England's latest humiliation down under will be remembered as their worst in recent times not only for its rapid nature, but also because this was supposed to be an opportunity to regain the Ashes from a weakened Australia.
This is how England gave themselves no chance, from selection and preparation, to booze and the beach in Noosa.
Seeds sown long ago
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Mark Wood's Ashes series lasted just 11 overs before he flew back to the UK
Hindsight makes experts of us all, but the failings of this tour began long ago.
It was a missed opportunity not to trial a genuine opener when Zak Crawley got injured in the summer of 2024, instead asking Dan Lawrence to do a job for which he is not suited. Lawrence has not been seen since.
If Jordan Cox's broken thumb in New Zealand 12 months ago was unfortunate – Cox could have been a badly needed reserve keeper in Australia – then the decision to send Mark Wood to the Champions Trophy proved immeasurably costly.
England so badly wanted pace on this tour, then managed to injure their fastest bowler in a tournament they were never going to win.
Assistant coach Paul Collingwood disappeared at the beginning of the home summer and has not been replaced, and there was no clarity on the identity of England's fast-bowling coach for this tour right up to the last minute.
Chris Woakes' dislocated shoulder effectively ruled him out of the Ashes, but there were still two other players in England's squad for the last Test against India that did not make it to Australia: Jamie Overton and Liam Dawson.
Overton took a break from red-ball cricket after using up a spot at The Oval which could have gone to Matthew Potts, Matthew Fisher or Sam Cook. Dawson - or any other frontline spinner – would have been pragmatic cover in Australia for Shoaib Bashir, whose form was an accident waiting to happen.
Even the announcement of the Ashes squad was an anticlimactic foreshadowing of things to come.
Whereas the British & Irish Lions unveiled their Australian tour squad in front of 2,000 fans at the O2 in London, England hustled out their team on a press release with no notice a couple of hours after the death of legendary umpire Dickie Bird was announced.
When it came, the 12-month hokey-cokey over Ollie Pope's place continued as he was replaced as vice-captain, adding further fuel to a Jacob Bethell debate that is still to be settled.
Director of cricket Rob Key did not speak to explain the squad until a full 24 hours later, at which point he ended Woakes' international career, taking the moment away from the man himself.
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
England's warm-up against their own Lions team in Lilac Hill was a world away from what they encountered in the first Test at Perth Stadium
For all the criticism of England's pre-series plans in Australia, the immovable obstacle to more warm-up matches was a white-ball tour of New Zealand that had been in the diary for years.
Despite England and Wales Cricket Board chairman Richard Thompson claiming the series against the Black Caps was strong Ashes preparation, England lost three of four completed matches, effectively played at the end of the New Zealand winter.
England ultimately got the Ashes warm-up they wanted – an intra-squad match against the England Lions. However, there is evidence of buyer's remorse through their opening of negotiations with Cricket Australia over an agreement to guarantee better preparation on future Ashes tours.
If there was an offer of a match against a state team or Australia A, it was too close to the tour of New Zealand for England to make it work. England insist they asked for time at the Waca, only to be told the ground was not available. When England made the request is not clear. The Barmy Army managed to book a game there.
The Lilac Hill conditions for the warm-up match were slow and low, far removed from the pace and bounce of Perth Stadium.
The overall attitude was laid back. England team analyst Rupert Lewis donned whites to run the drinks and music played from the dressing rooms throughout the three days. Harry Brook's shots demonstrated his disdain for the exercise.
As the Lions players not involved were sent on laps of the park as part of a tough fitness programme, Bashir's bowling was hammered by his own team-mates and Wood had to go for a scan on his hamstring eight overs into his comeback.
A hint of farce came when the scorecard malfunctioned, showing Wood to be batting despite being in hospital at the time.
Perhaps the most memorable moment of the Lilac Hill week came before a ball was bowled, when captain Ben Stokes described critics of England's plans as "has-beens". It was a slip of the tongue, but one that could have been corrected immediately.
Two down in six days
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Ben Stokes said his dressing room was "no place for weak men" after the second Test defeat in Brisbane
England dealt well with the build-up to the first Test. Josh Tongue and Jamie Smith swatted away questions about golf, stumpings and moral victories.
Dominant at lunch on day two in Perth, England lost before stumps on the same day.
Stokes said he was shell-shocked in some tetchy post-match media interactions, comments that were used against the captain as England lost the PR battle in the days after the Test.
England were followed by photographers to golf courses and even an aquarium, while housing the squad in a hotel attached to a casino was probably a mistake. Some of the group developed a penchant for an Australian brand of takeaway frozen yoghurt.
The decision not to send more players to the Lions' day-night game against a Prime Minister's XI in Canberra was put down to the difference in conditions between the capital and Brisbane.
However, a week's worth of radio silence did not help the tourists. Former Australia pace bowler Mitchell Johnson accused them of being "arrogant".
England instead opted for five days of training in Brisbane, a workload that head coach Brendon McCullum would later claim left his team "overprepared" for the second Test.
When Stokes finally broke the media blackout, he clarified the "has-beens" comment and responded to Johnson by saying England could be called "rubbish", rather than arrogant.
As the build-up to the Test continued, Stokes and Pope had to respond to pictures of the captain, Wood and Smith riding escooters without helmets – an offence punishable by a fine under Queensland law.
On the field, Root's long-awaited first hundred in Australia was rendered useless by some awful shots by his team-mates and England missed five catches.
Following yet another defeat at the Gabba, Stokes said his dressing room is "no place for weak men" – words that could come back later in the tour.
On the beach
Image source, MixFM
Image caption,
Ben Stokes poses with Archie and Bretz, presenters on Sunshine Coast radio station MixFM
England said their four nights in the beach resort of Noosa had been scheduled for more than a year, which possibly leaves it as one of the best-planned parts of the tour.
Some used it in the spirit it was intended. Root, for example, had accommodation with his family away from the main drag and was never spotted near a bar. It was curious that more family members were not present for what was billed as a break from the Ashes.
For others, it was a glorified stag do. Some members of the team followed two days of drinking in Brisbane with four more in Noosa – six in total, as many days as there had been of Test cricket at this point in the tour.
The England party was hardly inconspicuous, drinking by the side of the road, with plenty wearing traditional Akubra hats that became the uniform of the holiday.
