Inside an American family's frantic fight to free their loved ones held hostage by Hamas

NEW YORK – Alana Zeitchik takes a seat at the dining room table in her small Brooklyn brownstone, making the media rounds yet again.

Noise from a construction crew next door drowns out the Hebrew pop sounds of Coral Bismuth playing from her cellphone.

Zietchik is doing an interview on YouTube. Sitting across from her is Kosha Dillz, a Jewish rapper from New York whom she met that morning. Next up is a virtual meeting with TikTok.

This is Zeitchik’s life since Oct. 7, the day her mother called her in a panic, worrying about the fate of six Jewish family members in Israel taken hostage by Hamas.

“'They're missing! They're missing!'" her mother screamed.

Zeitchik’s days have been a mix of news and social media hits ever since. Trips to the United Nations. Meetings with lawmakers. Long-distance texts and voice messages to her family back in Israel desperately trying to find their relatives. They are among the more than 200 other men, women and children who were kidnapped in the brutal attack on Israel that left 1,400 dead.

The sun beams through a front window. On the table sits a brown paper bag of bagels that her new friend, the rapper, brought over. She hasn’t had time to grab one.

Zeitchik, 38, is determined to spread the word and get her loved ones home safe.

"I can't wrap my brain around it. My mind goes to like the worst torture film I've seen, so I just can't do it," Zeitchik says, trying not to focus on what they must be going through.

But she isn't giving up. "I love them very deeply and I have to advocate for them.”

Her cousin Sharon Cunio and her husband, David; their 3-year-old twin girls, Emma and Julie. Another cousin, Danielle Alony, and her 5-year-old daughter, Amelia. All of them missing for 25 days.

And counting.

‘The Israeli people and my family need to be heard’

Zeitchik last saw her cousin Sharon, 34, in August.

She came to New York to attend the wedding of Zeitchik’s brother, Justin. Zeitchik grew up with only brothers, so Sharon was the closest thing to a little sister. As teenagers, they used to go around town during Zeitchik's yearly vacation to Israel and talk about boys.

Danielle, 44, her other cousin, was like an older sister. Zeitchik used to steal cigarettes from her in high school when Danielle came to New Jersey to work as a nanny.

As Zeitchik tells her family’s story, her dog, Nami, a black catahoula leopard who embraces the role of protector, finally stops barking as she warms up to the strangers in her home.

"I believe that the Israeli people and my family need to be heard, need a voice, and I have to take action," Zeitchik says.

This hostage crisis has engulfed the Jewish diaspora around the globe. There are Israeli citizens. But also being held are people with French, Russian and U.S. passports, to name a few. For that reason, Zeitchik, an American, believes the fate of all the hostages is intertwined.

"I have to help them share their voice with my community here in America," Zeitchik says. "It's a demand that needs to be made to our government."

A small Israeli flag is in a vase next to a poster with pictures of her kidnapped family members. The words "Bring our family back" are prominent lettering. A painting depicting the bond between mother and daughter − symbolism particularly meaningful to her right now − hangs on the wall behind Zeitchik.

Kosha Dillz pulls out his phone to show a video featuring his new song about those taken from their homes during Hamas' siege. He calls it “Bring Them Home.”

“Bring the family home we got the world, sayin’.

Cry to death or can’t sleep, that’s the worst pain.

I’ll remember tonight, the night the world changed.”

A WhatsApp timestamp and other signs of life

On the morning of Oct. 7, Zeitchik woke up in her apartment and saw the news. The assault had begun right after dawn.

Zeitchik immediately thought of her cousins in Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel near the Gaza Strip, where "red alerts" of falling rockets are not uncommon. It’s where Sharon and David live with their twin daughters. Danielle and her daughter Amelia were visiting for the weekend.

All six were together when Hamas terrorists arrived.

Armed Hamas militants smashed through walls in communities throughout Israel, rode in on motorcycles and paragliders, guns and grenades in tow.

Voice notes from Zeitchik's family members during the carnage relayed that they entered their home's bomb shelter as the massacre unfolded. Hamas terrorists started burning nearby houses, and smoke started circulating in theirs. They were forced out of hiding.

