How a hostage family leader became one of the loudest anti-war voices in Israel

December 6, 2024

Edo Konrad and Oren Ziv

In partnership with

    When Ayala Metzger walks among the ghosts of Nir Oz, it almost feels like she isn’t quite sure whose story she wants to tell first. For the better part of the last year, she has been regularly leading tours along the dusty paths between the kibbutz’s gutted low-rise homes, located just four kilometers from the Gaza Strip. To anyone who will listen, she recounts what happened here on the morning of October 7 in vivid detail, like a forensic scientist reconstructing a crime scene.

Ayala Metzger sits in a cage to symbolize the Israeli hostages’ captivity in Gaza during a protest in central Tel Aviv, March 27, 2024. (Oren Ziv)

Forty-one members of Nir Oz and 11 Thai workers were killed in the kibbutz that day, while 71 residents and five more workers were kidnapped and taken back to Gaza. But Metzger doesn’t view herself as simply the groundskeeper of a plaque-less memorial; as the daughter-in-law of Yoram Metzger, whose body was brought back to Israel in a military operation after he was killed in Hamas’ captivity in February, and of Tamar Metzger, who returned alive in November last year in the hitherto only hostage deal, she knows time is not on the side of the remaining hostages.

Perhaps that is why she so fiercely oscillates between the personal and the political. Walking with her through what remains of her former community allows for scarcely a moment to absorb the horrors, but Metzger’s thoughts seem to be racing far ahead.

She moves through the ruins of Bracha Levinson’s home — where her killers allegedly live-streamed her murder on Facebook, and where traces of a life cut short, including a personal diary left open on a couch, remain littered among the wreckage. There is barely time to take it all in before Metzger breaks the silence, recounting the minute details of the residents’ evacuation to the southern city of Eilat the day after the carnage. Gazing at the toys scattered outside the Bibas family’s home, whose red-haired children have become the most recognizable faces of the hostages in Gaza, Metzger weaves between her daughter’s survival story and reflections on her own metamorphosis into an activist.

But Metzger is not merely a relative who occasionally joins protests in support of a hostage deal. Within several months of the war breaking out, she had come to believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the “main obstacle” to bringing back the hostages, choosing to prolong Israel’s onslaught on Gaza at their expense. Today, she is one of the most prominent voices among the hostage families, demanding an immediate end to a war that has killed over 44,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 100,000 others — transforming her, as she puts it, into an “anti-regime dissident.”

Recounting a massacre

On paper, Metzger appears to be anything but a dissident. She grew up in an Ashkenazi, Zionist-left home in Pardes Hanna-Karkur, a sleepy middle-class town in central Israel known today for its anti-vaxxers and hippie communes. She was raised on the lore of her grandparents, veterans of the 1948 War who “fought to establish the state and creating something meaningful.”

She and her husband Ran, who was born and raised in Nir Oz, moved to the kibbutz in the early ‘90s and left in 2005, the year Israel evacuated its settlements from the Gaza Strip. Although she always thought of herself as a leftist and against the occupation, she was more of a passive onlooker with some half-formed views, rather than a full-time activist. It was October 7 and its aftermath that would irrevocably change her into the latter.

On that day, like many other Israelis, Metzger woke up to the sound of sirens in her moshav, not far from the southern city of Ashkelon. Shortly thereafter, she started receiving text messages from her youngest daughter, who had spent the night with Metzger’s brother-in-law in Nir Oz. As the hours passed, the messages became more frantic and indiscernible, which Metzger later learned was due to the presence of Hamas gunmen outside the family’s home.

Militants broke into and set homes on fire, kidnapping and killing their occupants, after which hundreds of Palestinian civilians came streaming into the kibbutz through an opening in the fence that encages Gaza. “They sat in our kitchens, they took our tractors and our bicycles out for a spin,” Metzger recounts.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army was nowhere to be found. Metzger’s voice almost falters when describing how less than a dozen kibbutz members — some of whom were killed or kidnapped — were left to defend 400 residents. Soldiers finally arrived long after multiple waves of Gazans militants and civilians had returned to Gaza. “We live in a society built on the understanding that the Israeli army exists,” she says. “That in the moment of truth, it will show up — whether it takes 15 minutes or an hour, they will be here. But they weren’t here.”

Metzger’s daughter survived, but by the time it was over, a quarter of the kibbutz, including Yoram and Tamar, was gone — either dead or taken hostage. Israeli forces spent the next days sifting through the wreckage, trying to identify bodies (some had been charred so far beyond recognition that they could only be recognized by their teeth) including in the fields between Gaza and Nir Oz. Since then, the army has boarded up many of the homes.

Today, only a handful of kibbutz members and Thai workers live in the kibbutz, while the vast majority were eventually absorbed into a compound in the nearby city of Kiryat Gat. Earlier this month, over a year after the massacre, the Israeli government finally announced it would start rebuilding the kibbutz. But Netanyahu has not once visited the community that has become a symbol of government dereliction for many Israelis. And on Dec. 4, the Israeli army released the results of an internal probe that found that Yoram Metzger had been executed by his captors together with five other hostages — as a result, whether direct or indirect, of the Israeli military pounding the area where they were being held.

