Mother of Israeli hostage Romi Gonen describes what the year has been like without her daughter

It’s been a year since Meirav Gonen’s daughter, Romi, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7, 2023.

It’s been one year since Gonen heard her daughter’s voice, she told CNN, adding that she doesn’t know how her daughter looks like today, if she’s holding up, if she lost her hand after being shot on the day of the attack, or if she’s smiling like she always smiled.

“I cannot even explain how you feel when you wake up in the morning, and for the first moments you hope this is only a nightmare, a dream, a bad dream. But then you are waking up to a reality,” she said. “This is so agonizing, it’s so difficult.”

Gonen said some Israeli hostages who returned home were with her daughter and they told her stories about her in captivity.

The freed hostages also said that her daughter lost color in her fingers, Gonen said.

“The color in her fingers was changing, that her hand is not functioning,” Gonen said. “That time I thought, wow, she’s she’s going to lose her hand. We have to bring her back. But today I’m saying, it doesn’t matter if she lost her hand. We just have to bring her back alive.”

In August, the Gonen family marked Romi’s 24th birthday.

“At first, we wanted to hide the fact” that it was her birthday, Gonen said. “But at a certain point, we thought that maybe she will see us.”

So they marked the day to bring light and strength for people, she said.

The war, she said, is not about Israel and Palestine, but rather against Hamas. “We will not break because we are the good and the Hamas is evil,” she said.