“I love you, Doron, I long to hold you again, me and the entire family. Be strong. We won’t stop fighting until you get out. Hold on just a little longer, you will soon be with us.”
This was Simona Steinbrecher’s poignant message, in an interview with JNS, to her youngest daughter, Doron, who was kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7.
“I never thought we’d reach nine months of this. I was sure that we’d get her back before,” she said.
Doron, a dual Romanian-Israeli veterinary nurse who was abducted from her Kibbutz Kfar Aza apartment during the Hamas onslaught, marked her 31st birthday in March in captivity.
Back in January, Hamas released a propaganda video clip featuring Doron along with two other captives, Daniella Gilboa and Karina Ariev, all three pleading for their release.
“After 107 days, Hamas released a film where we could see Doron. This is her the week before she was taken from us—and this is a picture from the film they sent us,” she said while showing me a billboard featuring images of her daughter.
“You can see the difference; she is thin, pale. Doron needs to take medication daily and they don’t give it to her. We know from those who returned that they don’t get sufficient food or water, they can’t sleep, young women are followed around everywhere, including the bathroom,” she continued.
“We’ve heard of the physical brutality and sexual abuse that takes place in captivity, we fear for her, for what could happen,” Steinbrecher lamented.
‘The life and heart of our family’
On Oct. 7, as rocket sirens blared throughout the State of Israel, Simona Steinbrecher rushed to her safe room and asked her daughters to do the same, each one in her own apartment.
“Together with the alarms, we started hearing men speaking Arabic. At 10:20 a.m., [Doron] called us to tell us that they were close. She called again and said they had smashed her windows and shot into her room. She was terrified,” she recalled.
“I don’t know how she found the strength to do so but she managed to send her friends a voice message saying they were taking her. In the voice message, we can hear screams of ‘Allahu Akbar.’ We kept calling her but that was it,” she added.
The Hamas terrorists grabbed Doron, still in her pajamas, and abducted her to Gaza.
“They didn’t enter our house, but they were around; we could see bodies. I have another daughter, Yamit, who is married with two kids and who also lives in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. They tried to enter her house but she had two big dogs in there, and I guess they were afraid, they stopped trying after shooting at her windows,” she said.
Doron was very close to her two nephews. Since she was taken, they haven’t stopped asking for her.
“When they were younger, they couldn’t say ‘Doron,’ so they call her ‘Dodo.’ They keep asking all the time where their Dodo is. They write to her and paint pictures for her. They really miss her, everyone does. She was the life and the heart of our family,” said Steinbrecher.
Until a Hamas propaganda video was published over three months after the attack, Doron’s family had suspected that she was a hostage, but did not know with certainty.
“Of all those who came back in November, no one saw her, we asked them but they weren’t held with her,” said Steinbrecher.
In November, Hamas released 105 hostages, mostly women and children, as part of a weeklong ceasefire agreement. Doron was not among them.
As mediators work to revive the phased ceasefire outline presented by U.S. President Joe Biden in May, which calls in its first stage for a six-week truce during which dozens of Israeli hostages, women, the elderly and the sick, would be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian terrorists, Steinbrecher said fighting for her daughter’s return has become her life.
“She’s a strong woman, but it’s terrible being there. I hope she can fight through it, but she does not have any more time. We want her back alive. I hope she knows that we are fighting for her and that we will never stop,” she said.
“Now is the time to close a deal. They [the hostages] don’t have any more time. Some of the hostages are no longer alive. We want Doron and all the others to come back now,” she pleaded.
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spelled out Jerusalem’s red lines in negotiations with Hamas; including the ability to resume fighting until all war goals have been met; an end to arms smuggling into Gaza through Egypt; no return of “thousands” of terrorists to northern Gaza; and maximizing the release of living hostages.
Israel Security Agency chief Ronen Bar departed for Cairo on Monday to continue the talks. Mossad director David Barnea is expected to fly to Doha on Wednesday to meet with his CIA counterpart, William Burns, Egyptian intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Kamel and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in an attempt to work out a deal.