‘We stopped asking for permission’

Metzger and Ran spent the first weeks after October 7 in triage mode, going between her parents’ home in Pardes Hanna, where she worked on building lists of those who disappeared that day, and Eilat, where she supported the displaced of Nir Oz. But she quickly realized that she needed to broaden her efforts, and headed to Jerusalem to try and speak to members of Knesset about a hostage deal. There, she discovered that a hostage family had erected a protest tent in front of the Prime Minister’s Residence, demanding that Netanyahu do everything in his power to bring their loved ones home.

After two weeks in Jerusalem, she decided to focus all of her energy on working with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum — the central hub advocating for the hostages’ return, composed of activists from across the political spectrum. The Forum established “Hostages Square” in central Tel Aviv, where it holds weekly ceremonial vigils replete with somber speeches, songs, and performances.

Since its inception, says Metzger, the Forum has had to perform a “delicate tango” to keep its various factions unified under one banner, and to try to appeal to a broad spectrum of Israelis. While some members, like Metzger, have been openly critical of the government, others have pushed the Forum to take a conciliatory and cooperative approach with Netanyahu — a position that, over the past six months, has become increasingly untenable.

A meeting with the prime minister and his wife Sara last December ended with little more than what Metzger calls the “royal couple’s” braggadocio: Netanyahu implored the hostage families to tell the world about their plight but to avoid doing so in the local media; Sara regaled them with tales of how she wrote to women’s organizations around the world.

“The Forum members were afraid to say that the government was responsible [for returning the hostages], to hold them accountable and point the finger at them,” Metzger explains. “Members of the Forum knew how to set up tents, provide facilities, and bring sound equipment. But I needed our message to be refined.”

Meanwhile, Metzger began noticing the growing influence of the Tikva Forum, a far-right alternative to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum that supports the government’s “total victory” approach — for whom unrelenting military destruction in Gaza is seen as the only way to force Hamas to surrender, even at the expense of the hostages. “My first lesson in politics came when I understood who the Tikva Forum was,” Metzger says, noting that their vision of “sacrificing our children to become martyrs” aligned all too well with that of the government.

The vigils at Hostages Square, meanwhile, were too reminiscent of the solemnity associated with Israel’s annual Memorial Day ceremonies. “We went to the square about four times, and at some point I just couldn’t [be there] anymore,” Metzger explains. “So I started looking for other ways that didn’t involve standing there and singing.”

Metzger knew she would need to stake out a more radical position in order to exert real pressure on the government. And so in January, along with a small group of hostage family members, she began blocking main thoroughfares, including the Ayalon Highway. “We decided to simply start taking action, action, action. This draws the media to you, and that way you can deliver your messaging [to the public]. We stopped asking for permission.”

The Forum quickly distanced itself from the cadre, while Netanyahu-aligned media outlets and social media personalities — often dubbed the “poison machine” — launched a campaign of incitement against them. By February, they were openly speaking to the media, both local and international (Metzger herself gave an interview to Al Jazeera, which the Israeli government banned for its alleged support for terrorism), and confronting the police head on with protests that often ended in arrests or injuries; Metzger was wounded in June when she was trampled by a police officer on horseback.

During the tour of Nir Oz, two middle-aged women excitedly recognize Metzger (“We watch you hypnotized during every protest!”), urging her to enter politics (“We need new blood, someone we can vote for!”). Metzger speaks to them less like a revered public figure and more like the leader of a militant underground movement: “You must be careful everywhere now. Just by virtue of being against the government, you are already seen as a political dissident. That is why we need to ensure we have access to weapons — I’m serious.”

It was certainly not the first inflammatory remark Metzger has made over the last year; in June, during a protest outside Netanyahu’s home in Caesarea, Metzger delivered a blistering speech over the deafening blare of police sirens, in which she declared that if the hostages are not returned, “We will be waiting with a noose.”

The sacrificial altar of ‘total victory’

The penny dropped sometime in early May. Announcing that it had agreed to an Egyptian-Qatari proposal for a ceasefire and hostage deal, Hamas took the Israeli public — and the government — by surprise. Netanyahu quickly made his position clear: there would be no ceasefire, and Israeli ground troops would proceed into Rafah, a plan many Israelis said had been concocted by the prime minister to thwart a deal with Hamas and keep the war going.

Polls show that Metzger’s views are today in line with the vast majority of the Jewish-Israeli public, which has shifted over the last year from wall-to-wall support for the war to an overwhelming majority in favor of a negotiated deal to end it and return the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. She came to the conclusion “early on” that the war had to end, and like many others, she couldn’t comprehend how every soi-disant military “victory” — from the invasion of Rafah to the assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, and Hassan Nasrallah — wasn’t bringing the release of the hostages any closer.

“I initially supported the war,” she says. “I told myself, ‘Put pressure on [Hamas], fine. We need to fight.’ But as time went on, I began to see how every point of leverage was deliberately tossed away, and how, every time there is a real opportunity on the table, right before an agreement is signed, suddenly [Israel] assassinates some senior [Palestinian] figure. It has become systematic. How many more soldiers and hostages are we going to sacrifice for this?” 