There was a three-line whip issued to attend a kick-about on the beach, where England were sledged by local radio DJs and mingled with other holidaymakers.
Stokes was seen out running, while on another occasion strength and conditioning coach Pete Sim invited the entire group for a run along the coast at 07:45am. Smith, Bashir and Tongue were the only players to turn out.
At the end of the trip, a member of the England security staff was accused of a physical confrontation with a cameraman from TV network Seven following a back-and-forth in Brisbane airport.
Despite the gags and attention from Australian media about their time on the beach, England probably put in their best performance of a bad bunch in the Test after their jollies in Noosa.
All over in Adelaide
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
This is the fourth successive Ashes tour in which England have lost the first three Tests
By the third Test, England's messaging had become mixed. Stokes talked of "enjoying the pressure", despite actively looking to remove pressure from his team over the previous three years.
Brook said England had not spoken about cricket in Noosa, whereas Stokes admitted there had been "raw" conversations. Crawley would later claim not to know about the "weak men" comments.
Perhaps aware fielding had let them down, England engaged in some rare fielding drills.
At an Adelaide ground renowned for helping spinners, England left out Bashir, a decision explained by the need for Will Jacks' batting at number eight. Assistant coach Jeetan Patel insisted Bashir had not become "unselectable".
After putting so much emphasis on high pace, England were left with part-time spinner Jacks bowling more overs than anyone else in the match.
Outwardly, England remained relaxed. McCullum's walk to the Adelaide Oval twice passed through BBC Radio 5 live shows being broadcast from outside the team hotel. Patel left a news conference with the words: "Enjoy your evening. Have a pint, because I will be."
England showed some overdue fight and even took the Test into the final day, but the Ashes were lost in 11 days of cricket. It doesn't feel like the squad will fall apart, even if 5-0 seems inevitable.
The year's biggest artists included (L-R): Rosalía, Jarvis Cocker, PinkPantheress, Bad Bunny and Addison Rae
Songs about love, sex, tax and demon hunters ranked among the best music of 2025, according to a "poll of polls" conducted by BBC News.
We compiled more than 30 end-of-year lists from leading music publications to come up with a "super-ranking" of the year's best albums and singles, with artists including Pulp, Lady Gaga and Chappell Roan joined by newcomers like pop singer Addison Rae and indie band Geese.
In total, the critics named more than 200 records among their favourites, although the year's biggest-sellers failed to impress them.
Taylor Swift's blockbuster album The Life Of A Showgirl only picked up a handful of nominations. The year's biggest single, Alex Warren's Ordinary, appeared in just one list of 2025's best songs.
Instead, critics selected music that shifted the tectonic plates of pop... Here's a guide to their favourites.
The 10 best albums of 2025
10) Addison Rae – Addison
Columbia Records
After a shaky start in 2021, Addison Rae's music career took flight with this collection of shimmering, trance-like hymns to desire. The desire for touch, the desire for fame, the desire for inner peace.
Unlike most modern pop albums, it's the work of just three people, with Rae and her collaborators Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser establishing a stylish, spacey and occasionally off-kilter sonic palette all of their own.
Singles like Diet Pepsi and Headphones On felt simultaneously classic and futuristic, marking Rae out as pop's newest It Girl.
West End Girl is a savage and startlingly detailed portrait of a marriage being torn apart. Allen says some of the details have been exaggerated, but her pain is tangible amongst the artful pop beats and faux insouciance.
The dirty laundry triggered an avalanche of press coverage when the album arrived in November, but the songs have lingered as everyone remembers just how well Allen can craft an intoxicating pop hook.
Listen to Madeline: Where Allen confronts her partner's mistress, and recreates their texts.
Pulp's first album since 2001, More, somehow manages to sound as if it was recorded and shelved in their mid-90s heyday.
The lyrics are the only giveaway that this is the work of a band in their late middle age - as Jarvis Cocker sings movingly about stagnation, divorce and mortality. "You've gone from all you that could be to all that you once were," he laments on Slow Jam.
Yet, at 62, he remains stubbornly committed to the transformative power of love. And the reception Pulp received at Glastonbury this summer went a long way to proving him right.
What a wild year it's been for Dijon Duenas. After contributing to Bon Iver's Sable, Fable and Justin Bieber's acclaimed comeback, Swag, he scored two Grammy nominations for his second album, Baby.
It's a dazzling, harmony-rich R&B record, that channel-hops between genres and moods like a television tuned to the twin spirits of Prince and D'Angelo.
The album's central theme is the ecstasy and chaos of fatherhood, with Dijon addressing the title track to his firstborn, then imploring his wife to expand the family on the subtly-titled Another Baby! Sleepless nights have never sounded so good.
Listen to Yamaha: A swirling 80s funk groove allows Dijon to submerge himself in the bliss of enduring love.
6) FKA Twigs – Eusexua
Atlantic Records
Eusexua, FKA Twigs has said, is a word that describes "the tingling clarity" you get when you're struck by a new idea, when you kiss a stranger, or even "the moment before an orgasm".
The album attempts to recreate that feeling with a series of abstract, futuristic soundscapes and deconstructed club tracks. Echoing Madonna's Ray of Light (most notably on Girl Feels Good), the hooks are as sharp as the dopamine is addictive.
Coronation Street! Social anxiety! Late stage capitalism! Jamie Oliver! Grief! Road rage!
It's all there on Euro-Country, a riotously enjoyable romp through Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson's inner monologue.
Along the way, she tackles everything from male suicide to the impossible beauty standards that had her "trying to wax my legs with tape" at the age of nine.
French artist Oklou – aka Marylou Mayniel – described her debut album as a "quest for meaning, of the need to be touched by anything" in a world where our interactions are stripped of humanity and flattened onto a screen.
Co-produced by Charli XCX collaborators AG Cook and Danny L Harle, it couldn't sound less bratty if it tried.
It's an album of intimate, gauzy pop, almost entirely drumless and built around hypnotic musical loops that short-circuit your emotions. Unplug and absorb.
Listen to Blade Bird: The album's swooning climax, based on a Basque poem about the tension between love and possession.
His sixth album is a jubilant love letter to the music of his homeland, mixing traditional genres like plena, salsa and bomba with the hip-swaying pulse of reggaeton.
The irresistible grooves dare you not to get up and dance, while the lyrics agonise about gentrification and capitalism stealing the island's old magic.
