Rachel Goldberg-Polin wears a tag today with the number 76 on her shirt. It marks 76 days since Hamas terrorists abducted her son.
“At all times, there’s an excruciating, agonizing despair that is just constant, and unlike regular trauma, which hits you out of nowhere and you have to figure out how do I start to turn over, stand up and walk forward, with all of us hostage families, this is a slow-motion trauma,” Goldberg-Polin said via Zoom from Jerusalem.
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Hersh Goldberg-Polin is 23, an American citizen whose family lives in South Florida. Terrorists abducted him from the Supernova Dance Festival. He and 28 others crammed into a bomb shelter, but the gunmen tossed grenades inside, and Hamas video captured the horrifying aftermath.
“So we have footage of Hersh getting on to this pickup truck and we see him turn to sit down and we see the stump where his left arm used to be and we see the white bone, jagged bone, sticking out, and that was 76 days ago, and we know nothing,” Goldberg-Polin said.
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She told us the powers that be are doing what they can to free the hostages.
“We have spoken to President Biden, he has been unbelievably supportive,” Goldberg-Polin said, also praising the efforts of Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “So on the American side, we have felt unbelievably blessed and grateful to be Americans.”
I asked her if she thought Israel’s military operation in Gaza was endangering the hostages.
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“Well, I think that this two-pronged goal is extremely tricky, right, to try to diminish Hamas’s military capability to replicate the atrocities of October 7th while at the same time trying to get 130 people back,” Goldberg-Polin said.
“Everybody needs humanitarian aid in Gaza, I would also say that the other innocent civilians in Gaza who need humanitarian aid are the hostages.”
She agrees with Blinken, who said yesterday that the world should be pressuring Hamas to surrender and release the hostages, which would immediately end the war Hamas started.
Many of those killed and kidnapped when Hamas broke the cease-fire which existed on Oct. 7 were peace activists. Hersh was part of an initiative using soccer to bring Israeli and Arab kids together.
“He was an active peace pursuer and since this has happened, I should mention that one of his close Palestinian friends, who is a Muslim, has come to us, has reached out to us, and that has meant the world to us,” Goldberg-Polin said.
