Jonathan Dekel-Chen said his life has been a “living hell” since his son, Sagui Dekel-Chen — an American citizen — was taken hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz by Hamas terrorists one year ago.
“It’s our own crisis of having a hostage that we know nothing of his fate. Our homes were destroyed. Most of our property [was] either looted or burned by the looters, and we’ve lost our way of life,” Dekel-Chen told The Daily Wire.
Jonathan Dekel-Chen said his life has been a “living hell” since his son, Sagui Dekel-Chen — an American citizen — was taken hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz by Hamas terrorists one year ago.
My interview with him: pic.twitter.com/CJX7pYCV27
— Kassy Akiva (@KassyAkiva) October 8, 2024
Dekel-Chen, who also lived in Kibbutz Nir Oz, said the entire community is “completely traumatized” because there is “not a single household that wasn’t touched, either by someone being murdered, or taken hostage, or both.”
“We don’t know what the future holds for any of us. So it’s been a year of agony,” said Dekel-Chen, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
When Hamas terrorists entered Nir Oz, 36-year-old Sagui put his pregnant wife Avital and their children in a safe room and went to defend the kibbutz. He was then taken hostage by Hamas. His family has not received news of his condition since November, when freed hostages said they saw him wounded.
Dekel-Chen said his son was heavily involved in serving the Jewish and Arab Bedouin communities of southern Israel, and was working on converting old buses to usable objects for underserved communities on the morning of October 7.
“He’s the son that any parent would dream of,” Dekel-Chen said. “It’s such a terrible waste that he and another 100 — almost all of them civilians — have had their lives and the lives of their families destroyed this way.”
During his speech at the Remembering October 7 event hosted Monday by the Philos Project in Washington, D.C., Dekel-Chen said he often wonders how much Saugi knew in captivity about the fate of the rest of his family.
“Ever since he was taken, I ask myself, what does he know? Does he know that his wife and two young daughters or anyone from [nearby] all survived the massacre? Does he know that his youngest daughter, Shahar, which means Dawn in Hebrew, was born in mid-December?”
He added that he and the residents of Nir Oz feel like “refugees in our own country.”
Out of the about 400 residents of Nir Oz, 51 were murdered and 79 others were taken hostage, according to Dekel-Chen. Twenty-six people are still in captivity.
“Hamas and the civilian looters from Gaza reduced us in one day from a hyper-productive proud farming community to a smoldering shell by the afternoon of October 7,” Dekel-Chen, who lived in Connecticut before moving to Israel, said.
He added that he wishes the governments of Israel and the United States would do more to free the hostages.
“I must humbly ask for more: for you to dig deeper, fight harder for the hostages and for the future of Israel,” he said. “I do not seek revenge. I seek justice. Justice for the hostages. For their families. For the simple right to be free and to live in a Jewish state that protects its citizens even when it requires political courage from our leaders in Israel.”