A timestamp on WhatsApp shows Sharon last used her phone at 11:38 a.m. Israel time. The family is convinced that Hamas kidnappers turned off their phones to hide their whereabouts.

Later that day, a TikTok video circulated that appeared to show David, Sharon and one of the twins on the back of a truck with members of Hamas.

"At this point, it's the smallest, tiniest bit of hope, if I could describe it as that, because this at least meant they were alive," Zeitchik says.

Fighting for her family as hate grows

She’s late to her Zoom call with TikTok's public policy team.

Staffers hear from Zeitchik, Montana Tucker – a social media influencer with 9.3 million TikTok followers – and other Jewish users of the app talk about the rise of antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas attack and the Israel-Hamas war. The situation has gotten out of hand.

“The few times I’ve made anything on the platform that were any relation to being Israeli or Jewish, I’ve received hate,” Zeitchik tells the TikTok employees.

Drawing attention on social and traditional media was one of Zeitchik's first missions in the fight to save her family. She's not new to this field. Two days before the massacre, she had just left her job at a social media tech platform after separate stints in the advertising side at Vox Media and Buzzfeed. This became her full-time job.

But nothing could have prepared her for the level of vitriol in widespread pro-Palestinian solidarity protests that won't condemn Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Nor the ripping down of hostage posters or harassment of Jewish American students on college campuses in New York, home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel.

Zeitchik, who grew up nearby in West Orange, New Jersey, doesn’t remember being the target of discrimination in her diverse hometown. When she attended Northern Illinois University, she heard a friend once voice an antisemitic trope about being “Jewed down” for money.

Now as an adult, the unfiltered sea of social media, particularly TikTok, has opened her eyes to a wider antisemitic trend that has grown amid the conflict in Gaza.

Some of the haters, including American college students, have even tracked her down on Instagram and harassed her there, she said. “It’s out of control,” she says.

Nevertheless, Zeitchik says she appreciates TikTok’s powerful reach and wants to see the platform improve. A TikTok employee tells Zeitchik the hatred is “completely unacceptable” and promises to take the concerns to the “highest levels.”

The call concludes after about 30 minutes, but the conversation between Zeitchik and Kosha Dillz keeps going. They say U.S. media is biased against Israel.

Zeitchik, an unabashed liberal who votes Democrat, feels let down by her progressive peers who have sympathized more with Palestinians in Gaza than Israeli victims. She feels alienated and abandoned and alone.

"Hostage families and the hostages have been abandoned by the left in favor of identify politics and their own political ideologies," she says.

“It’s the empathy. No one has empathy.”

A trip to the UN brings unexpected news

The next morning Zeitchik and her younger brother Liam Zeitchik, 27, were at the United Nations headquarters in New York, delivering a petition signed by 86 Nobel laureates demanding the release of children kidnapped by Hamas.

That’s when word came in.

Hamas had released two hostages, Liam Zeitchik overhears Gilad Erdan, Israeli ambassador to the U.N., relaying to a U.S. official in the room.

Who were they? Could it be ... them?

Rushing onto the elevator, Liam gets busy on his smartphone. But by the time he and his sister reached the lobby Liam learns the freed hostages are Americans – later revealed to be Judith Raanan and her 17-year-old daughter, Natalie Raanan, of Evanston, Illinois.

Immediately, the Zeitchiks are suspicious of Hamas’ motives.

“It kind of feels like a Hamas PR stunt to show the world 'We are humane, we are releasing people,'” says Liam Zeitchik, riding in an Uber with his sister.

Alana and Liam Zeitchik arrive at his second-floor apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and turn on CNN to learn more about the two released hostages.

The Zeitchiks don't get a reprieve. The fight must continue.

Each morning, Alana Zeitchik updates her family in Israel on her efforts in the U.S. to save their family members, detailing to whom she has talked and what's next. She says she is forced to "disassociate" herself when she relives the terror her family is living through each day.

But when the quiet comes, so does the pain. "When I'm alone, I will break down," Zeitchik says.

While Zeitchik has become the point person with the media, her brother Liam, who took a leave from his job at Google, has focused on outreach to elected officials, including those in the Biden administration.

