Five Days of Freedom

This is a story of sadness and tragedy and pain. It is also a story of generosity of spirit and positivity and emotional strength.

Iris Haim considers her outlook a choice, a power to frame reality favorably. She oriented herself that way long ago, and it’s helped her to get through the past year.

Haim’s son Yotam, a red-haired 28-year-old, went missing on Oct. 7 from his apartment at Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Three weeks later, when she viewed film of Hamas terrorists kidnapping him the day they invaded Israel, Haim felt certain that he’d be fine.

“Until we hear otherwise, I have the right to believe that Yotam is OK,” she recalled telling family members who expressed concern. “I put a lot of faith in Yotam.”

When, on Dec. 15, Yotam and two other Israeli hostages were unintentionally killed in the Gaza Strip by the Israel Defense Forces and Haim later learned that the trio had escaped Hamas’ captivity on Dec. 10, she took comfort in Yotam’s having lived freely those five days.

Then there was this: While sitting shiva, Haim broadcast a message to the soldiers of the Givati brigade who’d killed the three hostages after mistaking them for terrorists. Rather than blame the soldiers, she sought to assuage their guilt.

“I love you very much and hug you from afar. I know that everything that happened certainly is not your fault or anyone’s fault other than Hamas’, may their name be blotted out and their memory be erased from the face of the Earth,” she told them. “Don’t hesitate for a second if you spot a terrorist. Don’t think that you intentionally killed a hostage. You must defend yourselves, because only thus can you defend us.”

She added: “No one judges you or is angry at you. We love you all.” Haim invited them to visit—and the soldiers did so during the mourning period.

Haim’s magnanimity amid her grief shocked Israelis, and she’s been beloved since. In May, she was bestowed an honor of lighting a torch during the national ceremony celebrating Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day). She regularly appears on television programs to offer a mother’s perspective on the war, a soothing voice amid the country’s rancor. While Israelis by the thousands demonstrate heatedly in Tel Aviv’s streets against the government and demand that it sign a deal with Hamas to free some of the 101 remaining hostages, Haim sticks out for advocating unity. She avoids the marches and says she wants nothing to do with their negativity.

“When things are not good, it’s normal to be angry at the world. But to see someone to whom the worst happens, and yet all the time she has good morale—it’s amazing,” said Naftali Chen, whose book The Hero Next Door tells chapter-length stories about Israeli heroes during this war, including Haim. “When you meet inspirational people, it strikes internally for me: If she can do something, I can do it.”

Haim carries on understatedly, imperturbably, with just a hint of a smile. In late July, she explained in an interview with Tablet that she’s never voted for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but trusts him, the government, and the military in the war, that he is her prime minister, and that the country must come together.

Three weeks later, on Aug. 8, rallies for national unity were held at 100 intersections throughout Israel. Hagay Lober, the event’s organizer whose son Yonatan was an IDF soldier killed in Gaza, said he recruited Haim because “bereaved parents can lead a movement for unity.” Lober assigned her to a thoroughfare in the town of Kfar Sava, where she donned an official, neon-yellow vest reading, “Displaying Love; Ending the Schism.” More than 100 people showed up, bearing such signs as, “Different Opinions; One Nation” and “It’s the Time for Listening, Brotherhood, and Love” and “Together, We’ll Free [the Hostages]” and “Through Love, We’ll Triumph.” Rallygoers seemed to represent a range of ages, political affiliations, and levels of observance (if any). Drivers of passing cars waved and honked their horns in support.

Several people approached Haim and hugged her.

“She inspires in the way she related to the soldiers, in her message of unity, and she’s unafraid to express herself. She’s a real person who speaks from the heart and captures the heart. It stands out,” said Orly Korem, who came from Rosh Ha’Ayin. “It’s what you say and how you say it. Added to everything she experienced, it shows she has lots of strength.”

Yotam is buried on Kibbutz Gvulot, close to where he grew up near Gaza. His gravestone states “the date he entered the world” and “the date he left the world.”

“I don’t say that Yotam died. I say that he went to his freedom,” Haim said when we met at a Tel Aviv coffee shop. “The day he was shot had been the happiest day of his life because he thought he’d be free. That’s the point for me.” She said she truly believes he experienced freedom those five days, the only ones of his 70 days in Gaza.

