‘We Shouldn’t Need a Crisis to Know We’re One People’

At about 6:15 a.m. on Oct. 7, Muhamad El Atrash spoke by phone from his military base at Kibbutz Nahal Oz with a relative, a contractor, about a project to be done at his house ahead of the wedding the following Friday of his daughter Basma. He had much to celebrate. A few days before, his 13th child and eighth daughter, Sida, was born. He saw her once, at the hospital.

Minutes after that phone call, Hamas attacked Nahal Oz.

Muhamad, a career military man and a sergeant-major in the Tracking Unit of the Israel Defense Forces, was declared missing after Oct. 7, and in December was determined to be held hostage, presumably alive, in the Gaza Strip.

Muhamad’s brother Salem put up posters—the placards that are ubiquitous across Israel to publicize all 251 people Hamas kidnapped during the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 invasion—in his home in Sawa (also known as Molada), a Bedouin village of 2,300 in the northern Negev. Those posters listed Muhamad’s age as 39. After Muhamad’s birthday on Feb. 20, the reprinted posters upped his age to 40.

It turns out, Salem recently discovered, Muhamad never made it to 40.

The IDF later analyzed video clips it found while battling in Gaza and determined conclusively that Muhamad had been killed on Oct. 7 in a battle with Hamas at his IDF base at Nahal Oz and his body taken to Gaza.

On July 2, during my visit to Salem’s home, eight IDF officials sat on lush sofas in the salon. They’d come to comfort the bereaved family. Bedouins in mourning traditionally receive visitors for three days, but the El Atrash family extended the period as people continued to arrive.

A military team had informed the family the previous week of the death of Muhamad, the eldest of 23 children—and as Salem told me proudly, an accomplished equestrian who dreamed of running a horse farm. They allowed Salem to view a video taken at and near Nahal Oz on Oct. 7. It showed Hamas terrorists shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is great) in anticipation of their coming attack, firing shoulder-launched missiles at the base, and, once inside, tossing a body onto a flatbed truck. He couldn’t tell if the body was Muhamad’s.

On July 11, Salem went to a military base in nearby Beersheba to watch the definitive video from Gaza. Accompanying him were his father, Ibrahim, and Muhamad’s widows, Ane and Ektimal. (Bedouin tradition permits men to have up to three wives simultaneously.) “It was my brother, absolutely,” Salem said after viewing it. He didn’t want to reveal more. “It was emotional,” he said.

As of July 11, 120 people whom Hamas kidnapped on Oct. 7 remain captive in Gaza; of those, Israel has concluded that 42 are dead, according to the Tel Aviv-based Hostages and Missing Families Forum. The 120 include 10 non-Israelis (eight Thais, one Nepalese, and one Tanzanian). One hundred and five living hostages—81 Israelis and 24 foreign nationals—were returned to Israel in a deal with Hamas in November. IDF forces have also rescued seven living Israelis and recovered the bodies of 19 dead Israelis.

Less known worldwide, even in Israel, is the toll taken on the country’s Arab citizens. Four of the remaining hostages are Bedouin Israelis, a minority Muslim group of 450,000. One is the late Muhamad El Atrash. Three others, all civilians, are presumed alive: Youssef Ziyadne, 53; his son Hamza, 22; and Farhan Al Qadi, 52, all from Rahat, an all-Bedouin city of 75,000, or nearby. Two of Youssef Ziyadne’s other children—son Bilal and daughter Aisha—were also kidnapped, but were released in the autumn deal. Another Bedouin—Samar Fouad Talalka, 24, of Hura—was among the three Israelis who escaped from Hamas’ captivity and were mistakenly killed by the IDF on Dec. 15.

Since Oct. 7, nine Bedouin Israeli soldiers have been killed in battle. Twenty-one Bedouin Israeli civilians were killed in Hamas’ missile attacks and the Oct. 7 massacre of Nova music festival celebrants.

