The conversation you're about to listen to with Nadabayel and Amit Segel was recorded on the morning of Friday, February 7th.

It is important that I mention this because since we recorded that conversation, we have all been reeling from a combination of joy, relief, and horror. Israelis welcomed home three more hostages on Saturday,

Orlevi, O'Had Ben Ami, and Elie Shirabi. Here were my immediate reactions. First, we have heard the terms

crime against humanity and genocide thrown around a lot in the past

16 months. In the context of Israel's defensive war, it is fighting on seven fronts. The war

Israel has been responding to. But these images remind us what an actual crime against humanity looks like,

and of Hamas's actual genocidal ambitions against the Jews. The images of emaciated, gaunt,

and dehumanized Jews are all too reminiscent of the images of Jews from Auschwitz and other concentration camps

after the Holocaust. If those images from this past weekend weren't unbearable enough, the cruelty

of watching Elie Shirabi at his quote-unquote send-off ceremony in which Hamas effectively conducted a farewell or exit interview

in which Elie Sharabi was prodded to talk about how excited he was to be reunited with his wife and daughters.

All well unbeknownst to him and to the chuckles of Hamas, his wife and children were slaughtered at

their kibbutz on October 7th. Orr Levy was reunited with his son. His wife was murdered on

October 7th near the Nova Festival site. They were hiding in the same shelter as Hirsch Goldberg-Polyne and Honor Shapira,

where grenade after grenade was tossed into the shelter by Hamas, and Honor kept throwing the

grenades back out. Honor was ultimately killed as well that day, but in that video footage we've all

seen of Hirsch being taken into Gaza

in a vehicle, a Hamas vehicle, or was with him, or was barefoot. And we now know that he was

barefoot for 491 days. He was only given shoes to walk in for his send-off this weekend.

And we now know he was only allowed to shower every few months.

Ohad Ben Ami was the only one of the three hostages to be reunited with his family intact.

As one hostage family member told me, we now know that every hostage is filthy, bloody, or skeletal, or all of the above.

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