‘It’s so lonely’: Desperate families of Israeli hostages are still in the dark a week on from Hamas rampage

The last glimpse Adina Moshe’s family saw of her shows the 72-year-old woman on a motorbike, wedged between two Hamas fighters who are kidnapping her from the Nir Oz kibbutz near Gaza.

Moshe looks terrified, but is holding her head high.

The horrifying picture is featured on a missing person notice that has been posted alongside dozens of others on the wall of HaKirya, the government and military quarters in Tel Aviv.

“First, I couldn’t look at it because it’s so shocking, you can see the kidnappers who killed her husband and put her on a motorcycle … and she has to hold onto him so she doesn’t fall,” Moshe’s niece Einav Moshe Barda told CNN during a gathering outside HaKirya.

Moshe Barda said the family was told by authorities that Moshe is believed to be among the people that have been taken to Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Friday that it notified the families of 120 people taken captive, but did not release any other information.

A week after the attack, those families are still stuck in agonizing limbo.

“All we have been told is that her phone is in Gaza,” Meirav Gonen, whose daughter Romi was kidnapped from the Supernova dance festival, told CNN.

“I know she was shot. She called me at 10:15 and I was on with her until 10:58, she was fading away and I heard shooting around her coming closer to the car and then people shouting in Arabic… shouting she was alive and that they need her,” she said.

Hamas gunmen murdered at least 260 people at that music festival. Throughout their rampage they killed around 1,300 people.

Gonen was speaking to CNN at the makeshift headquarters of the Families of Hostages and Missing Persons Forum in Tel Aviv, a group that was formed to provide support to those affected by the crisis.

The forum has put together teams tasked with speaking to the government and lobbying foreign diplomats. It has a PR team that is spreading awareness of the individual cases, as well as a group of negotiators who are trying to come up with a strategy on how to secure the release of the hostages.

“First and foremost it’s for the families, to support each other,” Gonen said. “So that you know you’re not alone. It’s so, so lonely. All the thoughts and feelings that you have once you stop for a minute to listen to them,” she said, adding that she has “locked all the thoughts away behind a door.”