Schrödinger’s Trauma

"Our hearts are captive in Gaza"

Source: photo © Pamela Paresky 2025

The first sign that Israeli hostage Yarden Bibas was alive in Gaza came when Hamas released a video taken on November 30, 2023. On that day, a Hamas terrorist informed hostage Nili Margolit, from Kibbutz Nir Oz, the same ravaged community from which Bibas and 70 others were kidnapped, that she was going home. But first, she told me, the terrorist instructed her to tell Bibas that his wife and children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. After learning of their deaths, Bibas was to perform in a propaganda video. If he didn’t, the terrorist warned Margolit, she would not be released.

At the time, they couldn’t know what was true. But Margolit told me she was afraid Bibas would not survive if he thought Shiri and the boys were dead. Courageously, she refused to participate in his psychological torture. In the end, a terrorist told Bibas that his wife and children had been killed (which was true) by an Israeli airstrike (which was a lie). Then, the terrorist filmed the sobbing Bibas blaming Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister. As soon as the video was captured, Margolit was released. She had spent 50 days in the tunnel.

For more than a year after she was freed, until Hamas paraded Bibas in front of a jeering crowd in Gaza, his family in Israel didn’t know whether he was alive, let alone whether he would ever come home.

Shortly after his release on February 1, 2025, Bibas buried his wife and children. After their bodies were forensically examined, he gave authorities permission to reveal that the three had been strangled to death in November 2023—their bodies mangled after their murders to mimic injuries from falling rubble.

The Bibas family’s horrific story is widely known. But there are less well known stories of families waiting for loved ones they might never see again, some having never seen signs of life. Other families buried charred bits of loved ones and will never know what happened when they died.

Twenty-five living hostages recently returned to Israel, bringing news that some of the roughly 60 remaining hostages were alive. But for many of the young men still held in Gaza, “It’s as if they have disappeared.” Moshe Or, brother of Avinatan Or, whose kidnapping was filmed by terrorists in the viral video of his girlfriend, Noa Argamani's abduction, told an Israeli reporter that this is “the most terrifying part—there are no details, no updates. Just silence.”

Across Israel, people have been trapped in a version of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, holding in mind both the possibility that hostages are alive and that they are dead. Now that phase one of the ceasefire is over, they face the uncertainty of the remaining hostages' fates.

Ambiguous Loss

Psychotherapist Galit Itzhaki Draizin explained, when we recently met in Tel Aviv, that ambiguous loss can be experienced in situations of “presence-absence,” circumstances in which someone is in some way ‘‘there but not there.’’ When someone has severe dementia, for instance, he or she can be physically present but psychologically absent. When someone has been kidnapped, on the other hand, he or she can be physically absent but psychologically present. As a poignant example, every week on Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath), the family of former hostage Eliya Cohen set a place for him at their table, for 72 weeks, until he was returned.

Ambiguous loss can result in feeling hopeless and depressed along with feelings of guilt, anxiety, and immobilization. Being in an irresolvable situation can interfere with cognition, coping skills, and stress management. It can also create an inability to properly grieve. Families of hostages have described being unable to work, to sleep, or to function with any semblance of normalcy.

Collective ambiguous loss occurs when a large-scale incident involves uncertainty, confusion, or lack of clarity about the status of victims, such as in a mass terror attack or a mass hostage-taking event. After 9/11, therapists with expertise in ambiguous loss helped families of the missing. Since October 7, 2023, therapists across Israel are being trained in ambiguous loss.

From Physical Absence to Psychological Absence

Eli Sharabi immediately before his release 2/8/25

Source: Screengrab from Hamas terrorist media

Former hostage Eli Sharabi was recently interviewed on Israeli TV. On October 7, he was surrounded by terrorists in his home. “I yelled to my daughters, ‘I will come back!’” he said. “And from that moment, I went into survival mode. No matter what happens to me now, no matter what they do to me,” he thought, “I’m coming back.”

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Sharabi is one of the three released hostages whose shockingly emaciated and fragile appearance at a grotesque Hamas release “ceremony” led to comparisons with holocaust survivors. He described in the interview some of the torture and starvation he suffered at the hands of Hamas. That promise to his family motivated him to stay alive for almost 500 days of terror and deprivation. What he didn’t know until he was returned to Israel was that they had been murdered on the day he was kidnapped until he returned to Israel.

Hamas knew, however. On the day of Sharabi’s release, in a final act of cruelty, a terrorist handed him a microphone and filmed him saying he looked forward to seeing his wife and daughters.

Reportedly against advice, Sharabi decided to speak publicly because, despite losing his wife, children, and brother, who was also taken hostage and who died in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, Sharabi made a new promise to one of the three hostages held with him for over a year and is now all alone in a terror tunnel, injured, starving, and in chains.

Alon Ohel, who is now 24, was wounded and kidnapped on October 7. He was blinded and still has shrapnel lodged throughout his body. During their 14 months of captivity together, shackled and starving, Ohel and Sharabi developed an intensely close bond. “He captured my heart,” Sharabi told an interviewer on Israeli television. “I adopted him from the first moment. We supported each other.” When they were told that Sharabi was being released, Ohel held onto him tightly until the last minute. “I promised I wouldn’t leave him there,” Sharabi said.

While the ambiguous loss that former hostages’ families initially faced involved their loved ones’ physical absence, now that their loved ones are physically present, they are, in part, psychologically absent. As long as any hostages remain in Gaza, those who return are psychologically still partly there.

It is a common refrain among those who have returned. “Until [my brother] and the others return,” Iair Horn said after his release, “I will not truly be here. Maybe my body, but not my soul.”

Even the “bring them home” dog tags that many wear to bring awareness to the plight of Israeli hostages illustrate how Israelis and Jews around the world are suspended in a state of presence-absence. The Hebrew on the tags reads, “Our hearts are captive in Gaza.”

“We are still in the trauma,” Margolit told me. The only way to truly recover, she said, is “if everyone returns.”

Helicopter transports freed hostage past Tel Aviv's "Hostages Square"

Source: © Pamela Paresky 2025