At every step, the UN has failed hostages and their families

The UN failed the hostages, both in life and in death. That was the message of a delegation of hostage families who addressed the United Nations this week.

For the first time since October 7, the UN Security Council held a special session centred on returning hostages held by hostile parties during armed conflict, based on Resolution 2474.

The Goldin, Neutra and Chen families should never have been at the UN for this grim session.

They came because the UN failed them. Because the international body, established after the Second World War in 1945 to uphold and maintain global peace, never came to them at their time of desperate need.

The families urged ambassadors to plead for an end to the years of psychological torment they had been enduring while their murdered loved ones continued to be held by Hamas terrorists.

Leah Goldin’s unimaginable pain long predated October 7. She should never have had to come to Manhattan’s UN headquarters with her son Menachem to urge Council members to uphold their commitment to return missing persons, and to plead for "the right of a mother to bury her son."

Her son, Hadar Goldin, was murdered and captured by Hamas on August 1, 2014, two hours into a UN- and US-brokered ceasefire Israel had struck with Hamas.

“For nearly 11 years, my son’s body has been held in Gaza by a terrorist organisation that exploits humanitarian frameworks for political gain, and for nearly 11 years, the international community has looked away,” Leah said during our press briefing preceding the Security Council session.

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Resolution 2474 was adopted in 2019, but its implementation has been virtually nonexistent, precluding grieving families like the Goldins from attaining “the dignity that every human being deserves in life and in death,” Leah added.

Ruby and Hagit Chen should also not have had to have come to the UN, either. Their son, Israeli-American-German citizen Itay Chen, the youngest American hostage aged 19 at the time of his capture, was declared dead in March 2024, yet he is still held by Hamas as a depraved bargaining chip.

“What my family have been subjected to—this deliberate withholding of information about our son’s fate and the refusal to return him, has been a form of slow and enduring psychological torture,” Ruby told the Council.

He added, “Resolution 2474 obligates parties, state and non-state actors, such as Hamas, in armed conflict to search for and account for the missing. Hamas, by refusing to provide information or access to hostages, even to peace-making entities such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, are in clear violation of this resolution and of international law.”

Four minutes into his speech, Ruby turned around and urged ambassadors to look at his 14-year-old son in the audience. "Where should he be now? He should be at school, but instead he's here fighting with me to get his elder sibling back. That's not normal."

Also sitting behind Ruby in the audience were Ronen and Orna Neutra. They should never have had to be there, either. Their son, Omer, a New Yorker who was killed near Nir Oz on October 7, is yet another hostage Hamas has callously used to negotiate, bargain and profit from this heinous war it started.

It’s time for the UN to act so that these families need not remind this beleaguered institution to do its job. Aside from implementing Resolution 2474, the global body should also appoint a special UN envoy who is singularly focused on the issue of returning the bodies of the kidnapped.

The UN has failed in its most basic mandate to protect the innocent and condemn evil. The resolutions that the UN did pass in the Security Council and General Assembly were invariably focused on the situation in Gaza, with the release of hostages being an afterthought.

This wasn't the first time released hostages and their families descended upon the year in the last year. Unfortunately, as 58 hostages continue to be held in brutal captivity, it is unlikely to be the last. Eli Sharabi, Noa Argamani and Mia Schem all did the same to highlight how the UN failed victims of October 7 -- and how it has not done enough to bring them all home. As did Ayelet Samerano, mother of Yonatan Samerano whose body was kidnapped to Gaza on October 7 by an UNRWA employee. The UN's response? To fire nine of its UNRWA staff who "may have" participated in the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s international spokesperson to the United Nations, is the author of “Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt,” out September 2025.