More hostage releases were set to unfold over the following days, but the 2023 deal soon collapsed: Israel blamed Hamas for reneging on the terms of the agreement by attempting to release three corpses instead of three living female hostages. Members of Israel’s war cabinet argued in closed meetings that Israel should overlook the infraction and maintain the cease-fire, to save as many hostages as it could. “I thought that it was right to continue implementing the deal in any way possible,” Gadi Eisenkot, a retired general and member of the war cabinet, told the investigative news show “Uvda” last year. But Netanyahu and his broader security cabinet overruled them. That night, Israel resumed its bombing campaign in Gaza. “That was my first breaking point,” Einav told me. “I remember thinking, How do I peel myself off the floor?”
That winter, Einav met with Netanyahu for a second time since the attacks, along with relatives of other hostages. “We will do everything in our power to bring your loved ones home,” he told them again. When the families pressed him on what he meant by “everything,” Netanyahu waffled, according to Einav. “That’s when the thought started to nag at me that something bad was happening,” she told me. Einav disagreed with the few families at that meeting who called for preventing humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Einav knew from Ilana that what little food the hostages received came from the aid packages, and a blockade would also hurt everyday Palestinians, which she found morally wrong. But Netanyahu “seemed to back those families, after telling us something completely different,” she told me. “I realized that his war goals” — to eliminate Hamas and bring back the hostages — “were on a collision course.”
Gil Dickmann, whose cousin was among those captured from Kibbutz Be’eri, recalled paying attention to Einav at that meeting. “She had a no-bullshit attitude,” he said. She told me that she was the last to speak, and she informed Netanyahu that just as her vote gave him a mandate to lead, she would “take that mandate away.” In the months before that meeting, “We had a sense that we were being played, but we didn’t know by whom,” Dickmann said. “Then, as time passed, it became clear who the biggest player of all was. It became clear that the person responsible was Netanyahu.”
By then, several hostage families had begun to protest outside the I.D.F. headquarters near Begin Road. They hoped to intercept politicians and security chiefs as they drove into the compound. The first to do so was Avichai Brodutch, a pineapple grower from Kibbutz Kfar Aza whose wife and children were captured from their home. Days after the attacks, he set up a chair and a hand-drawn sign: “My family is in Gaza.” He was soon joined by Hadas Kalderon, whose two children and ex-husband, Ofer, were also held hostage by Hamas. Kalderon and a handful of other women formed a group called the Mothers’ Guard. Einav occasionally drove by with her daughters and offered her support, but she initially shied away from public action. As she put it, “I was still under the influence of the Bibi-ist cult.”
The Brodutch and Kalderon children were returned as part of the 2023 truce deal. Hadas and Avichai now devoted themselves to their children’s rehabilitation. So Ifat Kalderon, Ofer’s cousin, took over the Begin Road guard with a handful of other relatives and supporters. In February 2024, Einav, still anguished after the meeting with Netanyahu, decided to sleep outside the defense headquarters until Matan returned. Kalderon and the other women arranged a tent and blankets for her and offered their sympathies. Once the police ordered her to remove the tent, she joined the rest of the group at Begin.
