Simcha Goldin said the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, was the result of successive governments’ refusal to heed his family’s calls to pressure the terror group to return his son Hadar, whose remains were finally returned by Hamas last month, 11 years after he was killed fighting in Gaza.

“A lot of the resistance to what we said stemmed from cowardice,” Goldin said in an interview published Saturday on the Ynet news site. “I feel that I could have stopped the catastrophe if they had listened to me.”

Very few government members, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have visited the family since Hadar’s return, said Goldin: “Probably their conscience doesn’t allow it.”

During the interview, Goldin accused both Netanyahu’s right-wing governments and former prime minister Naftali Bennett’s 2021-2022 anti-Netanyahu coalition of dismissing the Goldin family’s concerns.

“Netanyahu — he just doesn’t know what to do with Hamas… We saw that he is very wary of conflict,” said Goldin. “It was the same story for nine-and-a-half years, including in Bennett’s year.”

Goldin also blamed the failure to return his son on the four IDF chiefs who served from when his son was kidnapped to the October 7 attack.

These include Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, both currently opposition politicians, as well as Herzi Halevi, who took up the post nine months before the Hamas invasion, and Halevi’s predecessor, Aviv Kohavi, who was head of the Military Intelligence Directorate when Hadar was killed.

Goldin accused Kohavi of having “disappeared” both Hadar Goldin and

© The Times of Israel