Listen to DtMF: A lament for the loved ones he's lost, the album's title track translates as, "I should have taken more photos".
A savage and unpredictable record, Getting Killed was apparently recorded in just 10 days.
It finds the four members of Brooklyn-based Geese patchworking the best bits of Radiohead, the Strokes, Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground into something entirely new and unpredictable.
Frontman Cameron Winter anchors the chaos with his singular warble, and lyrics that swerve wildly between irreverence and incisiveness.
Listen to Taxes: Defiant, taut and full of swagger, Winter chants: "If you want me to pay my taxes / You'd better come over with a crucifix."
1) Rosalía - Lux
Columbia Records
If music brings us closer to God, Rosalía wants her music to bring God closer to us.
The Spanish singer's fourth album is an exhilarating - and profoundly moving - exploration of the human condition, that asks why the earthly and the holy have to be so far apart.
It's a monumental work. She devoted an entire year to the lyrics alone, singing in 14 languages, over music that sits at the lesser explored intersection of classical, flamenco and avant-pop.
In an interview with the New York Times, Rosalía agreed she was "demanding a lot" from listeners, "but I think that the more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite".
Accordingly, it's an album that reveals fresh new treasures on every listen, as Rosalía argues we're all capable of grace and beauty. We just have to open our hearts.
Listen to Reliquia: As staccato strings are sucked into a vortex of electronic distortion, Rosalía sings about the sacrifices she's made for art and love, and concludes it's better to contribute to the world than take from it.
There's a sense of unease bubbling under this gentle indie rock song, as though singer Karly Hartzman is perpetually on the brink of divulging an uncomfortable truth. Built around the metaphor of elderberries, a fruit that can heal or poison depending on how it's handled, the song captures the tension of staying in a relationship you know is toxic.
Introduced by nostalgic strings, Folded became Kehlani's first Top 10 hit in her native US, blending classic R&B themes of heartbreak and longing with modern production. Using the simple act of folding an ex-lover's clothes as jumping off point, Kehlani captures the emotional push-and-pull of saying goodbye.
Addison Rae is a student of pop, and Headphones On is her master thesis – a hymn to music that whisks you away from the world for three minutes of distracted, hypnotic solace.
A seduction, a come-on, a hedonistic exploration of physicality. "Ginga me," Amaarae sings repeatedly over a throbbing electro groove – referencing the fluid, hip-swaying movements of the Brazilian martial art Capoeira. You'll succumb, and you'll enjoy it.
This boisterous, captivating salsa was recorded live with student musicians from Puerto Rico's Escuela Libre de la Música (take that, AI). But the celebratory atmosphere masks a broken heart, as Bad Bunny is reminded of the ex who taught him to dance. "I thought I'd grow old with you," he laments.
Netflix
K-Pop Demon Hunters' effervescent soundtrack was a breakout hit
Sometimes a song escapes its origins and goes into orbit. Golden was the last song written for Netflix's hit animation K-Pop Demon Hunters, but its soaring chorus became an anthem for anyone striving to achieve their dreams. An Oscar nomination beckons.
Two things you can expect from Chappell Roan are theatricality and emotional honesty. The Subway delivers both, becoming a map of loss that carries listeners through a breakup on the streets and subways of New York - capturing that confusing limbo of experiencing grief and loneliness, surrounded by hundreds of strangers.
A triumphant return to the sound of her debut album, Abracadabra takes all the Lady Gaga tropes – Nonsense lyrics! Demonic synths! Gothic choruses! – and dials them up to 11. An absolute banger.
Olivia Dean says Man I Need is a song "about knowing how you deserve to be loved and not being afraid to ask for it". The object of her affections just needs a nudge in the right direction, and this playful, soulful melody should easily set the romance on track.
One of pop's most overused clichés is that falling in love is intoxicating, just like drugs!
So it's a credit to PinkPantheress that she's made the idea sound fresh – zoning in on the fraught awkwardness of hooking up, whether it's with a dealer or a potential new partner.
"It feels illegal," she frets, as her heartbeat races with the drumbeat of this smouldering dance-pop anthem.
The methodology
BBC News compiled more than 30 year-end lists published by the world's most influential music magazines and critics - including the NME, Rolling Stone, Spain's Mondo Sonoro and France's Les Inrockuptibles.
Records were assigned points based on their position in each list - with the number one album or single getting 20 points, the number two album receiving 19 points, and so on.
The results were the closest we've ever seen. Just 52 points separated Rosalía's Lux from the number two album, Geese's Getting Killed.
In the singles countdown, PinkPantheress was the runaway winner - but the rest of the field was tightly packed, reflecting a year where there haven't been many universally popular, culturally dominant songs.
The publications we surveyed included: Albumism, Billboard, Buzzfeed, Clash, Complex, Consequence of Sound, Dazed, Daily Mail, Dork, Double J, Entertainment Weekly, Exclaim!, The Fader, Flood, The Forty Five, Gorilla vs Bear, The Guardian, Independent, LA Times, Les Inrocks, Line of Best Fit, MOJO, Mondo Sonoro, NME, New York Times, Paste Magazine, Pitchfork, Pop Matters, Rolling Stone, The Skinny, Slant, Stereogum, The Telegraph, Time Magazine, Time Out, The Times, Uncut and Vulture.
Peek the TV classic among the sea of retro paper chains and garlands
Tinsel, foil garlands, multi-coloured floral lights and a lounge that looks like Christmas threw up all over it are making a return.
Retro-themed decor is in, with trees jam-packed full of bold, mismatching decorations, as more people try to recreate a festive season from their childhood.
The nostalgic shift started last year, say experts, but over-the-top (and tacky to some) has become one of the top decor trends for 2025.
"After a long run of pared-back, neutral or traditional Christmases, people seem much more willing to embrace fun, excess and nostalgia again," says Harry Bradshaw, from events and interiors styling company At Last Events.
Felicity Hayward
No tree branches are being left empty as people embrace the brightly-coloured decorations
Retailers say they're seeing growing demand for decorations that can help recreate that familiar Christmas magic from years gone by.
"Maximalism is making a bold return," says Abi Wilson, head of seasonal and gift buying at Habitat, adding that people are turning to '80s and '90s-style colourful bells and bows, oversized ornaments and paper decorations.
Primark said younger Gen X, millennials, and older Gen Z shoppers were buying decor that reminded them of their childhood.