Her words jolted me. How could someone consider her son’s most joyful day his last one or project freedom onto him in the thick of a war zone’s danger?

Haim’s profession and her dealing with a younger Yotam had already oriented her to look at a glass as half full.

As a palliative care nurse for 15 years, Haim tended to patients at their most vulnerable: on the verge of death and as they expired. “In someone’s last moments, I have to define what is good now,” she explained. “I’d say [of the patient], ‘He’s not suffering.’”

Yotam grappled with mental illness. He was hospitalized with anorexia and addictions. He often told his parents—Haim’s husband, Raviv, is a farmer—he wished his life ended.

“I took everything as: What do I have to learn from this? I worked on myself for many years. I made myself stable,” Haim said of her challenges with Yotam. She adopted defense mechanisms and taught herself to defuse situations. When Yotam charged her last year with favoring his brother and sister, Haim agreed. That took Yotam aback, so much so that he reconsidered the accusation.

Yotam played drums in a heavy-metal band. (His parents planned to see him perform in Tel Aviv the night of Oct. 7.) He loved animals, enjoyed exercising, and worked hard—and possessed an inner strength that Haim knew would serve him in captivity. One of his 32 tattoos depicted a comma. That’s because, for some people, a semicolon represents the struggle with suicide ideation; the dot represents a period, a full stop (committing suicide), while the comma stands for a pause, a reassessment (committing to live). So when Hamas kidnapped Yotam, Haim figured, or willed herself to believe, that he’d survive. Meanwhile, she sculpted a narrative filled with good thoughts and didn’t allow her imagination to contrive a nightmare scenario.

“Everything since Oct. 7 was intuitive. It was spontaneous,” Haim told me. “There are no guidelines for a mother whose son is kidnapped. But I had the tools to make a certainty in an uncertain situation. I could invent a reality and build a story. Being in a mindfulness state helped me a lot—not to think what will be, [but] to be in the moment, to stay in the moment.”

So when family members expressed concern for Yotam, Haim urged them not to worry. “It was a decision,” she told me. “I didn’t automatically go to the first place I could go [emotionally].” She rejected other hostages’ advocates who publicly displayed hourglasses to symbolize time running out for the captives.

“That was my state of mind: that Yotam is OK,” Haim explained. She believed that she, like her son, had “the strength to deal with this,” she said. “I’m shaping my reality to build a story that’s good for me.”

Haim’s trust in her perspective and in Yotam’s faculties were confirmed, she said, when a Thai field worker released in a hostage deal in November told of Yotam supporting him and several other captives during their seven weeks together by playing air drums and singing in the Gaza tunnel where they were confined.

Heidi Schreiber-Pan, a Baltimore psychotherapist and an expert on resiliency whom I contacted, hadn’t known about Haim but was spot-on in dissecting her. “My hunch is that she already had some resiliency in place,” she said. “You can train your mind to, even in darkness, look for things to be grateful for [and toward] what we want it to be paying attention to. It’s the way you choose to think about something that affects your emotions.”

Toward the end of their captivity, Yotam, Alon Shamriz, 26, and Samer Talalka, 22, were imprisoned together in the northern Gaza neighborhood of Shujaiya, in Gaza City, just a few hundred yards west of Kfar Aza. Their five Hamas captors moved them between apartments in buildings destroyed in the war. On or about Dec. 10, an Israeli tank shelled three of the captors, killing them. The remaining terrorists forced the hostages to a stairwell and left to take on Israeli soldiers. The IDF dispatched a trained dog to the building. The terrorists killed the dog, and themselves were killed nearby. The dog’s mobile camera continued filming. One of the hostages screamed his name and pleas for the three to be rescued, but no one was monitoring the transmission.

