‘He’s unfit’: Israel fiercely divided over Netanyahu’s hostage response

Dressed in a T-shirt bearing her missing granddaughter, Roni Eshel’s, smiling face, Zehava Eshel addressed a crowd of protesters gathered in front of the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv. “The country was supposed to protect her,” she said, her voice hoarse.

The Israeli military have labelled 19-year-old Roni Eshel, an IDF soldier stationed at a base near the kibbutz of Nahal Oz, as a missing person. All that the Eshel family know is that Roni last texted her mother from a friend’s phone in the early hours of Saturday 7 October, during the unprecedented incursion by Hamas militants that has so far left more than 1,300 Israelis dead.

Since then, Zehava Eshel said, the family has heard very little.

“Where is the state?” she asked, bemoaning what she said was a lack of communication from the Israeli military and the government.

Soldiers such as Roni Eshel, who was stationed near the fortified three-layer fence that surrounds the Gaza strip, were supposed to be “the eyes of the country”, her grandmother said, but no one had listened when they said they had seen unusual movements on the border, as so much of the Israeli military had been deployed on the West Bank.