Marks & Spencer noted strong sales of its tinsel rosettes and tinsel tree skirts this year, while John Lewis said sales of "retro-nostalgic decor" had soared 180% in 2025.
Felicity Hayward is going all out this year to find that Christmas joy.
Back in October, as she browsed the charity shops near where she lives in Margate, Kent, she stumbled across a collection of colourful festive foil stars that reminded her of Christmas at her grandparents' house when she was a child.
The 50p decorations started what became a two-month endeavour, looking for retro baubles, garlands, and anything she could find to recreate those special years growing up in the '90s.
Felicity Hayward
Felicity spent two months trawling round charity shop and antiques stores for Christmas decorations
"Christmas always revolved around my grandparents," Felicity, 37, says. The family would spend the day eating homemade cheese straws, listening to Frank Sinatra, watching Christmas movies and playing board games.
"When I think back to Christmas, I think back to their living room, and I think back to their decorations."
Felicity Hayward
Felicity's grandparents kept the same decorations for decades with her grandad declaring the baubles were "for life"
Felicity hadn't bothered with any Christmas decorations since 2019. The combination of the pandemic and her grandparents' deaths in 2022 and 2023 had left her feeling far from festive.
But this year, her living room is an explosion of colour, bedecked with foil stars, tinsel and homemade paper chains and ribbon garlands.
Some people might see her decorations as "tacky", but Felicity says that "for me, all of those colours bring me calm".
"I literally cannot wait to get home on a night and turn all my Christmas lights on and lie on the sofa," she says.
Felicity Hayward
Felicity says her decorations this year remind her of spending time with her grandmother, Sybil, and grandfather, Geoff
Liza Prideaux agrees understated decorations are overrated and has embraced "nostalgic, vintage" decor at Christmas for the last two years.
"There isn't a strict theme, it's more about colour, texture and creating a cosy, lived-in feeling," the 36-year-old from Devon says.
"The colourful incandescent lights are my favourite," she says. "They make everything feel warm and cosy."
How we sprinkle festive magic in our homes is a "physical representation of what we emotionally need from our Christmas celebrations", says Hannah Bartlett, who runs the business The Christmas Insider.
The season is always a "steady anchor" and coming back to the same rituals and traditions each year can help "ground us", she says.
But Ms Bartlett notes that the current "uncertainty" in the world is making people find even more comfort in those traditions that remind them of their childhood. There's a desire to "return to simpler times", she says.
Decorations like tinsel and brightly-coloured lights "take us back", agrees 52-year-old Pandora Maxton from York, an influencer who means business with her elaborate festive displays.
"I think that's why it's having a revival, because it just takes people back to being kids. And that's what Christmas is about, isn't it?"
Holly Langley
Holly hosted a 1980s-themed Christmas despite not being born that decade
Holly Langley was born in 1990. But that didn't stop her from hosting an '80s-themed Christmas some 40 years later.
Holly, 34, from Reading, hunted in charity shops and vintage fairs for foil decorations, satin baubles, tablecloths and china. On the day, she served Christmas cocktails and jam roly poly, with '80s music playing and a quiz about the decade.
"Every year we do the same thing, right? Everyone gets out their Christmas pyjamas, we watch the same TV shows, we eat the same food," Holly says. Her '80s-themed Christmas was "a little bit different, a bit quirky, a bit fun".
Want to create your own retro Christmas? Here are Felicity, Holly and Lucy's tips:
Check charity shops, especially immediately after Christmas when people might be having a clear-out
Look on resale sites and apps, though be careful buying second-hand electronics like lights
Make paper chains that you can reuse for other celebrations
Ask relatives if they have any unwanted decorations
Play '70s and '80s music videos, films or adverts in the background
So why were decorations so bold and bright in the past?
In 1970s Britain people were looking for a "signal of hope", says vintage decor collector Lucy Scott, in a time of austerity, trade union action and miners' strikes.
It was also the age of flamboyant glam rock - Brits were going crazy for eye-catching style.
But there were also simply fewer options available in the 1970s.
"There wasn't necessarily a massive amount of choice, but the choice was for these kind of bright space age tinsel decorations... the majority from Hong Kong," says Lucy, 45, from Birmingham.
This started to change in the 1980s, when more people owned their homes and retailers like Woolworths and BHS started selling a wider choice of decorations, Lucy says.
Lucy Scott
Lucy, who collects old Christmas decorations, says the bright colours were a "signal of hope"
But Felicity says she bought most of her decorations second hand. "If you think about it, these tinsels are 20 to 30 years old and they're still intact," she says.
And it's not just a trend for her.
"This won't be a Christmas, this will be my Christmas now forever."
Itzik Gvili demands the return of his son Ran, the last dead hostage in Gaza, in Tel Aviv's Hostages Square
In central Tel Aviv, the main stage has now been dismantled in Hostages Square, the focal point for the campaign over the past two years to bring back Israelis held in Gaza.
Nearby, signs and posters have been taken down, and the Hostages and Missing Families Forum has vacated the offices that served as its nerve centre. Of the 251 hostages seized by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in the 7 October 2023 attacks, 168 have been brought back alive from Gaza, eight have been rescued. Only one deceased hostage, Ran Gvili, remains.
With songs and prayers instead of mass rallies, the Gvili family and a small crowd of supporters assemble in Hostages Square each Friday to mark the start of the Jewish Sabbath; this week, a candle for the Hanukkah holiday was also lit.
They are determined to bring back the young police officer who was killed by Hamas fighters after he rushed to help people being attacked in Kibbutz Alumim in southern Israel in October 2023.
"I feel every day is still the 7 October. We didn't pass the 7 October, but we are strong, and we're waiting for him. We do whatever we need," says Itzik Gvili, Ran's father. "This gives us hope: the support of the people."
Reuters
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum's slogan is: "Bring them home now"
From the start, people power has been key to the hostage families. As its operations wind down, members of the Hostages Families Forum have been reflecting on its extraordinary evolution which turned the grassroots group into a powerful international lobbying force.
In the terrible aftermath of the 2023 Hamas-led assault on southern Israel, which also killed some 1,200 people, a huge group of distraught relatives gathered for the first time in Tel Aviv desperately seeking answers about their missing loved ones. Because of the incoming rocket fire from Gaza, they met in an underground car park.