Abandoned, the hostages moved from building to building, seeking safety. They wrote messages in Hebrew on outer walls. They shouted in Hebrew. IDF soldiers dismissed the signals as Hamas’ attempts to lure them into deadly traps. Communication gaps deepened because units didn’t brief comrades relieving them. So when, on the afternoon of Dec. 15, the trio emerged from a building waving white flags of surrender, the soldiers didn’t consider that they could be escaped hostages, even though they’d removed their shirts to show that they were unarmed. The soldiers shot each one, killing Shamriz and Talalka. An injured Yotam retreated to the building from which the three had exited. He continued shouting in Hebrew. He was chased and ultimately killed.

The young men were so close to being saved, so heartbreakingly close, I remarked to Haim.

“I thought so, too, the first few days: It can’t be, it couldn’t have happened. But you can’t live like that, because it takes you backward,” Haim said. “I thought: This is war. Yotam had five days of freedom. We can’t turn back time. It’s hard to live when you think this way. If I did, I’d go crazy. Nothing will bring back Yotam. It would just cause me to feel terrible. So I changed the narrative: Yotam is a hero, a partisan. He took a risk. He was a person taken captive by Hamas, like many people.”

Haim explained her approach thus: “Every person can decide if you’re a victim of your life or a protagonist of your life. I said on Oct. 7, ‘I’m not turning my son into a poor wretch.’” She believed that she helped Yotam by projecting “positive energy.”

“It was the butterfly effect: It gave Yotam strength,” Haim said. And on the fateful day of Dec. 15, she believes, Yotam calculated the risk of emerging into a battlefield, and concluded that he’d be identified by the IDF and rescued, that it “was worth it not to be in captivity … that he could make a decision and choose to be a free person.”

The narrative “takes me away from ‘if,’” she said, and “is a story that strengthens, that doesn’t throw us into an abyss.”

It’s what Haim has related to thousands of people on visits to Australia, South Africa, the United States, and within Israel. Seven days after we met the first time, there was Haim in the balcony of the U.S. House of Representatives, brought by Netanyahu—with several other hostages’ relatives and Israeli heroes of Oct. 7—to attend his address to a joint meeting of Congress.

After our interview at the coffee shop concluded, I rode 20 minutes with her to Givat Shmuel, a Tel Aviv suburb. Haim addressed 200 singles who filled a community center’s hall. She projected slides onto a screen and discussed her son, his struggles, and coping with his loss. She played Yotam’s audio messages and Instagram posts from the morning of Oct. 7. He sent them from his apartment’s shelter as missiles fell and terrorists’ rifle shots could be heard. In one clip, he sharpened a knife for self-defense. In another, improbably, he banged his drums.

The last slide of the evening showed an artificial intelligence-generated image of Yotam drumming. Interspersed with Hebrew rap, we hear the lyrics, “We can’t stop playing this tune.” The words come from a popular song from 1974, “We Must Continue Playing.” Both phrases come from comments delivered by the chief of Israel’s air force at a reception for fighter pilots repatriated from Syrian captivity following the Yom Kippur War.

The overlap could not have been lost on Haim, although the young adults in the room may not have known.

Later, Haim faced a long line of people wishing for a word or a hug.

“She’s clearly one of the strongest people I’ve ever had the honor of hearing from,” Marc Dver, an immigrant from Allentown, Pennsylvania, told me. “I’m not sure if I could ever face adversity the way she did. It’s a very inspiring story.”

Dver was asked what spoke to him the most. He mentioned the frustration of being unmarried at age 45. “I’m more inspired to reframe my situation in a more positive light,” he said. “It’s easy to lose hope when you go on date after date after date.”

Filmmaker Doron Eran, who’d dropped by the coffee shop earlier, said she’s an example for him, too.

“She hugged the soldiers who killed her son. It gave me inspiration,” Eran, who is making a dramatic movie about the three hostages, said in a subsequent phone call. “It’s very surprising. It’s maybe not natural.”

The comments spurred me to ponder Haim’s unique outlook. I located her most striking observation in notes taken while we drove to the Givat Shmuel event.

I’d asked if, in the months since her son’s death, she’s fantasized about the moment the soldiers would have delivered him to her all-embracing arms very much alive.

“Of course, I thought of this,” Haim said.

But she really meant, no.

“The word ‘if’ must be erased,” she continued. “I say it’s the death of his body. Yotam is with me, with us, for the next chapter. We get used to living with him in a different phase.”