The Hostages Came Home. America Moved On. We Shouldn’t Have.

Every few weeks, my friends and I pack boxes of plush animals and send them to the families of hostages taken from Israel on October 7, 2023. We started the charity because a stuffed bear says something a press release can’t: you are not forgotten. Lately, though, I’ve noticed that the sentiment behind those boxes is becoming rarer. The bears keep going out. The attention has stopped coming in.

On January 26, 2026, the body of the last hostage was returned to Israel, closing the ledger on all 251 people seized during the October 7 attack. For many Americans, that date marked an ending. The ceasefire negotiated between Israel and Hamas in October 2025 had already pushed the war off front pages; the return of the final hostage seemed to give the country permission to file the whole ordeal under history.

But for the survivors, nothing ended in January. Rather, it just started warming up.

The hostages who came home alive are children, parents, and grandparents now living with the aftermath of captivity. Doctors at Beilinson Hospital’s long-term Hostages Rehabilitation Unit, which received some of the last living hostages freed in October, have said the men will likely need ongoing treatment for months and in some cases years — and that it was too early even to diagnose the PTSD many are expected to develop. 

The research is sobering: a longitudinal study of Israeli prisoners of war from the 1973 Yom Kippur War found that captivity produces deep and long-lasting psychological, somatic, and functional injuries. Recovery from that kind of ordeal is not measured in news cycles. It is measured in years, sometimes generations. Israel is a country scarred by a traumatic event nearly every generation, driven by the same forces each time: prejudice, geopolitics, and antisemitism. The wounds of October 7 will not close simply because the story has.

Americans, of all people, should understand this. We live shoulder to shoulder with veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — men and women still working, decades later, to recover from what war did to them. We know from our own history that the fighting ends long before the suffering does. We also know what happens when a society decides that returning home is the same as being healed: veterans left to struggle alone, their pain treated as an inconvenience rather than a national obligation. To repeat that neglect with the hostages — to look away because the headlines have — would be an insult not just to them but to what we claim to have learned.

And the damage extends far beyond the hostages themselves. The ceasefire did not undo two years of destruction. This spring, the United Nations and European Union released their final damage and needs assessment for Gaza, estimating reconstruction costs at $71.4 billion over the next decade, with most homes and nearly all businesses damaged or destroyed. Israeli communities along the border are still rebuilding too, and entire populations on both sides are reeling from atrocities they experienced firsthand. Treating the conflict as resolved because a document was signed mistakes the absence of rockets for the presence of peace.

I write this as a Jewish American. Judaism connects me to Israel and to the wider Jewish diaspora, and I have watched with frustration as mistrust between Israel and much of the world — including many Americans — has deepened rather than eased since October 7. I understand the impulse to move on. Two years of war is exhausting even to witness from afar. But moving on is a luxury available only to people who weren’t there.

The hostages are living proof of where extremism and terrorism lead. Their testimony matters precisely because it is uncomfortable — because it refuses to let a hard chapter become a closed one. What they need from Americans now is not much: to hear their stories, to support the organizations helping them heal, to resist the temptation to treat January 26 as the day the subject expired.

We can’t forget the hostages, because they are not able to forget what they suffered. Their trauma is ongoing. Our support should be too.

Eva Halimi is a student and co-founder of Plushies for Peace, a charity that donates plush animals to the families of hostages.