"We were together, shocked, and it fell on me that this is actually real, that now we are going to face this unbelievable challenge of understanding where all these people are, getting them home," recalls Gil Dickmann, whose cousin Carmel Gat had been snatched from Kibbutz Be'eri.
"And the second thing is that we're going to do this together. I'm not going to stand alone."
Reuters
Gil Dickmann (2nd R) said the public support gave him hope after kidnapping of his cousin, Carmel Gat
The formation of the new forum, with its slogan: "Bring them home now", gave the hostages' families a much-needed sense of regaining control.
"It was very, very powerful to feel that when the government and Israeli state, in a way collapsed in those very first few days after 7 October, it felt like nothing was working, what was working was Israeli society," Mr Dickmann says. "So many wonderful people came to help. That brought me a lot of hope."
Dividing its efforts between supporting the families - many of whom were bereaved and displaced from their homes following the attacks - and campaigning in Israel and around the world, the Hostages Families Forum worked with more than 10,000 volunteers. They included former Israeli diplomats, lawyers and security officials.
Funded entirely by donations, it began to pay some staff, and a high-tech company loaned its central Tel Aviv office space.
Reuters
A makeshift tunnel symbolizing Hamas's tunnel network in Gaza was constructed at Hostages Square
In November 2023 - more than six weeks into the brutal war in Gaza, which had by then killed more than 14,000 Palestinians according to the Hamas-run health ministry - Israel and Hamas agreed to a Qatar-mediated truce.
This saw most women and children hostages returned in exchange for Israel releasing more than 240 Palestinian prisoners, all women and children. Hamas also freed some foreign nationals.
But after a week, the fighting resumed with ferocity. About half of the hostages were left in Gaza. In December, three Israeli hostages were killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza despite the fact they were shirtless, waving a makeshift white flag, and calling out in Hebrew.
Israeli Prime Minister's Office/handout via Reuters
Itay Regev and his sister Maya were released during the November 2023 ceasefire
Those were difficult days for the Hostages Families Forum and in early 2024, with polls suggesting more Israelis prioritised eliminating Hamas over the return of those still held captive, it brought in political strategist, Lior Chorev, as campaign manager.
"We were in deep war in Gaza, deep war in Lebanon, there was the Iranian threat, and it appeared that everything was stuck, and public opinion was against us," Mr Chorev explains.
"As a civil society organisation, we could not impact whether or not there's going to be a deal, but we could work hard on the Israeli public opinion to ensure that if a deal came into place, it would have a sound civilian majority within the country."
Reuters
Gaza has been devastated by the two-year war sparked by 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel
As well as Saturday evening demonstrations in the plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, now renamed Hostages Square, there were near-daily actions by the Hostages Families Forum ranging from concerts and art installations to civil disruption. Media and diplomatic teams helped keep the hostages at the centre of attention.
"They kept going 24/7 for two years," comments Times of Israel political correspondent Tal Schneider who, like visiting foreign officials, often went to the forum's HQ.
"This place became like a foreign ministry for the country, for the families of 250 people."
Looking back, Michael Levy says his intensive campaigning helped him deal with the "emotional rollercoaster" after his sister-in-law, Einav, was killed at the Nova Festival and his younger brother, Or, was taken hostage alive.
"The only thing that helped me was becoming active. I was interviewed all the time. I went with 15 different delegations to over 12 countries. I spoke to whoever was willing to listen and didn't want to stop and think," Mr Levy says.
"You need to stay optimistic all the time. You need to tell yourself every morning that today is going to be the day that he's going to be released, even though you know you are lying to yourself."
Reuters
Michael Levy's brother, Or, was released during the ceasefire that lasted from January to March 2025
Although a hostage-prisoner exchange deal to end the war laid out in mid-2024 was described by then-US President Joe Biden as an Israeli proposal, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was widely seen as dragging out hostilities to aid his own political survival – a claim he rejected.
Tensions rose between the Hostages Families Forum and Israel's government; there was open animosity from some government supporters.
The situation worsened after a Netanyahu aide was accused of deliberately acquiring and illegally leaking a top-secret document to a German newspaper to influence how Israel's public viewed negotiations on a ceasefire and hostage deal.
The document was misleadingly cast as suggesting that pressure on the prime minister played into the hands of Hamas.
Reuters
Hundreds of people were killed or taken hostage at the Nova music festival during the 7 October 2023 attacks
For Mr Dickmann and Mr Levy, there was a low point when they headed to Washington for Netanyahu's address to a joint meeting of US Congress in July 2024 with other forum members.
They showed off T-shirts saying "Seal the deal" during an ovation for the Israeli leader and were arrested for an unlawful demonstration. "That was one of the moments in which I felt most alone," Mr Dickmann says. "It was one of the most frightening things and it was while Carmel was still alive in captivity."
The worst news came a month later when Carmel and five other hostages were killed by their Hamas captors, as the Israeli military closed in nearby.
Mr Dickmann says it was only an "unbelievable support group" of younger forum members that helped him get through the ordeal.
After the Israeli deaths were confirmed, angry protesters flooded the streets of Israeli cities. The forum puts the total number at 600,000.
In Tel Aviv, a crowd of hostage families and their supporters marched with six prop coffins. A crowd gathered outside Israel's military headquarters and clashed with police on a major road.
EPA
The killing of Carmel Gat and five other hostages by their Hamas captors sparked a huge protest in Tel Aviv
By the start of 2025, international opposition to the devastating Gaza war had reached new heights as the number of Palestinians killed approached 48,000, according to Gaza's health ministry.
In Israel, polls indicated a clear shift in Israeli public opinion, with a growing majority backing a hostage deal to end the war. With the election of a new US president, the Hostages Families Forum was increasingly directing its efforts stateside.
"They needed to bypass their own government," comments Ms Schneider. "The most important person for the job was obviously [US] President [Donald] Trump. There were signs written in English carried by the people and they would pack all their messages into a one-minute video, and they'd send it to him."
Working with regional mediators, the US secured a new Gaza deal between Israel and Hamas in January 2025, just as Trump took office. The first stage brought back 33 hostages – eight of whom were dead – in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Five Thai hostages were also released.
But in mid-March, Israel ended the ceasefire, resuming its heavy bombing of Gaza, without starting talks on the deal's second stage, which involved a full end to fighting and the return of the remaining hostages.