Bedouin Israelis were among those lauded for rescuing hundreds of Nova attendees and residents of Gaza-area kibbutzim and moshavim on Oct. 7. Chief among them was Yousef Alziyadneh, of Rahat, who packed approximately 30 people escaping the festival into his minivan. He survived.

“The nation of Israel is united,” Hasan Abu Galion, a sheikh in Rahat, told me over iced coffee on the day I visited. “We shouldn’t need a crisis to know we’re one people.”

Abu Galion’s cousin lost two sons, 14 and 12, to a Hamas missile. The cousin couldn’t conceive for many years. Those were her only children, he said. “It hurts her that she’s a Muslim, and Muslims killed her kids,” he said.

Most Bedouins’ homes lack fortified rooms for shelter during attacks. Concrete bunkers, placed as temporary shelters throughout Israel, dot parking lots, roads, even beaches to protect against missiles, but few appear in Bedouin communities.

Rahat was promised more than 50, but only a few were delivered to a city already lacking in public bomb shelters, Abu Galion said. When an air-raid siren sounds in Rahat, he said, “I see the panic in people. They walk aimlessly, not knowing where to go.”

Israelis of all stripes, including Knesset members, have visited the El Atrashes to extend condolences.

One man who came on July 1 was Doron Perez, who well knows what Salem El Atrash is experiencing. Perez’s 22-year-old son Daniel, a captain in the tank corps, fought Hamas invaders at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, went missing, was later declared a hostage, and on March 17 was determined to have been killed on Oct. 7. His body, too, is held hostage in Gaza.

“Nothing in my life has connected me to the Bedouin community like this. Both [men] fell on Israel’s most fateful day. It’s a brit damim [blood covenant],” said Perez, a South African-born rabbi and executive chairman of the World Mizrachi Movement. “I feel close to them. I feel sad for them. What joins us is the desire to live in and defend the Jewish state.”

Perez bonded with Salem and Ibrahim at regular meetings of kidnapped soldiers’ families. The relatives are “a swath of Israeli society,” Perez said, representing Jews, Bedouins, “lone soldiers” (those who came from abroad to serve), Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and combat and noncombat soldiers.

“I’d pray for the soldiers, including Muhamad. Once I heard he passed away, I was very upset,” said Perez. Comforting his relatives was “what I would do for the families of any of the soldiers.” Of the El Atrashes, he said, “I like them very much. They’ve become like family.”

Salem’s kin include brothers and cousins fighting in Gaza and two cousins who enlisted recently.

“We have to defend the state. If we don’t, [Israel’s enemies] will kill us,” Salem told me after the IDF officials departed. Bowls of fruit, plates of pastries, and coffee pitchers still filled round end tables atop a carpet extending most of the empty salon’s floor. Unlike in Jewish shiva homes, Salem, a mourner, provided the refreshments and poured beverages for visitors.

“I’ve traveled all over, and this is the greatest country in the world,” Salem said. “You feel comfortable here. There’s no state like ours.”

Salem, who works in security for Israel’s monopoly electric company, has been abroad three times to lobby foreign governments and the United Nations for the hostages’ release.

Salem told Spain’s King Felipe VI that he and Muhamad are Bedouins. “The king looked at me like this, with great surprise,” Salem recalled, his eyes bulging to make the point. “They thought only Jews were killed and kidnapped.”

The roar of a fighter jet penetrated the closed salon while we spoke. Salem expressed hope that the air force would build another base in the area.

“It’ll defend all the citizens of Israel,” he said. “Without noise, there’s no defense.”

The four Bedouin Israelis languishing in Gaza since Oct. 7 do not include one of the longest-held hostages: Hisham El Saed, 36. He entered Gaza voluntarily in April 2015.

The hostage-awareness posters visible throughout the country include ones for El Saed; Ethiopian Israeli citizen Avera Mengistu, who crossed into Gaza in 2014; and the bodies of IDF soldiers Hadar Golden and Oron Shaul, whom Hamas killed in battle in Gaza during the 2014 war.

