“They were all taken very seriously. One very specific one was taken seriously. Which, in the end, was rejected,” said Yoni Asher, father of freed Gaza hostages Raz and Aviv.
Yoni Asher, father of the freed Gaza hostages Raz and Aviv, revealed that he received several ransom demands while his children were held in the Gaza Strip by Hamas terrorists together with his then wife, Doron Katz-Asher.
“They were all taken very seriously. One very specific one was taken seriously. And there was a week’s worth of e-mail correspondence. In the end, they rejected it,” Asher told Walla, explaining that he cooperated with the IDF’s cyber unit for every ransom request received.
His daughters were two and four years old when they were taken by Hamas from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where they were visiting the family together with their mother. They spent 49 days in Gaza until they were released during the first humanitarian ceasefire in November 2023.
Aviv Asher, 2.5, her sister Raz Asher, 4.5, and mother Doron, react as they disembark from an Israeli military helicopter, shortly after their arrival in Israel on November 24, after being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. (credit: VIA REUTERS)
Nightmares in the first hostage-prisoner exchange
The comments came after Asher published a post on Facebook where he criticized Israeli society and wrote: “Yesterday, two years ago, November 24, 2023, children, young children, mothers and elderly women were released from the captivity of Hamas as part of the first agreement. In exchange for them, teenage women and young men, terrorists, were released from prison in Israel.”
He then wrote, “In the 48 hours leading up to the exchange, when the IDF confirmed that my daughters were on the list, the tensions became unbearable. Thoughts were running wild. Someone would try to disrupt, someone would try to kill the hostages at the last minute… There was no certainty.”
At one point, an officer told Asher that “he should not be happy until the IDF told him that his children were with the IDF, had crossed the border, and that their identity was officially confirmed.”
“At one point, it seemed that the nightmare was coming true – the intelligence officer calls and announces – “There is a delay in the release of 24 hours.” Having learned from the experience, I no longer ask why, because the unofficial answer is that I am not allowed to know. As I was told quite a bit before,” he concluded.