10/7 Author Became 'Guardian of Secrets' While Interviewing Hamas Victims
It's been almost one year since the Hamas attack on Israel in which approximately 3,000 Hamas members overran Israel's southern border, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and taking 254 more hostage. Award-winning Haaretz reporter Lee Yaron committed herself to learning the stories of those victims, and she shares them in her moving new book, 10/7: 100 Human Stories (St. Martin's Press). In this Q&A with Yaron, she discusses how writing the book affected her personally, the feelings of the freed hostages she interviewed, what she couldn't include in her book and more.
Newsweek: How did researching and writing this book affect you personally?
Yaron: As a journalist, I've always tried to maintain a boundary between my work and my private life. But with 10/7, the professional became profoundly personal. My aunt and uncle live in Ofakim, a small and impoverished town in Israel near the Gaza border. Despite enduring rocket attacks for nearly two decades, many homes in Ofakim still lack shelters. Residents typically seek shelter in public shelters, which on 10/7 made them easy targets for Hamas terrorists. Forty-nine people were murdered in Ofakim that day. Too accustomed to rocket attacks to seek shelter, my family stayed at home—and lived.
Exactly two months later, I was in the middle of interviewing Eliana Suissa, the mother of Dolev Suissa, for this book, when I received the news that one of my dearest friends, Gal Eizenkot, had been killed in Gaza during a hostage rescue mission. The professional distance I always try to maintain suddenly vanished. I found myself on the other side of grief's divide, among the people I'd been documenting.
It was agonizing to immerse myself so deeply in these stories. There were days when it felt almost unbearable. Yet at the same time, writing this book ultimately gave me strength and purpose and saved me from despair. This was my way of achieving justice for the victims, giving voice to those who can no longer speak for themselves.
This book is my attempt to reclaim the stories of 10/7 from those who created the crisis and return it to the people who suffered from it. To transcend statistics and political agendas by providing a ground-level view of the conflict from the hearts and homes of the civilians caught in the crossfire.
Watching Gal being reduced to a political symbol after his death, watching his personality, his individuality, being used for political gain, brought a new dimension of sadness. This book, dedicated to him, aims to preserve what was stolen from him—and from all the victims. I believe this is where literature differs from media. Literature allows us to preserve humans most fully. To keep them alive, at least on the page.
What was the most surprising thing you learned when doing interviews?
One of the most overlooked tragedies of 10/7 is the plight of the approximately 50,000 Ukrainian refugees in Israel, victims of two ongoing wars. My book follows the story of a 15-year-old Jewish orphan from Odessa, a boy named Eitan, who fled war twice in the span of one year—first fleeing from Putin 's rockets when they threatened Odessa, and then fleeing from Hamas rockets that scored a direct hit on his new home in Israel.
In the chapter about Kibbutz Be'eri, you include narratives about what happened to some hostages while in captivity—some of whom have since been freed. What sources did you use to tell these stories?
The chapter is based on interviews I conducted, alongside with my research assistants, with hostages who were released from captivity, and with their families. These survivors bravely shared detailed memories of their captivity in Gaza: the terrifying moments of their kidnapping, the experience of being moved between Gazan homes late at night, their cramped conditions and the armed men who guarded them and controlled their fates. They recounted the hunger, the lice, the suffocating heat; the arguments between hostages; the constant dread of rape and threat of murder.
Perhaps most poignantly, they all expressed the guilt they now feel for having been released while more than 100 other hostages remain in Gaza, approaching a year in captivity.
Do you have a view about the feasibility of a hostage deal?
Every passing day without a deal is a death sentence for another hostage. The news of Hersh Goldberg-Polin and five others murdered after enduring 11 hellish months of captivity has shaken Israelis to their core. As I write these lines, it's impossible not to think how many more face execution? How many more suffer in dark tunnels, unable even to stand and gasping for air?
Israel is a country of mandatory military service, at least for the non-Orthodox, and its most fundamental social contract is: No one is left behind. This is what the army tells you from day one: You will never be abandoned. This is the promise that allows parents to entrust their children to the state. If this covenant is broken, what remains of Israel's identity? What trust can there be in the future of the state?
The question isn't whether Israel can afford a hostage deal. The question is whether it can afford not to make one.
Were there things you learned in your interviews that you felt you couldn't include in the book because it might put lives at risk? Given changes on the ground since you wrote it, is there anything you feel comfortable sharing now?
No, but there was information that I uncovered from one set of interviewees that filled in the blanks of the knowledge of another set of interviewees—instances in which I found out about the fates and last moments of victims that even their families didn't know. That was difficult for me—to be the guardian of a "secret" I then felt compelled to share with a victim's parents.
Anything else I didn't include related to a few graphic accounts of violence, especially sexual violence: I felt I had enough as it was, and also felt the need to respect the privacy of the dead and of their surviving family. I am aware that "sex crime denialism" is a phenomenon, so I will state this clearly: if sexual [violence] isn't spoken about openly by many of the victims, it's not because it didn't occur; it's because of the trauma of the experience and, frankly, the stigma of being its victim.
Is there one point you'd especially like readers to remember from your book, what would it be?
In these times of extreme political polarization, when Israelis and Palestinians have become blind to each other's pain and grief, these human stories are more necessary than ever. I believe in the power of empathy to build bridges - incidentally, a belief shared by many of the peace activists murdered in the kibbutzim on 10/7.
In many ways, Hamas murdered the remnants of the Israeli peace camp—the Israeli Left—the people who were at the forefront of advocacy for a two-state solution. These were the people donating to Gazan families, driving sick Palestinian children to hospitals and so on.
My generation is a large one—fully half of Israelis are 30 years old or younger—and we've never known a time of real hope for peace. We were born just after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist, which shattered the dream of the Oslo Accords. In Gaza, approximately half the population is under the age of 18—it's heartbreaking to think of a society so young and yet so destroyed. All of us, on both sides, were born into this violence and told it was unchangeable. But the challenge of our lives is to prove that it's not true—to prove to the older generations that peace can be achieved—and the first step toward that is empathy.