The White House
Released hostages travelled to Washington to ask President Donald Trump to ensure the return of those left behind in Gaza
Frail and emaciated following his release in February under the ceasefire deal, Or Levy was emotionally reunited with his three-year-old son, his parents and brother Michael. However, Michael's joy was short-lived. He quickly resumed his campaigning with others in the Hostages Families Forum.
"I got what I wanted, I got my brother back, but I couldn't just stop," he says, "I couldn't be happy because in those 491 days, they became my family. I almost felt I knew all the other hostages, that every hostage still there was part of my family."
Newly freed hostages gave TV interviews saying they had been starved and beaten in captivity, sometimes in response to the ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
Despite their trauma and fragile health, a few of the former hostages travelled to the White House urging President Trump to use his influence to bring back all the living and dead Israelis they had left behind in Gaza.
Reuters
Evyatar David was among the last 20 living hostages freed shortly after the current ceasefire began in October
There were more dramatic moments.
In September, an Israeli air strike unsuccessfully targeted the exiled Hamas leadership as it met in Qatar, a regional mediator, to discuss a new ceasefire proposal presented by the US.
However, the ultimate effect was to push the Trump administration - backed up by its Arab allies – towards a new plan to end the war, which had by then killed more than 67,000 people in Gaza, according to the territory's health ministry.
Israel and Hamas agreed a ceasefire deal, under which all 20 living and 28 dead hostages still in Gaza would be handed over in return for almost 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails, as well as a surge in humanitarian aid and a partial Israeli withdrawal.
Reuters
Israel released about 250 Palestinian prisoners and 1,700 detainees from Gaza in exchange for the living hostages
When Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, arrived in Israel just after the latest ceasefire started on 10 October, they were greeted by rapturous applause on stage in Hostages Square.
On 13 October, the remaining living hostages came back.
"I'll never have a happier day in my life," says Mr Dickmann, remembering seeing his best friends reunited with their loved ones.
Mr Chorev, the Hostage Families Forum's chief strategist, considers that long-held Jewish and Israeli traditions won through.
"This basic value of the Israeli theme that you don't leave anyone behind, that you're responsible for each and every Israeli held by the enemy, this was something that was unclear to certain elements in the Israeli government," he says. "But it was very clear to the Israeli public."
Tali (L) has been helping out hostages' families since the beginning of the war
Slowly, 27 of the dead hostages' bodies have been returned to Israel over the past two months.
Amid the ruins of Gaza, where health ministry officials say the number of Palestinians killed has risen to more than 70,000, Hamas operatives and the Red Cross have been searching for Ran Gvili's body east of Gaza City.
Now, the last funds of the Hostages Families Forum are being used to support the Gvilis and a few dozen volunteers continue to head to Hostages Square on Fridays.
"We have been here in the rain and in nearly 50-degree [Celsius] heat, from winter to summer," says Tali, from Tel Aviv. "Now that this is nearly over, I have mixed emotions. There is still one hostage who hasn't come back. I told myself I would stay until the last one."
A symbolic tunnel, a large "Hope" sign and a piano put in the square in honour of now released hostage, Alon Ohel - a musician - have not yet been removed, nor has the giant countdown board which marks the days since 7 October 2023. A final mass rally is promised for when Ran Gvili's body is returned for burial.
Itzik and Talik Gvili are determined to bring their son Ran home for a proper burial
Israel's prime minister has never appeared in Hostages Square, but he has met with released hostages and hostage families, including those from a small, alternative group to the Hostages Families Forum, the Tikva Forum. The Gvilis belong to both.
The family joined a candle-lighting ceremony on the first night of Hanukkah with Netanyahu.
"We will bring Ran back, just as we brought back 254 out of our 255 abductees," the prime minister said. "Some did not believe. I believe. My friends in the government believed. They said: 'It will be a miracle.' I said: 'This nation performs miracles.'"
But in Israel, painful questions linger over why more hostages' lives were not saved.
The Hostages Families Forum recently released harrowing Hamas videos recovered in Gaza which show the six hostages who were later murdered, including Carmel Gat, celebrating Hanukkah in a tunnel in 2023.
The hostage crisis continues to cast a long shadow over Israeli society; even as many take heart from the families' message of endurance and solidarity.
Additional reporting by Davide Ghiglione and Gidi Kleiman
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Andrew and Zoë met while on a cycling holiday through Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in 2014
Just a few days before her sudden death in late May, Zoë and her husband Andrew had a conversation that he returns to time and again.
They were driving to see a friend when the 38-year-old mum of their two young boys told him "she had everything she ever wanted in life".
Six months after losing his "kind, caring, clever and beautiful" partner to sudden adult death syndrome, he says remembering that "heart-to-heart in the car... makes me feel so much better".
Andrew, a 42-year-old mechanical engineer who works in the nuclear power industry, says the pair had been busy "doing life" until then.
Surrounded by toys, photographs and cats in the family home in Timperley, Greater Manchester, he says you can never tell your loved ones too often how much they mean to you.
"I think you take so much for granted in that they are there – that you get to just touch them, cuddle them. But do you ever tell them, 'Oh yeah, you look really good today' or 'I'm so happy that you're here'?
"You don't, do you? I wish I'd done more, I wish I'd shown more how I felt. Zoë knew but..."
Andrew and Zoe
Andrew and Zoë's sons Joey and Tommy were born in 2021 and 2023
Facing his first Christmas without his wife, Andrew thinks this is indicative of our wider inability to talk about death, to even contemplate facing our worst nightmare.
Many people just do not know what to say, how to behave or how to best support a family member, friend or colleague who has lost their partner.
Andrew admits he used to be "terrible at this - I was always the person that hid away and didn't approach it".
There had been nothing to suggest Zoë, a partner in a Manchester law firm, was unwell before the unexplained cardiac arrest that took her life.
Having experienced such a traumatic loss, Andrew has thought about what people can do.
"Just acknowledging the pain, the grief and there's nothing to say... being there for them is enough," he says.
"Don't ask what you can do - just do what you can do. Because I don't know what I want, I don't know what I need. I just need people to do something that they're willing to do.
"Buy me some food or deliver some food. It doesn't matter if I eat it or not – you've at least given me the choice, but you'venot asked me to choose.
"Because if you would ask me 'Shall I bring some food round?' I'm probably gonna say 'no' because I don't care. I will survive without it. But if you just do it, it's there isn't it?"
