He looked pale but sounded calm. And somehow he seemed younger and older than his 23 years.
“Mom, Dad, Libby and Orly, I love you, I miss you,” said Hersh Goldberg-Paulin, looking directly into the camera as he addressed his parents and two sisters. “And I think about you every day.”
The Palestinian militant group Hamas released a 1-minute, 42-second video Thursday night of the Berkeley-born American and Israeli who were killed last week along with five other Israeli hostages in a tunnel under the Gaza Strip. They were held captive for nearly 11 months and were kidnapped by Hamas-led attackers in the early hours of the war.
Israeli authorities say the six people were executed by their captors on Thursday or Friday while Israeli forces were conducting an operation near the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The news of the discovery of the bodies and the confirmation of the identities of the six people plunged the country into mourning.
The killing sparked mass street protests, with demonstrators demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu negotiate a ceasefire to free dozens of Israeli prisoners believed to be alive in Gaza.
Hamas used such videos frequently during the war. The Israeli government condemns them as crude propaganda aimed at demoralizing and dividing the country. Israeli media generally do not broadcast them, except for the parts approved by families for general viewing.
The videos, reportedly produced under pressure from Hamas, often show captives pleading with Israeli leaders to negotiate a deal for their release and at times offer scathing criticism of the Israeli government’s failure. The video also drew criticism from the Biden administration.
It is unclear when Hamas completed recording the six individuals individually. But there was at least a hint that these videos could be a few months old; one of the hostages, Carmel Gat, described himself as a 39-year-old man. He turned 40 in May.
Hamas released the initial video clips of the hostages on Sunday, just hours after Israeli officials confirmed the killings and the names of those killed. The video, in which each of the six recited their names and places of origin, was posted on a channel on the Telegram messaging app linked to Hamas’s armed wing, along with longer versions posted later this week.
In the first, a 24-year-old hostage named Eden Yerushalmi, who appeared thin and had dark circles under his eyes, told his family that he loved and missed them. But he also sounded a warning, complaining about continued captivity and the Israeli government’s failure to free him and others.
His family called them “shocking psychological horror videos” in a statement.
American-born Goldberg-Paulin’s parents had launched a high-profile international campaign to try to free her, and to much of the outside world she was a familiar face, a well-known symbol of the hostages’ fate. Perhaps because of this ambition, Hamas delayed the release of its video until the very end.
In it, the young man, with a light beard and a black and red T-shirt, described the harsh conditions of captivity.
“Since I arrived in Gaza, I have survived on almost nothing, with medical care, little food and little water,” she said. “I don’t remember the last time I saw the sun or breathed fresh air.”
But he expressed hope for his freedom: “I think I will be home soon.”
In April, another video of Goldberg-Pauline provided her family with the first evidence that she was alive in captivity. Until then, they were unsure of where she was on the day of her abduction, when her left arm was severed below the elbow by a grenade the attackers threw into a bomb shelter where she was with others attending an open-air music festival.
In the video, where his arm was visible, he urged his parents to be strong.
Most of the six, including Goldberg-Paulin, are from the overnight desert raid in which Hamas attackers breached the border wall and stormed into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages. Gat was traveling from Tel Aviv to visit his mother in a small farming community who was one of the attackers.
More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Nearly all of Gaza’s population has been displaced, hunger and disease are rampant and entire neighborhoods have been bombed with debris.
Thousands of mourners attended Goldberg-Paulin’s funeral in Jerusalem on Tuesday, where speakers including President Isaac Herzog apologized on behalf of the State of Israel.
Her mother, Rachel Goldberg, regretted the piercing.
“My sweet boy,” she said. “At last, at last you are free.”
Staff writer Nabih Boulos contributed to this report from Washington.
