Parents of slain Hamas captive push for deal, warning remaining hostages won't 'make it much longer'
Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin was found “emaciated” in a tunnel, his grieving parents told NBC News in their first interview since his death.
JERUSALEM — The body of Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin was found “bullet ridden and emaciated” in a 60-foot-deep tunnel, his grieving parents told NBC News in their first interview since his death, warning that the scores of hostages still in the Gaza Strip are “not going to make it much longer.”
In a wide-ranging and emotional interview in Jerusalem last week, they revealed the squalid conditions in which their son was kept, their exasperation at the failed diplomatic process and their fears of the war’s escalating further.
Goldberg-Polin’s parents, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, said they felt they had failed as their high-profile push for a cease-fire deal to bring their son home from Hamas captivity fell on deaf ears.
In the year since militants abducted their son in video seen around the world, they have felt like “pawns in chess,” his mother said, as world leaders failed to resolve the “surplus of anguish, misery and suffering on both sides” of the Israel-Gaza border. Her husband, speaking shortly after the anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, called for an end to the “cycles, endlessly, of bloodshed and wars” in the Middle East.
It’s a region “on the precipice,” Jon Polin warned, with Israel now at war not just in Gaza but also in Lebanon and engaged in an escalating exchange with Iran. “We can let the current situation lead us in one of two very different directions,” he said. “I hope that we choose the courageous one.”
Rating: 5