'Overwhelming responsibility'
If the bereaved person does not immediately respond, he says you should not be surprised.
"In the early days I was getting text messages all the time from people. And if you were the last one I read before I went to sleep at night, that person got everything - they just got a horrible griefy message summarising my day."
He says Benjamin Brooks-Dutton's best-selling book - It's Not Raining Daddy, It's Happy - offers an invaluable insight into the new reality of living without your partner while supporting and looking after young children.
The pain and sense of overwhelming responsibility is so clear when Andrew talks about their beloved boys, four-year-old Joey and Tommy, who was a month away from turning two when his mum died.
"I'm not their dad anymore - I'm their parent," Andrew explains. "My role has changed."
Sounding wistful for a moment, he continues: "I really liked being Dad. But I can't be the dad that I was - I have to be this. I have to do some of what she did."
Andrew and Zoë
Zoë was living in Manchester when Andrew decided to move from Abu Dhabi to be with her
Widows and widowers talk about the pain of the "firsts" without their late partner - anniversaries, birthdays, major life events.
Andrew thought he would be celebrating Zoë's 39th birthday on 23 December, quickly followed by the glorious chaos of Christmas with family, friends and their boys' wide-eyed excited innocence.
The couple met by chance in September 2014 after independently booking a cycling holiday in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Andrew remembers the first time they met, thinking: "Wow - she is amazing!"
He adds: "I guess the beauty of a cycling holiday is that you have to look ahead - you can't look at the person - you just talk and we talked and we hit it off."
The young couple knew it was meant to be, and Andrew soon moved from Abu Dhabi to be with Zoë in Manchester, a city where he did not know anybody else.
"It's what you dream of," he says. "You know you've got this person who understands you, believes in you, accepts you, loves you, lets you be yourself and you learn that as your relationship grows."
They moved in together before getting married in May 2017, enjoying what Andrew describes as "the perfect life - on Fridays we went to restorative yoga after work and then have a restorative pint on the way home".
After struggling to conceive naturally and a failed course of IVF, their dream of having children finally came true when Zoë became pregnant with Joey, who was born in April 2021. Little brother Tommy followed in June 2023.
Andrew
Andrew with his sons Joey, four, and Tommy, two
Andrew says he will spend much of the festive period potty-training his younger son.
Many widows and widowers raise an eyebrow when they hear well-meaning people urging them to "be strong" and saying things like "I don't know how you do it."
Andrew says: "You do have a choice but you don't have a choice. It's like I have to be. I feel this level of expectation from her - that's who she was, that's what she was.
"So for her to be proud of me - and that's all I can do for her now, to honour her memory - is to be there for the boys, to be the best possible parent for the boys.
"Make sure they're – I don't like this – as impacted as little as possible by her loss. And they can be the people they were going to be.
"I really struggle with that because if I do a really good job as a parent her loss will be minimised. But if I do a really bad job as a parent that's the loss of her."
'Hurts so much'
Andrew, who returned to work two months after he was widowed, says he only now fully appreciates his "male privilege" and everything that "amazing mother" Zoë did to support him and their boys.
He says time is now his most precious commodity, adding: "You just don't have that backstop, do you? That extra support."
Using a sporting analogy, the keen runner - who completes Parkruns every week by pushing his sons in their buggy - says: "When a player gets sent off in a football match, you still try and win the match with 10 men don't you? And you just have to work a little bit harder.
"I feel that's the point, that I still want the boys to enjoy life. And for the boys to enjoy life, I have got to enjoy life at some point."
Andrew talks about Zoë being his "safety blanket that made me feel whole - she's gone and I don't feel whole. That's love, I think, and that's why it hurts so much."
He says seeing happy couples walk hand-in-hand while Christmas shopping, just like he and his wife used to, is incredibly hard.
"It's just accentuated at this time of year," he says. "I'm trying to wrap presents - I hate wrapping presents."
Talking about how that job always fell to Zoë, while he occupied the boys, he says: "I haven't got 'me' to distract the kids."
Andrew
Andrew finds it hard that he can no longer just be "Dad" to his young sons
When you are rushing around, trying to do everything for your children and hold down a demanding job, how are there enough hours in the day?
Andrew says: "The bit that I struggle with is time. You don't have space or time to grieve and feel or reflect. I think I had two months off work. After that, I was always busy.
"And I think I was – and I still am – scared of time on my own. I'm really scared because time on my own is actually time with Zoë.
"Because she's there with me but you almost don't want that because she's not with you. You have to have it in your head."
He struggles when asked what he thinks Zoë would want for him this Christmas and in the years to come.
Eventually, he replies: "It's a horrible way to put it but she's not here to live anymore.
"It's silly for me not to live 'cos she can't. She would want me to live. I can't put it any other way."
If you have been affected by the issues in this story, information and support is available via the BBC Action Line
日本时间12月20日上午，在东京都内一家酒店首次举行了“中亚＋日本”对话（CA＋JAD，Central Asia plus Japan Dialogue，简称“卡加德”）首脑会议。会议在高市早苗首相主持下召开，哈萨克斯坦总统托卡耶夫、吉尔吉斯斯坦总统扎帕罗夫、塔吉克斯坦总统拉赫蒙、土库曼斯坦总统别尔德穆哈梅多夫、乌兹别克斯坦总统米尔济约耶夫以及各国部长等出席了会议。
An army patrol in Bekkersdal township - file photo
South African police say a manhunt is under way after a shooting at a tavern left nine people dead and another 10 injured in a township near Johannesburg.
They say about 12 unidentified gunmen arrived in two cars in Bekkersdal, "opened fire at tavern patrons and continued to shoot randomly as they fled the scene".
The shooting happened at about 01:00 local time on Sunday (23:00 GMT Saturday). The police added that the tavern was licensed.
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, at 45 people per 100,000 according to 2023-24 figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Itzik Gvili demands the return of his son Ran, the last dead hostage in Gaza, in Tel Aviv's Hostages Square
In central Tel Aviv, the main stage has now been dismantled in Hostages Square, the focal point for the campaign over the past two years to bring back Israelis held in Gaza.
Nearby, signs and posters have been taken down, and the Hostages and Missing Families Forum has vacated the offices that served as its nerve centre. Of the 251 hostages seized by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in the 7 October 2023 attacks, 168 have been brought back alive from Gaza, eight have been rescued. Only one deceased hostage, Ran Gvili, remains.
