Two years after Hamas’s October 7 attack, many wounds remain open, some etched in memory, others carried in the heart of an Israeli family still waiting for a final goodbye.
“I miss my father so much,” says Nadav Rudaeff, the son of Israeli hostage Lior Rudaeff, 61. “It’s been two years since I last saw him.”
On the morning of October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants breached the Gaza fence and stormed nearby Israeli towns, Lior, a father of four, was among the first to respond, trying to protect residents of Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, where he lived with his family.
Families woke to sudden sirens, smoke in the sky, bursts of gunfire: chaos unlike anything they had ever known. Within hours, hundreds of civilians, men, women, and children were killed, and hundreds more were taken hostage into Gaza.
Amid the confusion, Lior left home with the kibbutz’s emergency team, carrying his weapon, determined to help whoever he could. He was wounded but managed to send one last message to his wife, telling her he loved them.
Later, his phone was found in Khan Younis after Hamas fighters withdrew.
The attack killed about 1,200 people in Israel. In response, Israel launched a war in Gaza that has killed more than 65,000 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
For seven months after the attack, Lior’s family clung to one hope: that he was still alive among the hostages in Gaza. That hope ended on May 7, 2024, when the Israeli military told them he had been killed on October 7 and that his body had been taken across the border.
“That was the hardest day of my life,” Nadav says, his voice breaking as he looks at his father’s photograph hanging behind him.
Speaking to Alhurra, he recalls every detail of that morning. “Unfortunately, that day will stay with me forever.”
Nadav had been in his small Tel Aviv apartment that day, while his mother sheltered in the kibbutz safe room and his younger brother attended the Nova music festival, which turned into a killing ground. “My mother, my brother, and all my father’s relatives survived,” he says. “But not everyone was that lucky.”
Many of his friends were killed or abducted that day. Most of his relatives’ and friends’ homes were damaged. His father was among the victims.
The announcement of Lior’s death closed one painful chapter and opened another: waiting for the chance to bring him home.
With a deal between Israel and Hamas to end the war and secure the release of both living hostages and the bodies of the dead, Nadav waits again.
Most hostages were freed during two cease-fires, one in November 2023 and another in early 2025. Others were rescued by Israeli forces. The bodies of 59 have been recovered, some killed before being taken to Gaza, others dying in captivity, whether at their captors’ hands or in Israeli airstrikes.
Nadav’s priority remains with the living.
“We still have 20 hostages alive,” he says. “They need to be released first because they’re suffering in Hamas’s hands. That doesn’t mean I don’t want my father back, but he died that morning. He’s no longer suffering there. They can’t kill him again.”