Since October 7, a total of 78 Israeli hostages — including Metzger’s mother-in-law — were freed in a deal with Hamas last November, while eight others were rescued alive in military operations. Hamas also released four women for “humanitarian reasons,” as well as 27 foreign and dual nationals outside of the initial deal.

The Israeli army itself killed three hostages in December, mistaking them for Gazans. Another was killed in a botched rescue operation. Around 30 have been recovered by the military in body bags, some of whom were killed on October 7 and some of whom died in captivity. At least 36 of the remaining 96 hostages are presumed dead, and Hamas claims that Israeli attacks have killed several others.

Metzger is convinced that Netanyahu’s doctrine of “total victory” is a euphemism for abandoning the remaining abductees. “It was clear to me from the start that Netanyahu wasn’t seriously considering anything but the military route,” she says. “We knew already in February that Yoram was killed in captivity; the deaths of the hostages is a result of that very same military pressure.”

Despite the respectable showings at the weekly protests in support of the hostage families, Metzger feels the activists have been left with little recourse. But there is one act she believes could force the government to end the war and cut a deal: conscientious objection, a phenomenon that gained popularity during last year’s protests against the government’s judicial overhaul, but became a near-treasonous position following the Hamas attacks.

“People must refuse to be part of an army that continues to corrupt itself,” she says. “Why are we surprised when Palestinians, who we have harmed, turn around and commit pogroms against us when we invade their homes?”

Metzger’s call for refusal is as personal as it is political — her daughter was conscripted into the army after October 7, and her son is a few years away from enlisting — and she displays no compunction about urging her children to refuse to serve. “If the army argues with my daughter about wearing a pin for the hostages because it’s not officially approved but allows other soldiers to wear a messianic patch that says that killing Palestinians is okay, then this isn’t a defense force — this is an army of vengeance fighting in the name of God,” she says, her voice rising with exasperation.

Her words hang in the air, cut off only by the purring of stray cats that now constitute the majority of Nir Oz’s population. The only other audible sounds are an army drone buzzing in the distance, and gunfire cutting through the wind from the direction of Khan Younis — just a few miles beyond the fence that was supposed to protect one community and imprison another in perpetuity. Even here, among the ruins of the kibbutz, Gaza forces its way back into the Israeli consciousness.

Waging a different struggle

In mid-October, Metzger took part in a conference in south Tel Aviv to mark the one-year anniversary of October 7 and the war on Gaza (Hebrew-language site Local Call was one of the sponsors of the event). Speaking alongside Palestinian journalists and activists, Jewish radical leftists, and community organizers, Metzger told her story. Speaking after Gazan journalist Mahmoud Mushtaha — whose pre-recorded testimony described how Israel’s genocidal assault has killed dozens of his family members — she took the opportunity to address what the vast majority of Israelis prefer to ignore.

“I grew up learning not to make generalizations, certainly not about 3-year-old children,” she told the packed auditorium. “Yes, the 3-year-old might attend a Hamas kindergarten, but he is not to blame for what he’s being taught. I see it in Ashkelon too, where there is a similar kind of education, just from the opposite side of the political spectrum. So he is not to blame, and he certainly doesn’t deserve a bullet to the head just because he was in a Hamas kindergarten or because his mother was part of Hamas. I’m not willing to be part of that, and I’m not okay with things like that being done in my name.”

“The longer this war drags on,” Metzger continued, “the more the hatred grows. My mission today is, first and foremost, to stop this cycle. I want to address the Palestinian side, as they too bear responsibility in this story and must engage in self-reflection, demand more, and take greater action — despite the immense difficulties. Even as we face a fascist-leaning reality on our side and are in a position of relative strength [vis-a-vis Palestinians], there is a need for introspection on their part.”

Standing in Nir Oz’s communal dining room, where long tables have been set up with places laid for each kibbutz member still held captive in Gaza, Metzger certainly has no love lost for those who pillaged the kibbutz. And yet she knows that the violence of October 7 did not occur in a vacuum.

“What’s happening in the occupied territories — I cannot stand behind this,” she says. “Do we really think that there won’t be a boomerang effect [to this]? Those who speak the language of bullying and force should expect the same in return. It’s a terrible loop that’s incredibly hard to break out of. You have to be brave to step out of it.”

Despite everything she and her community have endured, Metzger knows there is no choice but to try and imagine a shared future between Israelis and Palestinians. “The other option is to leave en masse and tell the Kahanists to build their Holy Temple on blood-soaked ground,” she says. “Now the question is: what will our camp decide to do? Flee? Will we abandon the fight or stay and wage a different kind of struggle?”

The question lingers in the air as the sun creeps westward toward Khan Younis. Metzger knows the answers will surface eventually, but for now she is confronting a reality in which the hostage families have become emblematic of Jewish-Israeli society’s deepening fractures — a stark contrast to the unifying force they represented in the immediate aftermath of October 7.

“We’ve entered a new phase, but it’s unclear where we go from here.” she says. “The government has escalated its violence on all fronts, while we are stuck in the same cycle that has run its course.”