Families of Israeli detainees in Gaza organized several demonstrations, demanding an agreement to release their families (Getty Images)
The Israeli Broadcasting Corporation announced that the families of captured soldiers detained in the Gaza Strip will meet today, Thursday, for the first time with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Noting that the families "will ask Netanyahu to answer a question about his plans to return their children."
Before the meeting, which the Israeli Broadcasting Authority did not mention its location or specify a date, Israeli media quoted the families of the detained soldiers as saying, “The security services and the state frightened us, and no minister contacted us, and we have remained silent since the start of the war at the request of the security services.”
The Jerusalem Post newspaper quoted the soldiers' families as saying in a statement, "Our sons have been abandoned and are being held as corpses by Hamas."
Anat Agrenest, the mother of soldier Matan detained in Gaza, told the Broadcasting Authority, “At the request of the state and the security forces, we remained silent until today. We were afraid. We understand that the number of days of silence is increasing, while the number of our children who will return home alive is decreasing.”
Agrinst added, “We demand today in the meeting that we put on the table publicly what is the price of abandoning our children, and what is the irreversible situation that the state will not be able to deal with.” She went on to say, “Answers such as we do everything... are no longer satisfactory.” .
It is noteworthy that the families of Israeli detainees had previously staged a sit-in several times in front of Netanyahu’s house and in the main streets of Tel Aviv to demand the completion of a prisoner exchange deal, after accusations against the Israeli Prime Minister of neglecting the detainees’ file and prolonging the war to protect his political future.
The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said last Saturday that about 600 families of 81 Israeli detainees in the Gaza Strip sent a letter to US President Joe Biden in which they expressed their frustration with Netanyahu, who they said was not doing enough to release their families.
The families of the detainees called on Biden and his administration to "intervene to help and guide Netanyahu towards what they called the 'correct course of action' that would ultimately lead to their families being returned to their homes."
Neither Israel nor the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) specified the number of captured Israeli soldiers in Gaza, while Israel holds more than 9,000 Palestinians in its prisons, and estimates the presence of about 134 Israeli prisoners in Gaza, while Hamas announced that 70 of them were killed in random Israeli raids during Its continued aggression against the Gaza Strip.
Source: Al Jazeera + agencies