“We are standing at what we hope will be our last ‘bring them home’ rally,” Shimrit Braun Kamin told about 50 people who came together in Palo Alto’s Greer Park on Sunday in anticipation of the next day’s release of the final 20 living hostages in Gaza.
The rally, organized by the Israeli expat group UnXeptable, took place just hours before the first Israeli hostages crossed the border from Gaza into Israel and ended a nightmarish two years in the brutal custody of the Palestinian terrorist group.
Emotional scenes of tear-soaked family reunions on Monday were broadcast worldwide, as U.S. President Donald Trump landed in Israel to address the Knesset, then headed to Egypt to chair a post-war summit attended by leaders from the Muslim world and beyond.
But at the UnXeptable rally, one of several gatherings and watch parties across the Bay Area, attendees couldn’t yet know what the outcome of the planned cease-fire deal would be. They waited impatiently for the hostages to begin arriving home in Israel, as part of a deal brokered by the United States.
“I have high anxiety about what shape they will be in when they return,” said Palo Alto resident Giora Tarnopolsky, who like many at the rally held an Israeli flag. (While the specific condition of each hostage isn’t public yet, all appeared to have returned home on their own two feet.)
It was Santa Clara resident Ketura Cooper’s first time to attend a hostage rally. “I’m here because of the news” of their possible release, she told J. “I needed to feel the presence of everyone for camaraderie and community.”
UnXeptable, now an international organization, was founded in the Bay Area in 2020 to protest what it describes as the anti-democratic nature of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It has held rallies to demand the return of the hostages since Oct. 7, 2023, more recently combined with calls for a cease-fire and a surge in humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“This is a story that will be in the history books — people who never gave up,” Braun Kamin, J Street’s regional director and part of UnXeptable’s organizing team, told the crowd. “Because for two years, through despair, fear, and heartbreak, people kept marching, kept shouting, kept believing that this day would come.”
“At last we are a little bit happy,” said Rony Sagy, whose relative Carmel Gat was one of six hostages executed in a Gaza tunnel in 2024. “Oct. 7 has been a long day for us, and it has not yet come to an end.”
“Hamas has said it will take time to release all the bodies,” she added. “We will wait.”
All 48 remaining hostages, the living and the dead, were supposed to come home on Monday. Although all 20 living hostages are now back in Israel, just four bodies were handed over so far. Hamas has said it is having trouble locating the rest, but Israel said the small number violated the cease-fire agreement.
Belmont resident David Meyers told the Palo Alto crowd that although he founded an organization of Bay Area Israelis supporting Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, “I must thank President Trump today. He used the power of the American presidency to save the lives of 20 hostages, hundreds of Israeli soldiers and thousands of noncombatants in Gaza.”
“The sad truth is that only the American administration — Trump and Biden before him — have demonstrated real empathy for the hostages and the Gazans,” Meyers added.
Other speakers joined Meyers in thanking the U.S. president for, as they put it, doing what the Israeli government could not do. At the same time, they cautioned against excessive optimism.
“We need to carefully attend to the rest of the elements in this deal, a deal that does not allow for continued war in Gaza, a deal that does not allow for annexation of the West Bank,” said Sagy. “We are concerned there will be no Phase 2,” she said, referring to the complete implementation of the hastily brokered plan.
The event ended with a speaker reading the names of the hostages and the rallygoers singing Hatikvah, which is how UnXeptable closes all its events.
And then there was cake: babka, to be specific, baked by UnXeptable co-founder Offir Gutelzon. He used to bring his babka to every UnXeptable event. (How else to get Jews to show up, one speaker quipped.) Gutelzon stopped after Oct. 7.
Now it was time, once again, to celebrate.
“But we still have a big fight ahead of us,” he reminded the crowd. “End the war, bring them home and let us build an Israel worthy of our children and their dreams.”