Hamas published, this Wednesday, a video showing 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The young man, with dual Israeli and North American nationality, was one of the 253 people kidnapped by the Islamist group in the terrorist attack on October 7th, which left around 1,200 people dead.
The three-minute long video, details the Israeli press, was shared on the Telegram platform. It is not possible to confirm the date on which it was recorded, but Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who appears in the images with one of his hands amputated, says that he was kidnapped “about 200 days ago”, which indicates that it was filmed recently.
The young man, who was at the Supernova festival when Hamas launched the attack, asks the Israeli government to help him return home. According to the newspaper Haaretz, Goldberg-Polin was born in California and then moved to Israel in 2008. His mother, Rachel, was chosen as one of the 100 most influential people in the world this year by Time magazine, after meeting with dozens of world leaders, including US President Joe Biden and the Pope, in the awareness campaign for the release of Hamas hostages.
Of the 253 hostages taken to Gaza, 105 were released during the seven days that the November truce lasted, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners who were imprisoned in Israeli jails. By that time, Hamas had already released four hostages. After that, the IDF managed to rescue three people alive and brought the bodies of 12 from the enclave (counting soldiers already killed in the war launched by Israel), including three hostages mistakenly killed by the IDF.
At this time, fears are also growing that the number of hostages still alive is really low. At the beginning of April, the US, which has been following the advances and setbacks in negotiations between Hamas and Israel for a new ceasefire, admitted that the majority of the hostages could already be dead.
“Privately, Israeli and American officials estimate that the death toll could be much higher,” wrote the daily The Wall Street Journal. “Some US estimates indicate that most of the hostages are already dead”, the diary also reads, which cites officials who know the intelligence information on the subject.
Hamas has previously published similar videos of hostages, in what Israeli authorities consider “to be a deplorable psychological war”.
