One by one, they stepped to a wall filled with pictures of the missing. One by one, they attached tiny blue stickers, reading “home.”

One by one, they celebrated the hostages who returned to Israel on Monday after two years in brutal captivity by the terrorist group Hamas.

Twenty returned home. Twenty to celebrate. But, still, 28 who never made it home alive. Twenty-eight to eventually bury. Twenty-eight to mourn.

“It’s a mixed emotion,” Alon Levy, whose sister Sigal Levy was among those who were killed when Hamas attacked the Nova Music Festival in Re’im, Israel, as dawn broke on the desert on a day that eventually left 410 festival-goers dead.

By day’s end on Oct. 7, 2023, 1,200 Israelis would be dead and 251 taken hostage and brought across the border into Hamas-controlled Gaza.

“W

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