What Hersh Goldberg-Polin Weighed

Today marks a thousand days since October 7. Asked this week what the war had done to him, Netanyahu said he'd lost some weight.

The grave of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. “Child of light, love and peace.”

This week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat for an interview on Channel 14—think of the outlet as Israel’s equivalent to Fox News or Newsmax.

Netanyahu was asked how October 7 had changed him; he paused and replied, “lost a little weight.” The audience laughed.

I thought of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Twenty-three years old and nearly six feet tall, Hersh was seized by Hamas terrorists from a roadside shelter near the Nova festival after a grenade tore off his left arm. When Israeli soldiers found his body in a tunnel under Rafah at the end of August 2024, he weighed about 115 pounds.

Since then, his mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, has worked to make sure the world knows what happened. After eleven months underground, Hersh was shot six times at close range by his captors. By then, he was emaciated. His body was too light and too small when he was finally brought home.

The same war changed both men, Benjamin Netanyahu and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, but not in remotely comparable ways. The prime minister lost a little weight and drew some cheap laughs. Hersh Goldberg-Polin lost his arm, a third of his body, and then his life.

Today marks a thousand days since October 7. The hostages are all home, so the ritual of counting days has lost its urgency. The Tel Aviv clock that once measured their captivity stopped at 843, when Ran Gvili’s remains were returned.

The thousand-day milestone is a reminder that Israel’s reckoning has yet to arrive rather than a moment of closure.

In the same interview where he joked about his slightly reduced waistline, Netanyahu reviewed the war’s results and briefly mentioned the hostages. He said the first goal was to bring them all back, and that Israel had done so. He did not say many returned in coffins.

A few days earlier, Finance Minister and far-right firebrand Bezalel Smotrich went further on a podcast, claiming it was thanks to him that all the hostages are here. Yet Smotrich voted against almost every deal that could have brought living hostages home sooner. Or Levy, a former hostage, slammed Smotrich’s comments as gaslighting.

This week, the man who led the hostage negotiations for Israel weighed in with a counter to the callous words coming from the prime minister and his cabinet. Nitzan Alon, the major general responsible for the hostage talks from the immediate post-October 7 period until the ceasefire last autumn, spoke at a conference at Reichman University.

Alon said that the war could have ended at least a year earlier. Of the hostages taken alive, about 40 died in captivity. In some cases, different choices or talks might have saved them. He argued the cabinet kept choosing partial deals that allowed the fighting to continue, all for a “total victory” he called a falsehood.

In the end, it took an American president—Donald Trump—to make it stop.

Alon chose his words carefully, and anyone quoting him should do the same. He did not claim that every death could have been prevented. Some hostages were killed by their Hamas captors before any negotiation could have saved them, and a few died from Israeli friendly fire. He did not accuse Netanyahu of killing the hostages, and he acknowledged the necessity of at least some degree of military action against Gaza’s terrorist rulers to bring them to the table.

The government’s defenders also have arguments: military pressure did help bring Hamas back to negotiations, and Hamas left the table more than once. Likud responded to Alon by saying that following his advice would have meant surrender.

Let’s accept all of that. Let’s agree that the situation was harsher and more complicated than any Israeli government has faced and that, as Alon said, there was some logic in keeping up the pressure, and yet—with no official review of the government’s actions after October 7, with no real accountability, we cannot simply accept Netanyahu’s cold dismissals of the hostages and Israel’s conduct in the war. Too many broken families have received more insults than answers from the people pretending to be their leaders.

Before Hersh Goldberg-Polin was killed, his parents confronted officials with a terrible, yet necessary question: If Israel applied too much pressure, would the hostages be executed?

The answer was always no. The government was confident that hostages were assets, not liabilities. Things would not end in a mass killing of prisoners by Hamas. Yet that is exactly how it ended for several. Hersh was shot six times in a tunnel. Now, the same officials who dismissed the risk are claiming credit for the outcome.

Netanyahu’s weight-loss boast was not an ill-considered joke. It is representative of a prime minister who has shunted responsibility aside for two years.

Netanyahu, Smotrich, and their associates will face voters this fall when Israelis elect a new Knesset for the first time since October 7. Their crass dismissal of the victims of the worst attack in Israeli history, one that happened on their watch, cannot get lost in the buzz of an election season. At stake in the election, among other things, is an official commission of inquiry into the Hamas attacks—something Netanyahu has consistently blocked. Instead, the prime minister treats the hostages as a figure to be counted once and set aside, a number that might trouble him for a moment before daily life moves on. For the 40 families whose loved ones came home in coffins, they were never a number. They were everything.