One year after deal, Schneider Medical Center waits for rest of hostages to return

This week marks a year since the November 2023 ceasefires, when the medical center welcomed 26 freed hostages.

By AMY KLEIN NOVEMBER 30, 2024 07:56

Schneider Children's Medical Center CEO Dr. Efrat Bron-Harlev waits by the empty hostage unit for the other to come home. (photo credit: Schneider Children's Medical Center Spokesperson)

It’s been a year since Schneider Medical Center received 26 hostages, 19 of them children. The hospital still waits for the rest to return

Ten days after the October 7 attacks, Dr. Efrat Bron-Harlev contacted the government of Israel. “We want to prepare for the optimistic moment when the children will come back,” she wrote to the Health Ministry. “We want them to come here.”

By “here” she meant Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, the first dedicated pediatric hospital and research center in Israel. Back in October 2023, there was no talk of ceasefire, no talk of hostage deals, and many people thought that Bron-Harlev, Schneider’s CEO and an ICU doctor, was crazy.

This week marks a year since the November 2023 ceasefires, when the medical center welcomed 26 freed hostages – 19 children, 6 mothers, and one grandmother – the largest number of children sent to any hospital. Now, doctors and patients recall that difficult and hopeful time.

“I had an empty ward,” in the new glass building in Petah Tikva, “and a team of professionals – psychiatrists, psychologists, pediatricians, surgeons, dietitians, and more – so we started secretly planning,” said Bron-Harlev, not knowing when, or if, anyone was coming back. “We still wanted to prepare to receive children hostages from captivity.”

OF THE 26 patients who went to Schneider Children’s Medical Center, 24 had witnessed the murder or kidnapping of family members during the October 7 attack. (credit: Amy Klein)

But how? Nothing like a mass kidnapping had ever occurred, and there was no real research on how to treat civilians en masse who had been in captivity.

“We didn’t have enough knowledge,” said Prof. Silvana Fennig, the director of the department of psychological medicine at the time. The only research on hostages was from the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago, or anecdotal information on kidnapped children in Chowchilla [California, in 1976 when a bus with 26 kids was hijacked], “but that was for a few hours, not 50 days, and that’s not the same,” Fennig said. “We were trying to understand how kids and families will react,” she said, noting that the only guideline was the United Nations Operational Guidelines on the Protection of Persons in Situations of Natural Disasters.

They studied PTSD research and understood their mission was first, to do no harm. They had to draw from existing frameworks like Psychological First Aid, emphasizing safety, calming, connectedness, efficacy, and hope. They had three weeks to prepare the unit (“We had the time, sadly, because the kids weren’t back,” Fennig said) with a multidisciplinary team.

One of the most important things was not to have any chaos, to work together, not to fight.

They also made decisions based on the likely experiences of the hostages, such as staffing the unit with only female doctors because their captors were mostly male. They created a homelike atmosphere for the children, so they put dinosaur sheets on the beds, each of which had a stuffed animal (or age-appropriate toy), and the family name on the door, and there were clothes for every returnee.

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“The milieu was the treatment: they sprayed clean laundry perfume to provide this homelike atmosphere to this new transitional home,” said Fennig. “It was the best we could do with people coming from captivity, to provide this time to calm down and to be prepared for the reality, because the reality was terrible.”

Still, the team realized, no matter what physical conditions the children might present, it was their psyches that needed healing most.

“When you’re providing psychotherapy, you’re providing the relationships, the care, the means, the safety, and hope. If you don’t have hope, you are not doing good work,” said Fennig. “We were seeing this helicopter [with the hostages returning]. That was a symbol of hope in the middle of this terrible chaos... and that was a rare moment of joy.”

What they learned from the hostages

The staff, the first to see the hostages – as their parents, family and friends awaited them at the window of the medical center – was trained not to touch any of the hostages without permission and to give them back a sense of control.

“They control what they eat, when to take a shower, and when to talk,” said Dani Lotan, the director of psychological services at Schneider, noting that all the control was taken from them in captivity. “The basic intervention was to give them back control.”

Bron-Harlev said that because they were in captivity for 50-52 days “and we thought it was unbelievably long but we knew nothing about what happened, we said we’re not going to ask anything.” The doctors explained every minute, step-by-step: “Now we are going to get off the helicopter; now we will go into a bus. We will travel on the bus for two minutes, and we will get to the hospital.”

Bron-Harlev carefully asked Sharon Aloni-Cunio, who was freed after 51 days in captivity, if she could help hold one of her three-year-old twins. “If she’ll let you, fine,” Cunio told her.

“I had her in my arms,” Bron-Harlev said. “She put her head on my shoulder, carrying her through that corridor, and she was heavy as a sleeping child. I felt like I had such a big, heavy responsibility, but she trusted me, and she believed in me, and it was something very physical that meant a lot to me.”

The team members wanted the hostages to have control about when they spoke to the media, so they got a “sock” tunnel from the soccer stadium, a long sleevelike attachment from the helicopter to the hospital corridor underground, but they plastered it with Israeli flags so the hostages would know they were home.

Escorting them through, the team members asked, “Do you want to sit, do you want to walk?” One boy was scared to turn the corner in the hospital. “What’s around the corner?” he asked. When they told him nothing, it’s just an elevator, he asked again, “Are you sure there is nobody around the corner?”

One of the hostages, a teenager, couldn’t sleep; he was pacing back and forth, worrying: “Don’t tell me anything, but I need to know everything,” Lotan remembered him saying. “We didn’t know what to do,” Lotan said, because the boy wanted to know what happened on October 7 but didn’t know whether he could handle it. Lotan finally told him he would tell him everything, but would also give him a pill if he needed it, and his own social worker and therapist.

