Horrifying footage surfaced Tuesday showing American-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin looking dazed and shocked just moments after Hamas terrorists blew off his arm.
The bone from Hersh’s mangled left limb was visibly protruding when he pulled himself into the bed of a truck under gunpoint by Hamas terrorists shortly after they opened fire at the Tribe of Nova music festival in the southern Negev on the morning of Oct. 7, according to video released by CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Hersh’s arm was blown off when the terrorists lobbed a grenade into a shelter that the festival-goer was taking refuge in during the carnage.
The disturbing footage – which Cooper’s team filmed off the phone of an Israeli soldier who later arrived at the scene – showed several Hamas fighters dragging three other men into the truck with Hersh before driving back into Gaza.
Cooper said he realized he had possible footage of Hersh’s capture while doing a live remote interview with the 23-year-old’s parents, Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, last week.
He later sent the parents the footage, and they confirmed that the bleeding, stunned-looking young man was indeed their missing son.
“As horrible as it is as a parent to your kid under gunpoint, with one arm … the composure with which he’s walking on his own legs, pulling himself with his one weak hand onto the truck, gave me a real dose of strength,” Polin told Cooper.
Goldberg said of her son’s calmness, “I think it was from shock.”
The parents said they are determined to bring their son home, two weeks after he and around 200 other hostages were taken captive by Hamas.
They flew from Israel to Manhattan to go to the United Nations on Tuesday to lobby for action for their son and the other captives.
“I personally feel like we have to keep running to the end of the Earth to save him,” Goldberg told Cooper last week. “And we have to try to go believing that somehow he got treatment and … he’s alive and he’s there.”
But the parents – who lived in California and then Connecticut before moving their family to Israel more than 10 years ago – acknowledged there are moments when it is hard to keep hoping for a good outcome.
“There are moments in this universe that we now live in when you say, ‘Maybe he died on the truck, maybe he bled out on that truck, maybe he died yesterday, maybe he died five minutes ago,’ ” Goldberg said.
Goldberg and Polin took Cooper during their interview to Hersh’s bedroom – which is reinforced with a steel door because it is also their home’s bomb shelter.
On Friday, during the Shabbat ritual, Goldberg stood on the family’s porch and yelled out the blessing that she would typically say over her son’s head, she recalled.
“I was screaming the blessing to him with my hands up,” she said tearfully.
In the emotional interview, the pair also paid tribute to Hersh’s friend, Aner Shapira, who died defending Hersh and about 27 others hiding in the bomb shelter when Hamas descended.
“All the eyewitnesses said there were 11 grenades thrown [into the shelter], and Aner threw out eight,” Goldberg explained.
Shapira’s body was later found with a grenade still in his hand, she said.
“He’s the real hero,” Goldberg said.
As the war between Israel and Hamas rages on, Hersh’s family is calling on international leaders to advocate for their son and other injured hostages.
“The support is there, the empathy is there from the US. But we want more, we want action,” Polin told Cooper.
“There are hostages from somewhere around 30 countries. Why have we not yet seen … global leaders screaming to get the wounded help?”
Goldberg was recently on a 90-minute call between the impacted American families and President Joe Biden.
“It was a coming-together of people who know what pain is,” she said.
Biden, 80, lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car accident in 1972. His son, Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015.
“There’s no playbook for this,” Goldberg added of the family’s daily life as they wait for more news on Hersh’s condition.
“We’re on the head of a pin, and every direction you fall is a bad direction. So we’re just trying to balance on the head of the pin.”
Hersh’s parents described him as “a curious kid” with a passion for travel that started at a young age.
At the time that he was taken hostage, Hersh was counting down to a much-anticipated trip to India set for Dec. 27.
Now, Goldberg said, she and the rest of Hersh’s family are staying hopeful that he will come back to them, “And he will go on that trip, with one hand.”