by Zvika Klein
I'm also sure that Gali and Ziv will heal, potentially faster than others, because they have each other. They've both gone through the same trauma, so they can heal by being together.
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When covering the news, especially a war, you don't always have time to let stories sink in. Though there are moments in this terribly long war when the news actually has an influence on your mental self-being. For me, it happened when I saw two thin young men in hospital sweats lean into each other and not let go.
Gali and Ziv Berman, twins from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, finally reunited after two years in Hamas captivity. As a father of twin boys, that image landed like a punch in the stomach and a prayer in my soul. I am still not sure if what rose in my throat was a happy cry or a sad one. It was both. It still is.
The Bermans grew up in the “young generation” neighborhood of Kfar Aza, a small community a short drive from the Gaza fence. They were the kind of twins who built parallel lives that touched at every seam. They worked side by side as lighting and sound techs, setting up rigs for concerts and community events. Friends say they were football obsessives who cheered for Maccabi Tel Aviv and Liverpool, travelers who came back from Costa Rica with sunburned stories and a next itinerary already forming.
The family described their chemistry in the way families do: Gali, the spark, quick with a joke and quicker to show up when someone needed help. Ziv, the quiet anchor, wry and steady. Different, but also one. If you know twins, you know what that means.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, their lives changed. Hamas gunmen stormed Kfar Aza. Ziv sheltered in the safe room of his house. The terrorists set the home on fire, and he ran out through the smoke, only to be seized outside. Gali was not even in his own home. He had gone to check on a friend, a young woman, then, unknown, who was alone and terrified. It was Emily Damari, also a releases hostage. They broke down her door.
In the first hours inside Gaza, there are fragments that suggest they were transported with other captives and may have crossed paths. Then the trail forks. From testimonies of released hostages, we know that Gali and Ziv were separated early and held apart for almost all of their captivity. Imagine the strangeness of that sentence.
For people who had never spent a serious stretch of life out of sync, the next 700-plus days were experienced in separate cages, separate tunnels, separate rhythms of fear and hunger. A sign of life for the family came only much later, in early 2025, carried by others who had seen or heard of them. It confirmed the worst detail for any set of twins: they were alive, but apart.
I keep coming back to that. Only in Israel, perhaps only in this impossible time, could a parent say what I am about to write. If, God forbid, one of my boys were kidnapped, I would find myself hoping that both were taken together. It sounds monstrous even as I type it. But parents of twins will understand.
Being a twin is complicated. People speak to you in the plural. Teachers mix up your names. You spend childhood learning to be a “we” and an “I” at the same time. Some twins call it a blessing, some a curse, and most call it both. There is less oxygen for your individual self. There is also a person who knows your breath before you take it, who completes your sentence because he thought it first, who can read the fear on your face in the pitch black. In ordinary life, that is an intimate shorthand. In a tunnel, it is a lifeline.
Friends teased them about being a package deal and meant it as a compliment. You can hear the affection in the way they are remembered. You can also hear something else. In almost every story, someone uses a plural verb without thinking. The twins did this. The twins loved that. The twins went there. It sounds small, but it is the grammar of a bond.
So when the reunion finally came on Monday, after two years in underground rooms and borrowed daylight, it was as if the language snapped back into place. The photo shows two thin men hugging like brothers who survived a shipwreck by clinging to opposite sides of the same raft. The clip shows them smiling, tentative at first, then wide with relief.
Doctors say they were underweight, dehydrated, and exhausted. They asked to sleep in the same room in the hospital - though entitled to their own. You can see all of that. You can also see something surge across the gap between them. Recognition. Relief. Energy. I am certain that moment gave them the strength they did not know they had left.
I hope the Berman twins are permitted to be individuals again, not only symbols
Twins are a special situation. They teach you early that identity is not a zero-sum game. Two children can be wholly themselves and also, somehow, one story. They fight like brothers and forgive like mirrors. They compete and then conspire. They borrow each other’s shirts and, in a crisis, each other’s courage.If you have ever watched your twins sleep in the same position on different sides of a room, you know that mystery. If you have ever seen one twin calm just because the other walked in, you know the medicine in it.
I picture the Bermans in those first minutes together, not in public, but after the cameras are gone and a door closes. I imagine the quiet. The way one reaches for the other just to check that he is real. The way they start talking at the same time and then stop and laugh, because they always do that.
The way, even in grief for stolen years and friends who will never come home, the body remembers what it is to be whole. I hope they are allowed long hours of that kind of silence. I hope they heal without hurry. I hope they eat, and sleep, and walk outside without looking over their shoulder. Mostly, I hope they are permitted to be individuals again, not only symbols. To find the oxygen for the “I” and keep the comfort of the “we.”
I'm also sure that Gali and Ziv will heal, potentially faster than others - and that's because they have each other. It's a unique situation. They've both gone through the same type of trauma; therefore, they can heal just by being together, understanding what their other half went through.
Only in Israel would a parent write the sentence I wrote earlier and have the country nod in tragic understanding. Only here would we learn, against our will, that there are worse and better ways for a nightmare to play out. Only here would a terrible hope make sense: that if your child is stolen by men who hate, he is stolen with his twin, so that one small mercy travels with him into the dark. It should not be a thought any of us needs. It is. And this week, for one family, the better ending has finally arrived.
Zvika Klein
Source: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-870435
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