They've enlisted help from a crisis management agency and launched an online campaign called Bring Our Family Home.

The family met with the office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and has reached out to the Jewish liaison at the White House, Shelley Greenspan. Zeitchik addressed the United Nations on Oct. 13 before presenting the Nobel laureates' petition a week later.

Conversations haven't progressed further, the family believes, because the captives are not dual citizens of the U.S.

"I don't think it should matter what their citizenship is," Liam Zeitchik says. "And we're American citizens, so our elected leaders should be fighting for us, too."

President Joe Biden, in an Oval Office address last month, said he has "no higher priority" than the safety of "Americans held hostage." Biden has met virtually with family members of hostages, but only American hostages.

A senior Biden administration official told USA TODAY the U.S. is "working to secure the release of all hostages,” but the official added: "We of course have a special responsibility to Americans." The official would not confirm whether the Zeitchiks' family is on the State Department's radar.

Moran Alony, the brother of missing Sharon and Danielle, said he is in constant communication with the Israeli military and a forum of family members of Israelis taken hostage. He says Israel lacks leverage to help his family amid its war with Hamas, which makes Qatar the main player in hostage negotiations.

"I think that Israel can do a lot, but to bring them back safely we have to play the international field, and that's why I think the U.S. support is very important," he told USA TODAY in a text message.

For the beleaguered family, their situation transcends politics.

"These are humans, with families that cannot live their lives until they are back," Alony said.

The emotional toll of waiting

Days after the release of the two Americans, Hamas released an additional two hostages, both of them elderly Israeli women. One of the women described “going through hell” as she was held captive in tunnels underneath Gaza.

Zeitchik phones her "ima," Hebrew for mother, Rachel Zeitchik. She puts her on speakerphone.

The Zeitchiks' Israeli roots stem from their mother, who was born in Israel but moved to the U.S. at age 24 when she was working for the Israeli airline El Al. Rachel’s sister, Riki, is the mother of Sharon and Danielle.

Rachel Zeitchik sounds in agony this day.

“I'm just drained," Rachel Zeitchik tells her daughter in English. "I feel sick to my stomach."

Rachel Zeitchik had just finished talking to Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J. She urged her congresswoman to push for U.S. diplomacy with Qatar and Egypt to help free the hostages and asked whether the Red Cross can go into Gaza to check on the hostages' health.

As the phone call with her mom continued, Rachel Zeitchik's voice aches, starts to raise more concerns and share a feeling of helplessness.

"I don't know how to do it," Rachel Zeitchik confesses to her daughter.

Zeitchik tries to calm her mother, urging her to disconnect from the TV and take a proper day of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest.

"You have to take care of yourself. You can't let yourself break down," Zeitchik tells her.

But the situation in the Gaza Strip is fluid, changing by the day and minute. And her mother is terrified about what a ground offensive might do to the hostages.

"Once the army sets foot in Gaza, we are going to be lost," Rachel Zeitchik says. "There's going to be no way."

By Shabbat on Saturday tanks had rolled in to Gaza, expanding limited operations in the buildup to a full-scale invasion. By Monday, Israeli troops were battling Hamas in underground compounds. The operation resulted in the first rescue of a soldier kidnapped by Hamas.

But on that same day, Hamas also put out a new video.

There was a ding in Zeitchik's WhatsApp family group chat with a link.

There she was on the screen: Danielle Alony, Zeitchik's cousin, seated in a chair in the middle of the two others held captive.

Zeitchik heard her voice.

Danielle delivered a statement directed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that criticized his government's response: "You promised to free us all. Instead, we bear your political and military failure," she screams in Hebrew.

It is unclear whether her cousin – almost certainly under duress – spoke willingly or was ordered what to say.

Zeitchik noticed her cousin's complexion. She had gone pale. Gaunt. Danielle hasn't seen the light in days, she thought.

"It was really painful and heartbreaking to hear her voice in such desperation and such agony," Zeitchik says.

But on day 25, Zeitchik had proof of life. That was enough to see her through another 24 hours.

Reach Joey Garrison on X, formerly Twitter, @joeygarrison.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hamas took this Israeli family hostage. Inside the fight to free them