Israeli mom offers herself as Hamas hostage to reunite with kidnapped daughters

An Israeli mother is offering herself as hostage to Hamas in order to potentially reunite with her young daughters, one month after they were taken captive by the terrorist group.

“I am calling on the President of the United States Joe Biden and Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, if you can’t bring back my girls now, I’m asking you, I’m begging you, take me to them now,” Maayan Zin begged in an emotional video appeal uploaded on X.

“Put me in Gaza. I will be hostage 243. If only I could hold them and tell them everything would be alright. Hug them and tell them that mom is here – no matter what mom is here.”

Zin’s daughters – Dafna Elyakim, 15, and eight-year-old Ella Elyakim – were kidnapped by Hamas from their father’s house in Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7, according to the Times of Israel.

The attack on the family home was streamed on Facebook Live, which showed Zin’s ex-husband, Noam Elyakim, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the leg as Dafna cries beside him, the outlet said.

The bodies of Noam, his girlfriend Dikla Arava, and Arava’s son, Tomer, were later found near the Gaza border.

Zin later saw a second video of her daughters sitting on a mattress in pajamas she did not recognize, the Times of Israel reported.

“My girls, Dafna and Ella, fifteen and eight years old, are being held captive by Hamas in Gaza. Two girls alone after they had to see their father brutally murdered,” Zin lamented in her X video, which received over one million views in just a few hours on Sunday.

“Thirty days have passed since they were kidnapped, since they were taken from me,” she added, noting that it is hard “to even catch [her] breath” since Oct. 7.

“I am receiving many messages praising my video, and it has thousands of views. But, I don’t seek views; I only want my girls to return home NOW,” she wrote in a follow-up post.

In an interview with CNN shortly after the early October attack that killed 1,400 people and left about 242 Israelis in Hamas captivity, Zin explained that she confirmed her daughters were taken when her sister showed her a video of Dafna “on a mattress in Gaza.”

“I thought at first it was a kind of photoshop the Arabs did. I didn’t think such a thing could be possible,” she recalled.

“They are all I wanted all my life. This is my existence to be a mother. It’s all I wanted. I didn’t want to be rich, I didn’t want to be married, I didn’t want anything. I wanted to be a mother.”

Zin and hundreds of other families in Israel and beyond are living in a nightmare one month after Hamas terrorists broke through the Gaza border fence and unleashed merciless violence on southern Israel.

Kibbutz Nir Oz, where Dafna and Ella were visiting their father, was one of the hardest-hit communities and lost a quarter of its population in just a few hours, according to The Atlantic.

The local dead include the Siman Tov family – grandmother Carol, her son Johnny, his wife, Tamar, their twin daughters, six-year-old Shahar and Arbel, and four-year-old son Omer, per the New York Times.

The family was buried together in one pit, which the coffins could barely all squeeze into, the outlet noted.

As of Tuesday, four hostages have been returned: American mother and daughter Judith and Natalie Raanan, who were let go on Oct. 20, and elderly neighbors Nurit Yitzhak and Yochved Lifshitz, who were let go three days later.