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Daniel Danon (left), whose friend and fellow student Idan Shtivi (on the poster on the right) is being held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The picture is a montage.
1 / 3 Photo: Daniel Danon/Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/TT
Two of his friends were murdered and a third kidnapped to Gaza in the October 7 Hamas terror attack.
The student Daniel Danon wants peace – but also wants Israel to go even harder in the Gaza Strip.
On the morning of October 7, Daniel Danon eats cereal in a hotel bar in Iceland. He has holidays from studies in Tel Aviv, visiting glaciers and ice caves. When messages from home start trickling in, he calls his mother in Kalia, a kibbutz next to the Dead Sea in the occupied West Bank.
– She just said: “Daniel – it’s total chaos here”.
He comes home to a changed Israel. The first week he buries two close friends, one shot dead in his home and the other at the Nova music festival.
A third friend who was also at the festival in the Negev desert has disappeared. The car he was driving is found abandoned with two lifeless bodies, but Idan Shtivi is missing.
Traumatized country
Only at the beginning of January does the army confirm: the 28-year-old is one of the roughly 240 kidnapped by Hamas. Since then, Daniel Danon has been living in limbo.
– It is a surreal situation and it never ends. I hope he’s alive, I hope he’s dead…
– I don’t know what would be best for him. It’s messing with my head.
Five months after the October 7 attack, Daniel Danon describes a traumatized population that just wants the war to end and the hostages to come home. But how? That’s where opinions differ.
– I think we should go harder in Gaza. If Israel had wanted, we could have ended this on October 8. We chose the kind, internationally accepted path.
Since the start of the war, it is estimated that tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, most of them women and children. Aid organizations have time and again warned of mass starvation and a humanitarian disaster.
“Don’t want to kill children”
Daniel Danon is disappointed with what he calls “the European narrative”, tired of being questioned by friends outside Israel.
– “The poor children of Gaza.” Do people know who, how, why we bomb? We don’t want to kill children. If Hamas gives up and releases the hostages, no more bombs will fall on Gaza.
Daniel Danon was eight when the second intifada began in 2000. After the violence subsided, growing up in the Israeli-occupied West Bank was peaceful. The family lived peacefully side by side with Palestinians, he claims. He does not oppose a Palestinian state in the future.
– We want a long-term solution that we can trust. We want peace. For me it doesn’t matter if it is with or without the Palestinians.
When asked if Israel, with its indiscriminate warfare, does not risk creating more terrorists than it kills, he answers:
– That’s why we have to go as hard as possible in Gaza – so they never dare to carry out another 7 October.
FACTS The October 7 attacks
On Saturday, October 7, 2023, the terror-labeled Palestinian Islamist group Hamas surprisingly attacked Israel. About 2,500 armed Hamas militiamen broke through the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel in a coordinated fashion. Thousands of rockets were fired at Israeli territory.
More than 1,100 people in Israel, the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians, were shot, stabbed and burned to death. Massacres were carried out in kibbutzim and at the Nova music festival organized near the border. According to Israel, there were systematic rapes, torture and embalming.
Close to 250 people, among them children, were taken hostage and taken to Gaza by Hamas.
The day after the deadliest attack on Israel in the country’s history, the Israeli government formally declared war on Hamas. In extensive and sustained bombing, entire areas of the Gaza Strip have subsequently been left in ruins. Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas.
At present, it is believed that roughly 100 of the hostages remain in Hamas captivity, since some have been released and others have been killed.
More than 30,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the October 7 attack, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The absolute majority of them are civilians. At the same time, Israel’s blockade of emergency aid to Gaza has put hundreds of thousands of Palestinians on the brink of a humanitarian disaster.
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