On a clear December morning, two Palestinian brothers stood on a mound in southern Israel that overlooked Gaza, watching smoke rise after Israeli airstrikes.
It was a conflicted moment for the men, Abd Al-Mughani Abu Amar, 37, and Mahmood Abu Amar, 24. They live in Israel, in East Jerusalem, and were thinking of their relatives in Hamas-controlled Gaza, whom they had not heard from in weeks.
But the brothers had been drawn to the Gaza border for another reason: Their youngest brother, Soheib Abu Amar, a bus driver, was captured by Hamas on Oct. 7, taken after he drove Israeli partygoers to a music festival the night before.
His brothers had come to retrace Mr. Abu Amar’s last known steps.
Some two million Arabs live in Israel, roughly a fifth of the country’s population of more than nine million. Several were among the 1,200 people killed by Hamas on Oct 7.
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