Giving the patients control meant giving them choices on the smallest things. The morning after she arrived, Ruti Munder, 78, who was held for 49 days with her daughter Keren and her son Ohad, was wearing clean clothes and holding a coffee, and came to a doctor and said, “Thank you for all you’re doing. But I really, really like red or bright colors. Do you have a red shirt?” The hospital did not, so the staff sent someone to the nearby shopping center and did a Facetime with Munder so she could choose the right clothes and the makeup she wanted. After receiving them, she went to her room and got dressed again and came out and said, “Now I’m out!”

Lotan said that the team also let the patients decide if they wanted to talk to the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency). “People had information that could save other hostages, but we also didn’t want to pressure them,” he said, noting that the team would decide who could handle it.

The team let the freed hostages lead the way when it came time to talking about their experiences in captivity. “Some patients wanted to talk, others didn’t want to talk,” Fennig said, noting that studies show that reliving trauma is not necessarily helpful. “No, this repetition, this venting, is sometimes harmful.

“Kids who were there with their family or with someone they knew were in a better situation,” Fennig said. “Captives who were held with a family in a home were in better situation than [those held] underground,” she added, noting that there were so many factors that determined their psychological health.

In August 2024 Schneider released a study, “Medical perspectives on Israeli children after their release from captivity – A retrospective study,” of 19 children (aged two to 18 years old) and seven women (34-78 years old). It found significant weight loss, complications of poor hygiene, complications of recent shrapnel wounds, multiple gastrointestinal pathogens, various infectious diseases, lice, and psychological trauma.

All of the 26 hostages were forcefully taken from their homes, the study explained, noting that 24 of them witnessed the murder or kidnapping of other family members during the October 7 attack. “They all reported psychological terror, with different psychological warfare strategies, including isolation, intimidation, food and water restriction, and psychological abuse.”

All the young children at Schneider demonstrated “submissive behavioral patterns; some suffered from repeated nightmares.”

In the study, the doctors concluded that the “immense magnitude of psychological trauma of kidnapped and hostage victims” could not be properly assessed or treated in the immediate return phase. As pediatricians, they said, “we are hopeful that the insights gained from our experience and detailed in this article will never again be clinically relevant in the future, as children and their mothers should be spared from these atrocious situations.”

Still, Fennig told The Jerusalem Post, “We are looking to understand captivity treatment for [the benefit of] everyone around the world. This is a special situation [for which] we need more tools to help other countries.”

A year later

“I can’t believe it’s been a year,” Hagar Brodutch said, as she walked the halls of Schneider with her husband, Avihai, recorded on Channel 13. A number of hostages returned to the hospital to mark a year since their release.

It was Brodutch’s first time back since her release with her three children. “I didn’t think I would react this way,” she said tearfully. “It all bursts out in moments I don’t expect: it can be a picture or a sound that sends you back.”

November 26, 2023, was the craziest day of her life – aside from October 7. “It was a day of upheaval: Are we going home? Are we not going home? Is there even a home? Who will we not find when we get here?”

She recalls her first moments at the medical center. “I remember the kids ran to Avihai, they were so happy, and me – I just finally wanted to collapse to the floor.”

A year later, she said, they are not in a great place. She can’t sleep in another room without her children. “Yuval can’t learn. He goes to school but doesn’t go to class. He’s better, but he has moments he reverts to behavior from [captivity] in Gaza and then to the period immediately after,” she said, noting that her daughter Ofri is filled with fear, saying, “What are they doing for our hostages now and who is alive?”

For other hostages, the return visit to Schneider was bittersweet. “I can’t believe a year has passed,” Cunio told Channel 13 of returning with her twin daughters. “It’s a year since our release, but it will be forever,” because the “24th of November is the day that they took David from me,” she said of her husband, still in captivity.

“We try to make a routine for them,” Cunio said. “I say ‘we,’ but it’s just really me.

“Every day, something from Gaza comes up, or something about their father. Yuli talks more about him; the other one [Emma] doesn’t want to draw him, because it makes her sad. There are so many moments that I can see his face in them, and I just break down.”

Walking into her post-captivity room at the hospital, Cunio recalled seeing herself in a full mirror for the first time. “Where we were held, there was a small mirror in the bathroom, and when we got here and I went to shower, there was a big mirror. That was the first time I saw myself; I was half of what I was. And the coin drops, and you realize what you went through there.”

Reuniting with her medical team at Schneider – including one psychiatrist who had to help her with the postpartum depression meds that she was denied in Gaza – was very emotional. Schneider, for her in the interim period, was like a warm greenhouse. “I would have preferred to stay here until David comes home, but now it’s different,” she said.

Bron-Harlev said she’d never forget when the ceasefire ended. “When they said the ceasefire had ended, what I saw on the TV screen was Sharon Cunio,” she said, realizing that her husband, David, was not coming back yet. “That was the moment Sharon became a part of me.”

An empty wing

Bron-Harlev affixes her yellow hostage pin every morning and removes it every evening. “For me, every day, all day long and at least twice a day, I think very deeply about the ones who are not here. We should not allow ourselves to forget for one minute that they are not here.”

She pointed to a closed-off unit in the sparkling new glass building; it was where the 26 hostages stayed last year. It remains empty because they are saving it. Though most of the remaining hostages are not children, Schneider wants to host them. “Hopefully, we will leave it closed till they come home,” she said.

Fennig added: “We are waiting because this is very important. The hostages – they are part of us. We are not complete as a country, we are not complete as a people, without the hostages. They need to come back for us to complete ourselves.”