'I am with you': In Israel, anguish over dozens of Hamas-held captives

TEL AVIV — These days, when Israelis speak of loved ones who are missing and believed held by the militant group Hamas, they sometimes make a small, heartbreaking slip of the tongue.

"She was so brave," they might say. Or: "He really was a very kind person."

Then, with a quick draw of breath, they catch themselves: She is. He is.

Because using the present tense connotes the belief, or at least the hope, that the missing are still among the living.

For family members and close friends of the more than 220 people seized in southern Israel during a deadly onslaught by Palestinian militants on Oct. 7, this has been a time of near-hallucinatory grief — and wrenching uncertainty.

Many families, if not most, do not know whether missing loved ones are dead or alive inside the Gaza Strip, the densely populated coastal enclave that is now being pummeled by Israeli bombardment, starved of food and electricity, and is under imminent threat of an Israeli ground invasion.

Those taken include grandmothers and: so varied a group as to defy categorization, other than by their common presence near the Gaza fence on that fateful Saturday morning.