The family of Yagev Buchshtab, an Israeli hostage the IDF confirmed was killed in captivity on Monday, held a memorial service for him in his home in Kibbutz Lahav in southern Israel on Wednesday.
"I ask for your forgiveness for not being able to bring you back," his mother said at the ceremony. "For everyone who fought and waited for you with great love, I can't believe I’m standing here in this terrible moment," his mother said.
"In recent months, I've talked about you everywhere in Israel and around the world. We spoke about a sensitive and non-judgmental person. You learned everything by yourself. You never settled for standard answers.”
She added she was "angry about your neglect, about the country that deserted you. About the secret we had to keep in order to protect the security of a country lost to everyone. We’ll continue to see and do good. I only ask for peace for your soul, my beloved child. We’ll continue to do everything to bring you home."
Oren, Yagev's father, spoke about the hardship of parting with his son. "There's a longing and memory in every place and action. Longing for family dinners, for the flavors you brought into your music, which was wonderful. Everything collapsed in one terrible day. The fact you were kidnapped shocked us all; the border is so close yet so far. I hoped everything would be okay, believed you would be okay, that you would manage to survive."
He added that Yagev "was killed while in a tunnel with five other hostages. The IDF is making efforts to prevent harm to the hostages, but without clear information about their location, there’s a reasonable fear — which manifested — of harming the hostages and endangering IDF soldiers."
He stressed at the end of his words, "Every bomb dropped could harm the hostages' lives. I call for an immediate halt to the fighting, progress toward a hostage deal, and the return of all hostages — the living for rehabilitation and the dead for burial. Rest in peace, my dear son."
Germany's Ambassador to Israel Steffen Seibert, who attended the ceremony, mourned Yagev’s loss. " Yagev’s dear family, dear friends of the kibbutz, I hoped this moment would never come, that the next time we meet you would already be together again in your home. Now we stand here remembering Yagev, his short life that was brutally cut short, unable to hold a proper funeral. It’s cruel and very hard."
Yuval, Yagav's brother, asked for his forgiveness. "I always tried to be with you in difficult moments, I wasn’t able to this time. You've been gone for over nine months, it's still incomprehensible, hard to accept the fact that you won't come back to us alive. They took you alive and you could have come back alive, I’m filled with anger and pain."
Nofar, Yagev's sister, lamented his loss. "I've been repeating the sentence to everyone willing to listen for nine months - 'He’ll come back, I'm sure he will' - and now, how can you realize you have to say goodbye? The fear I had the day you were kidnapped quickly turned into hope, hope that everything would be okay and you would come back to us. We were informed you were murdered in captivity, and the hope we held on to so tightly vanished in an instant.”