Sagui Dekel-Chen, an Israeli-American hostage recently released from Hamas custody, reportedly encouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit his devastated kibbutz near the Gaza border, offering to escort him there himself when the two spoke earlier this week.

Dekel-Chen was freed from captivity on February 15, over 16 months after he was kidnapped from Nir Oz.

The small kibbutz was among the hardest hit in the October 7 onslaught, with 117 of the community’s approximately 400 residents either kidnapped or murdered during the Hamas-led massacre. Despite the widespread carnage, most government politicians, including Netanyahu, have stayed away from Nir Oz, which has traditionally been viewed as a dovish bastion.

The Prime Minister’s Office said Sunday that Netanyahu had spoken to Dekel-Chen and Ohad Ben Ami, a hostage released a week before Dekel-Chen. The prime minister told them that Israel needed to apply great pressure on Hamas to secure their release, according to the PMO.

“I understand that you haven’t visited Nir Oz,” Dekel-Chen said to Netanyahu, according to a purported transcript of the call published by Channel 12 news on Monday. “I’m inviting you, with a personal invitation. We will put politics aside and I will take you, without any politics — just you and me on the paths of Nir Oz.”

The prime minister has not visited Nir Oz over the past 16 months, despite appeals for him to do so from the residents of the tight-knit community.

“Right now, everything is blossoming, but I will show you blood-soaked places and burnt homes,” he said, according to the report.

Dekel-Chen told Netanyahu that he cannot “eat, drink, shower, or play with my daughters while there are hostages whom I left behind, some of them my friends, dead and alive.”

“I will not leave anyone there,” he added.

Netanyahu, in response, told him that he “will not leave anyone behind,” and stressed that “we are working extremely hard to return everyone.”

Dekel-Chen was shot in the shoulder and abducted while battling invading terrorists with the kibbutz security team on October 7. He was held in a Gaza hospital for the first weeks of his captivity and was “tortured during interrogations” by his captors, Channel 12 reported.

The Israeli-American was cut off from the outside world, with no access to any media or information, and didn’t know what had become of his family, including his wife, who had been seven months pregnant at the time.

Dekel-Chen did not find out until his return about the vast protest movement in Israel calling for the release of hostages. He told the prime minister that the footage from the demonstrations, “of my father crying on the stage, of my wife and daughters standing at protests and crying,” have been hard for him to take in.

“We come from different viewpoints, but I have always believed, even in captivity, that the considerations in Israel are made professionally,” Dekel-Chen said.

He told Netanyahu that “the real victory will be returning love to the streets, and that will only happen with the return of the hostages.”

Most of Netanyahu’s political allies have followed the prime minister’s lead, with few having visited Nir Oz since the October 7 massacre. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Settlement Minister Orit Strock made a rare visit a few weeks ago, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, who is no longer part of the government, visited a few weeks after October 7.

Out of approximately 400 buildings in the kibbutz, only six houses were spared. The rest were damaged by fire or were the scene of horrific violence and abductions.

The October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre saw terrorists kill some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnap 251.

Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are holding 63 hostages, including 62 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7. They include the bodies of at least 36 confirmed dead by the IDF.

Hamas has so far released 30 hostages — 20 Israeli civilians, five soldiers, and five Thai nationals; and the bodies of four slain Israeli captives — Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, and Oded Lifshitz — during a ceasefire that began in January. The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that in the early weeks of the war.

Eight hostages have been rescued from captivity by troops alive, and the bodies of 41 have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors and the body of a soldier who was killed in 2014.

The body of another soldier killed in 2014, Lt. Hadar Goldin, is still being held by Hamas and is counted among the 63 hostages.

Tal Schneider contributed to this report.