Hundreds gathered Sunday in New York’s Central Park for a rally urging a continuation of the Gaza war hostage release-ceasefire deal until all captives have been returned to Israel.
Participants held Israeli flags and some American flags and wore yellow, representing the hostages’ plight, and orange, representing children Ariel and Kfir Bibas, redheaded brothers who were murdered in captivity and whose remains were finally returned to Israel on Thursday.
It came as the complex, three-phase deal’s fate remained uncertain, given mutual accusations of violations, a delay in completing the first stage, and a missed deadline for further negations on the second stage.
The rally, organized by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, in coordination with local Jewish groups, included an address by freed hostage Ilana Gritzewsky, who was released in November 2023, during a previous deal, after 55 days of captivity.
Her boyfriend, Matan Zangauker, is still held captive.
The forum is the main non-government organization representing many families of hostages.
Gal Gilboa-Dalal and Ilay David also spoke, a day after their respective brothers, Guy and Eviatar, appeared in a Hamas propaganda clip, in which they were seen watching the release of other Israeli hostages while they were kept in captivity.
Democrat Congressman Ritchie Torres, who represents New York’s 15th congressional district, addressed the event, telling the crowd that people often ask him why he so often speaks up for the hostages and against antisemitism.
“The question is not why I have chosen to stand up and speak out. It is why so many others have chosen to stand by and remain silent,” he said to cheers from the crowd.
The forum has held weekly rallies in Central Park for more than a year.
The three-stage ceasefire agreement, reached last month, halted some 15 months of fighting triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, when terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
The deal requires the terror group to release all its hostages, Israel to release thousands of Palestinian security prisoners — including hundreds serving life sentences — and a halt to fighting in the Strip, followed by negotiations for a “sustainable calm” and IDF withdrawal from the enclave.
The six-week first phase of the deal is slated to conclude on March 1, and the last group of living hostages slated for release in the stage were freed on Saturday.
The deal allows for the extension of the first phase so long as the sides are engaged in negotiations regarding the terms of the second phase. But Israel has stalled on starting those negotiations, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners threatening to collapse the government if the war does not resume.
Israel also decided to hold off on releasing over 600 Palestinian security prisoners, whom it was expected to release on Saturday, citing what it said were various Hamas violations, including the public parades it forces hostages to participate in during handovers, and the manner of its return of the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two young children, Ariel and Kfir.
The coffins of all three Bibases were put on public display, but Israeli officials discovered the casket that was supposed to contain Shiri’s remains contained those of an unidentified woman instead. Hamas claimed a mix-up and returned Shiri’s body the next day. Israel has determined that all three were murdered in captivity. The incident further drained patience in Israel and the US, which has backed Jerusalem in delaying the release of the Palestinian prisoners.
Hamas official Mahmoud Mardawi said in a Sunday statement that the group will hold off on further negotiations until Israel frees the 602 Palestinian prisoners it was supposed to release on Saturday.
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are still holding 63 hostages, including 62 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023. 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 the 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.