soul.

That’s what I’m finding unbearable.

From the early days of this war, Israel had the option to strike a broad hostage deal. Hamas expressed willingness. The U.S., Qatar and Egypt were willing to broker.

But the Israeli government said no, instead prioritizing the fantasy of “total victory” over Hamas over the reality of human lives — those of the hostages who had survived Oct. 7, and those of the families of all the hostages, whom the government condemned to an endless cycle of anxious waiting.

There were many reasonable strategies Israel might have pursued to push Hamas aside, rather than seek total elimination of the group, including replacing its government in Gaza with that of a moderate Palestinian leadership backed by the massive support of the Arab world.

The government preferred to press on with its war, which has killed almost 900 Israeli soldiers since Oct. 7, and more than 50,000 Gazans, most of them civilians.

Oct. 7 was the worst intelligence and security failure in Israeli history, and it has been followed by the most heinous moral turpitude on the part of Israel’s government — a betrayal with its roots in the gradual abandonment of the hostages, about 20 of whom are believed to still be alive.

Every week, their families and supporters gather in the plaza outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. They hold vigils. They sell handmade goods from the shattered border kibbutzim. They invite the public to walk through a replica of the tunnels where their loved ones are held — narrow, dark, suffocating.

Family members deliver televised speeches begging for action. “Free them,” they say. “Bring them home.” And still they wait.

What does the recovery of Judi and Gadi’s bodies really represent? Some might say it proves that the system somehow works. Perhaps it proves that intelligence operations can succeed despite the government’s paralysis.

To me, it represents every way in which the system does not work; it is a reminder of how many failures led to this one belated act of resolution.

Judi Weinstein Haggai was not a soldier. She was a teacher, a woman of peace. What irony, what cruelty, that she would die in terror, in isolation, far from her family and everything she loved.

Shame on those who took so long to bring her and her husband home, choosing instead a path determined by the foulest of human impulses: vulgar pridefulness and vainglorious lust for power. Only when this cabal is gone can the healing finally begin.