Both El Saed and Mengistu have mental conditions and were treated in psychiatric hospitals in Israel. But Hamas maintained early on that the two, like Golden and Shaul, are Israeli soldiers.

When Hisham El Saed went missing, his father, Shaaban, searched everywhere he might be, thinking unconventionally, as his son would. Shaaban went to building sites where he worked—he rents out heavy equipment for construction and road grading—and to Israel’s borders with Jordan, Egypt, Gaza, and the West Bank, since Hisham had previously entered those areas twice, once, once, and many times, respectively.

Authorities in those jurisdictions understood that Hisham’s mental illness was responsible, and returned him each time—until the second Gaza crossing. Hisham “likes adventures and would walk everywhere,” Shaaban said, and had spoken dreamily of bringing peace between Israel and its neighbors. Hisham was intent on rescuing IDF soldier Gilad Shalit after Hamas terrorists tunneled into Israel and kidnapped him in 2006. (Shalit was released in a 2011 exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian terrorists.)

“Someone who wants to make peace is not normal,” Shaaban joked between puffs on a series of cigarettes throughout our interview.

We were sitting on the patio of his home in Hura, a village of 20,000 residents northeast of Beersheba. Shaaban’s shirt sported a plastic pin of a yellow ribbon to represent the Oct. 7 hostages. From his neck hung a facsimile dog tag, another hostage-advocacy symbol. On the wall above the couch where we sat hung a poster of his son next to a flowing yellow ribbon.

A striking feature in the Bedouin communities I visited that day—Rahat, Hura, and Sawa—and on the roads between them is the utter lack of publicly displayed posters demanding the return of Bedouin Israelis held in Gaza. Not in store windows, at towns’ entrances, on utility poles, at traffic circles, at bus stops—common places where they’re seen in Jewish communities.

Shaaban said he hung posters of Hisham near polling stations in Sawa during Israel’s municipal elections on Feb. 27. In some places, they remained intact; in others, they were gone the next day.

Within the Bedouin population “are people who don’t support me and favor them,” he said, speaking of Hamas. “Someone who removes a poster, what I understand from it is that there’s a problem here. … I call it support for Hamas. It’s how you interpret it.”

Hamas’ announcement in 2015 that it held Hisham had reassured Shaaban, who now knew where his son was. He figured he’d be repatriated within a few months.

That didn’t happen, so he tapped into his tribal affiliations, as he explained Bedouins will do. He asked relatives and friends in Gaza to intervene with Hamas. They did so. But they reported being arrested, beaten, and threatened, so Shaaban backed off. “I don’t want people to be hurt because of us,” he explained.

“Usually, that’s how conflicts are discussed and resolved among Bedouins, without governments. Apparently, we didn’t realize that the world was changing and that the interests of groups dominate,” Shaaban said. “As simple people, it’s hard to understand Hamas’ lies that Hisham is an Israeli soldier.”

Shaaban, 64, is the father of 12 through two wives, but both marriages ended due to tensions related to Hisham’s captivity. He now lives alone.

“Our lives changed, collapsed: socially, financially, business-wise, the family. We were broken by many things,” he said. But, he added, “I have to continue life.”

Two young grandchildren walked up while we were talking. His granddaughter set down a bowl of fruit.

“We didn’t have all of this fruit when I was her age,” Shaaban said. “We were poor.”

The girl displayed her first-grade report card for the just-concluded term. Shaaban reviewed each subject and voiced approval.

The hostage crisis that began nine months ago, improbably, has returned a spark to him, Shaaban said. It’s connected him to scores of Israelis struggling with what he’s experiencing: “For eight-and-a-half years, until Oct. 7, I felt I was in a war alone. I had no support from anyone, not even the state. After Oct. 7, to my great regret, I found myself within many families, be they of the kidnapped or fallen soldiers—within a very large family,” he said. “I’d comfort and soothe each family I met, and they comforted and soothed me. They said, ‘It’s a pity we didn’t assist you before this.’ They saw what it is, that it’s not easy. We support each other.”