Zvika Mor, father of hostage Eitan Mor, said Sunday that when his son returns from Hamas captivity, he will understand and support his father’s opposition to previous hostage-ceasefire deals.
“My son trusts me completely, and he’ll say so himself,” Zvika told Army Radio in an interview ahead of Eitan’s anticipated release on Monday morning. “In our home, we educated our kids to risk their lives for the people of Israel, for the State of Israel. If Eitan hadn’t been taken hostage, he would have fought in Gaza, and then he, too, would have been required to risk his life.”
Zvika Mor has led the Tikva Forum, a small group of hostage families who — unlike members of the larger Hostages and Missing Families Forum — have opposed previous deals that secured the release of only some of the hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners and temporary ceasefires in Gaza.
According to Mor, the Tikva Forum’s slogan, “Only pressure on Hamas will get the hostages back,” proved itself over the last two years, as the terror group was subjected to intense Israeli military pressure, without which, he said, it would never have agreed to those deals.
Regarding the current deal, Mor said that while it met the Tikva Forum’s demand for all the remaining hostages to be released at once, he and fellow right-wing families were very unhappy about the price.
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“The deal is very far from what we wished for the State of Israel, because we have to pay for our hostages with 250 terrorists with life sentences — murderers who will no doubt go back to murdering Israelis,” he said.
Members of the Tikva Forum of hawkish hostage families protest outside the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, July 14, 2025. (Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)
“That’s how it’s always been. We may end up building Hamas’s new state here: 1,700 Hamas members who were collected from Gaza throughout the war [will also be released]. This is awful in my opinion. It’s incredibly awful that we still need to pay Hamas, that we’re now endangering the citizens of Israel.”
The current deal will see all 20 remaining living hostages returned to Israel together with as many of the 28 dead hostages as Hamas can immediately locate, in exchange for 250 Palestinian terror convicts serving life sentences, 1,700 Gazans who were detained amid military operations in the Strip, and 15 dead Palestinians’ bodies in exchange for each dead hostage. Israel is also withdrawing its forces from much of the Strip, with an understanding that the deal will end the war.
Claiming that all Gazans were Hamas, Mor said that the population in the Palestinian enclave hadn’t “even begun to pay for what it did to us.”
“But when my son is in my arms, I’ll say exactly what I think we need to do to them. For now, we’ll leave it at that,” he said.
‘We’ll begin with a long, strong hug’
Despite his mixed feelings about the terms of the deal, Mor said he was deeply grateful to be reunited with his son, telling the station: “We’re still debating as to what our first sentence to him will be, but what we know for sure is that we’ll begin with a long, strong hug with a silence that tells him how much we missed him and how worried we were. The main thing is just to hold him.”
Mor noted that while other hostages were made to appear in Hamas propaganda clips, “there were no photos or videos” of his son, and speculated that this was likely due to other hostages’ parents being mobilized by propaganda clips to direct their ire at the government and demand greater concessions for a hostage deal, which served the terror group’s interest.
“They knew that Zvika Mor wouldn’t burn roads or block [the] Ayalon [highway] or get into a cage or spill red paint around IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, so it’s a waste to put in the effort to make a video of Eitan,” he said.
Anti-government protesters light a bonfire on Azza Road in Jerusalem, March 19, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Avinatan Or, another hostage who is expected to return on Monday, was also never featured in any of Hamas’s propaganda clips, and his family is also represented by the Tikva Forum. The first sign of life from Or — whose girlfriend Noa Argamani was rescued in a 2024 special operation in central Gaza — came from hostages freed in the January 2025 deal, who reported they were kept alongside him.
In his interview, Zvika Mor expressed skepticism about plans for an international force to disarm Hamas, saying: “We live in Kiryat Arba [a settlement near Hebron], and we know our neighbors very well.
“I don’t understand what they mean by disarming them. It’s like taking credit cards away from you or me. They cannot live without weapons. What are you talking about? This community is a violent, murderous community that lives by the sword. Only the IDF can take away its weapons,” he said.
Asked about far-right members of the government who voted against the current deal, he said: “I completely understand them. I don’t know what they would do if they had the deciding vote in this deal. But once they knew the deal would go through, there had to be that voice” warning of the price, ” he said, and compared the ministers to earlier political figures who opposed similar deals.
“That voice needs to be heard saying that it’s not okay that we’re releasing murderers,” Mor said. “Israelis are going to be murdered here. That’s how it always was, and that’s how it will always be.”
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