JERUSALEM — The body of Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin was found “bullet ridden and emaciated” in a 60-foot-deep tunnel, his grieving parents told NBC News in their first interview since his death, warning that the scores of hostages still in the Gaza Strip are “not going to make it much longer.”
In a wide-ranging and emotional interview in Jerusalem last week, they revealed the squalid conditions in which their son was kept, their exasperation at the failed diplomatic process and their fears of the war’s escalating further.
Goldberg-Polin’s parents, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, said they felt they had failed as their high-profile push for a cease-fire deal to bring their son home from Hamas captivity fell on deaf ears.
In the year since militants abducted their son in video seen around the world, they have felt like “pawns in chess,” his mother said, as world leaders failed to resolve the “surplus of anguish, misery and suffering on both sides” of the Israel-Gaza border. Her husband, speaking shortly after the anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, called for an end to the “cycles, endlessly, of bloodshed and wars” in the Middle East.
It’s a region “on the precipice,” Jon Polin warned, with Israel now at war not just in Gaza but also in Lebanon and engaged in an escalating exchange with Iran. “We can let the current situation lead us in one of two very different directions,” he said. “I hope that we choose the courageous one.”
Goldberg-Polin, 23, was born in Berkeley, California, and emigrated to Israel with his family at age 7. He was among 251 people taken hostage during Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, in which 1,200 other people were killed, according to Israeli officials.
Since then, 154 have been freed, with 101 hostages still held in Gaza, including 33 believed dead. Seven American hostages are still believed to be in Gaza, including three known to have died. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has faced angry protests from Israelis admonishing him to end the war and bring the captives home.
Israel’s yearlong military assault has killed more than 42,000 people in the Gaza Strip, most of them women and children, and injured 95,000 others, according to the Palestinian enclave’s Health Ministry.
“We are not alone in having lost,” Rachel Goldberg-Polin said. “There are thousands of people in Israel who have lost people; there are thousands and thousands of people in Gaza who have lost people.”
There is “a surplus of so much agony,” she added.
Her son, a geography lover who planned to travel the world last December, was at Israel’s Supernova music festival when Hamas attacked in the early hours of Oct. 7, 2023. He and around 30 people hid in a roadside bunker and were soon discovered by the militants, who began throwing grenades inside. His friend Aner Shapiro, 22, was able to toss back seven grenades before the eighth killed him.
Goldberg-Polin’s loved ones discovered he survived only after video showed him being bundled into a militant’s truck, his left arm blown off below the elbow. They would have to wait until April to learn he had recovered, when a Hamas video showed him with a healed stump.
“He was kept in a tunnel that was 60 feet underground, with no electricity and no plumbing,” Rachel Goldberg-Polin said. At just 5 feet tall and 2 feet wide, the passageway was too cramped to stand in, she said.
“There were bottles of dark urine everywhere” because they “were so dehydrated,” she said. “And there was a bucket at the end of the tunnel” for other bathroom needs.
Somehow, his parents and two younger sisters never lost hope for his return.
“We knew he was held captive, in a war zone by a terror organization, with one arm missing,” Jon Polin said. But “we were optimistic and hopeful. We knew there could be another outcome, but it basically had never entered our minds.”
On Aug. 31, however, that other outcome that they had never uttered became their reality.
They began to hear rumors that their son’s body was among six found in the tunnels beneath Gaza, most likely executed two days earlier by militants as Israel’s military closed in. The others were later confirmed as Carmel Gat, 40, Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Alexander Lobanov, 32, Almog Sarusi, 27, and Ori Danino, 25.
Israeli and American officials showed up at Goldberg-Polin’s Jerusalem home in the early hours. “They don’t show up at your door at 4 o’clock in the morning with good news,” Jon Polin said.
His wife opened the door before they approached. “The dread of hearing the knock on the door with such bad news was something that I didn’t think I could bear,” she said.
They learned Goldberg-Polin had “tried to protect himself,” with one of the bullets going through his hand and out the side of his head, his mother said. “Then they put the gun on the back of his head and they shot him.”
When they buried him two days later, he weighed just 115 pounds.
“It’s really critical that the world knows this is how these hostages are being held — they are starving,” Rachel Goldberg-Polin said. “So while we’re having this conversation, there are hostages in similar tunnels” most likely “surrounded by bottles of urine and buckets of feces, in complete darkness.”
They “are not going to make it much longer,” she added, “if this continues.”
The family members are clear about who bears the most responsibility.
“Hamas committed a horrific massacre inside of Israel,” Jon Polin said. “They are responsible for pulling the trigger that killed Hersh and the five other beautiful people who were with him.”
But responsibility in their eyes doesn’t end there.
“There are also plenty of world leaders in Israel, outside of Israel, who have failed to bring a solution,” he said. Asked whether they had spoken to Netanyahu since their son’s death, Jon Polin said that the prime minister’s office had reached out to them but that they declined.
President Joe Biden has been at times optimistic, but a deal has remained elusive.
The Goldberg-Polin family asked “many leaders in the world” about the possibility the captors would “line up the hostages one by one and shoot them in the head,” Jon Polin said. “We were repeatedly told, ‘No, that’s not what’s going to happen; the hostages are an asset.’”
They reserve some blame for themselves.
“What we have failed to do on our journey is shake up the world to understand the urgency of this issue,” Jon Polin said. “We failed to instill Martin Luther King’s ‘fierce urgency of now,’ and part of why we’re talking about it is we still want to instill that urgency in others in the world.”
Now the concern is for not just the remaining hostages, but also the region and perhaps the wider world.
Israel has its attention focused not just on Gaza but also on its northern neighbor, Lebanon, from where Hezbollah started firing rockets at it after the Oct. 7 attack, pledging support for the Palestinians. Jon Polin is worried about becoming “mired in a forever war.”
Rachel Goldberg-Polin added that the region has “been on this trajectory for decades, truly for centuries. If you look back at the history of warfare, it doesn’t work. It’s not beneficial for anybody. So who is going to be brave enough? And the answer might be no one, but that’s our challenge.”
Erin McLaughlin reported from Jerusalem and Alexander Smith from London.
