Iris Haim cannot bear to think about how close her kidnapped son came to freedom before he was mistakenly shot dead by Israeli soldiers. After being held captive by Hamas in Gaza for more than two months, Yotam Haim and two other Israeli hostages escaped and evaded their captors for five days, only to be killed by the IDF.
Haim has repeatedly insisted she does not blame the soldiers who mistakenly identified Yotam as a threat. But she said it was devastating to know how close she had come to being reunited with the 28-year-old, who had dreamed of becoming a professional musician.
“Yotam was actually so close to coming back home,” Haim said in an interview in Jerusalem. “It could ruin me but I’ve decided that I don’t want to think about this last moment. I don’t want to think ‘what if?’. Because if I think ‘what if?’, it will be very difficult to continue. I will stay in the past and Yotam will not come back. So I want to forget the last moment. And I can do it. I can. I don’t think about this. I just think about his bravery.”
Yotam was abducted from the Kfar Aza kibbutz along with Alon Shamriz, 26, during Hamas’s 7 October attack, while Samer El-Talalqa, 24, was taken from the Nir Am kibbutz.
The three men were killed in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighbourhood on 15 December after being mistakenly identified by the IDF as terrorists, despite being shirtless and waving a makeshift white flag.
Haim said it was “like a slap in the face” to find out that Yotam, a drummer in a heavy metal band, had been killed after escaping captivity five days earlier.
She said: “For five days they [the hostages] walked around Shejaiya looking for Israeli soldiers, escaping from Hamas, making signs with paprika to say they were there, writing: ‘Please help, three hostages.’ And nobody understood, nobody saw. The best intelligence in the world didn’t understand that. In the end they reached the army but they thought they were armed terrorists.”
The family went to a briefing at an army base two weeks later where they were given more details about the killings, which had caused anger and intensified scrutiny of Israel’s military campaign.
According to Haim, the IDF had sent a military dog wearing a camera into a building in Shejaiya on 10 December. A gun battle broke out and some Hamas fighters and the dog were killed. The IDF later left the area before realising that the dog’s camera had picked up the voices of the hostages inside the building as they pleaded for help in Hebrew.
Five days later, the three hostages approached an IDF position in Shejaiya. Shamriz and El-Talalqa were shot dead while Yotam Haim managed to flee to a nearby building. He was shot dead when he came out.
Haim said: “At first the soldiers killed the two others and Yotam was the last one. And unfortunately, one officer understood that Yotam was not a terrorist and he said ‘don’t shoot’ but one soldier didn’t hear it and he did shoot. So it was really, really so close to being a different end for Yotam.”
Haim said the wife of the officer who had ordered the soldiers not to shoot Yotam came to her house while the family was sitting shiva.
Haim, 57, palliative care nurse who now lives in Evan Sapir, a moshav in central Israel, recalled: “She told me that the soldiers were really broken, that they couldn’t fight and their morale was very low. And immediately I was not angry. I was very disappointed, very sad and it was very painful but I was not angry.”
She later recorded a message for the Israeli soldiers, saying she wanted to hug them and that she did not hold them responsible for her son’s death. She emphasised that they should continue fighting to destroy Hamas.
Two months on, Haim said her position had not changed. “I’m not angry,” she repeated. “I think we need to investigate what happened that day. Everybody needs to pay the price – the government, the prime minister, everybody – but it’s not coming [from a place of] anger in me. I’m very rational; I think it was a mistake.”
An IDF investigation found that the shooting of the hostages could have been prevented but there had been “no malice” in the event.
Haim said it was very hard to hear the details about her son’s death but added: “It also gave us another a point of view about Yotam, how brave he was, how strong he was, that after 65 days in captivity, without food, without water, he was really powerful to escape, so I was very proud of him. He succeeded. It was a success. It doesn’t matter that in the end he didn’t reach the promised land, like we say in Hebrew.”
Haim now spends her days giving talks about her son, who she described as an intelligent and talented sportsman and musician. She said she would like to set up mental health projects in Yotam’s name, because he suffered from anxiety and depression.
Fighting back tears, she said she missed his laugh the most but that she felt her son was still with her. “I really feel that he’s here and he just went somewhere and I will see him. When I’m talking about him all the time, I see him, because I see his pictures and videos and I’m talking about his bravery. It keeps him alive.”