With songs and prayers instead of mass rallies, the Gvili family and a small crowd of supporters assemble in Hostages Square each Friday to mark the start of the Jewish Sabbath; this week, a candle for the Hanukkah holiday was also lit.
They are determined to bring back the young police officer who was killed by Hamas fighters after he rushed to help people being attacked in Kibbutz Alumim in southern Israel in October 2023.
"I feel every day is still the 7 October. We didn't pass the 7 October, but we are strong, and we're waiting for him. We do whatever we need," says Itzik Gvili, Ran's father. "This gives us hope: the support of the people."
Reuters
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum's slogan is: "Bring them home now"
From the start, people power has been key to the hostage families. As its operations wind down, members of the Hostages Families Forum have been reflecting on its extraordinary evolution which turned the grassroots group into a powerful international lobbying force.
In the terrible aftermath of the 2023 Hamas-led assault on southern Israel, which also killed some 1,200 people, a huge group of distraught relatives gathered for the first time in Tel Aviv desperately seeking answers about their missing loved ones. Because of the incoming rocket fire from Gaza, they met in an underground car park.
"We were together, shocked, and it fell on me that this is actually real, that now we are going to face this unbelievable challenge of understanding where all these people are, getting them home," recalls Gil Dickmann, whose cousin Carmel Gat had been snatched from Kibbutz Be'eri.
"And the second thing is that we're going to do this together. I'm not going to stand alone."
Reuters
Gil Dickmann (2nd R) said the public support gave him hope after kidnapping of his cousin, Carmel Gat
The formation of the new forum, with its slogan: "Bring them home now", gave the hostages' families a much-needed sense of regaining control.
"It was very, very powerful to feel that when the government and Israeli state, in a way collapsed in those very first few days after 7 October, it felt like nothing was working, what was working was Israeli society," Mr Dickmann says. "So many wonderful people came to help. That brought me a lot of hope."
Dividing its efforts between supporting the families - many of whom were bereaved and displaced from their homes following the attacks - and campaigning in Israel and around the world, the Hostages Families Forum worked with more than 10,000 volunteers. They included former Israeli diplomats, lawyers and security officials.
Funded entirely by donations, it began to pay some staff, and a high-tech company loaned its central Tel Aviv office space.
Reuters
A makeshift tunnel symbolizing Hamas's tunnel network in Gaza was constructed at Hostages Square
In November 2023 - more than six weeks into the brutal war in Gaza, which had by then killed more than 14,000 Palestinians according to the Hamas-run health ministry - Israel and Hamas agreed to a Qatar-mediated truce.
This saw most women and children hostages returned in exchange for Israel releasing more than 240 Palestinian prisoners, all women and children. Hamas also freed some foreign nationals.
But after a week, the fighting resumed with ferocity. About half of the hostages were left in Gaza. In December, three Israeli hostages were killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza despite the fact they were shirtless, waving a makeshift white flag, and calling out in Hebrew.
Israeli Prime Minister's Office/handout via Reuters
Itay Regev and his sister Maya were released during the November 2023 ceasefire
Those were difficult days for the Hostages Families Forum and in early 2024, with polls suggesting more Israelis prioritised eliminating Hamas over the return of those still held captive, it brought in political strategist, Lior Chorev, as campaign manager.
"We were in deep war in Gaza, deep war in Lebanon, there was the Iranian threat, and it appeared that everything was stuck, and public opinion was against us," Mr Chorev explains.
"As a civil society organisation, we could not impact whether or not there's going to be a deal, but we could work hard on the Israeli public opinion to ensure that if a deal came into place, it would have a sound civilian majority within the country."
Reuters
Gaza has been devastated by the two-year war sparked by 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel
As well as Saturday evening demonstrations in the plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, now renamed Hostages Square, there were near-daily actions by the Hostages Families Forum ranging from concerts and art installations to civil disruption. Media and diplomatic teams helped keep the hostages at the centre of attention.
"They kept going 24/7 for two years," comments Times of Israel political correspondent Tal Schneider who, like visiting foreign officials, often went to the forum's HQ.
"This place became like a foreign ministry for the country, for the families of 250 people."
Looking back, Michael Levy says his intensive campaigning helped him deal with the "emotional rollercoaster" after his sister-in-law, Einav, was killed at the Nova Festival and his younger brother, Or, was taken hostage alive.
"The only thing that helped me was becoming active. I was interviewed all the time. I went with 15 different delegations to over 12 countries. I spoke to whoever was willing to listen and didn't want to stop and think," Mr Levy says.
"You need to stay optimistic all the time. You need to tell yourself every morning that today is going to be the day that he's going to be released, even though you know you are lying to yourself."
Reuters
Michael Levy's brother, Or, was released during the ceasefire that lasted from January to March 2025
Although a hostage-prisoner exchange deal to end the war laid out in mid-2024 was described by then-US President Joe Biden as an Israeli proposal, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was widely seen as dragging out hostilities to aid his own political survival – a claim he rejected.
Tensions rose between the Hostages Families Forum and Israel's government; there was open animosity from some government supporters.
The situation worsened after a Netanyahu aide was accused of deliberately acquiring and illegally leaking a top-secret document to a German newspaper to influence how Israel's public viewed negotiations on a ceasefire and hostage deal.
The document was misleadingly cast as suggesting that pressure on the prime minister played into the hands of Hamas.
Reuters
Hundreds of people were killed or taken hostage at the Nova music festival during the 7 October 2023 attacks
For Mr Dickmann and Mr Levy, there was a low point when they headed to Washington for Netanyahu's address to a joint meeting of US Congress in July 2024 with other forum members.
They showed off T-shirts saying "Seal the deal" during an ovation for the Israeli leader and were arrested for an unlawful demonstration. "That was one of the moments in which I felt most alone," Mr Dickmann says. "It was one of the most frightening things and it was while Carmel was still alive in captivity."
The worst news came a month later when Carmel and five other hostages were killed by their Hamas captors, as the Israeli military closed in nearby.
Mr Dickmann says it was only an "unbelievable support group" of younger forum members that helped him get through the ordeal.
After the Israeli deaths were confirmed, angry protesters flooded the streets of Israeli cities. The forum puts the total number at 600,000.
In Tel Aviv, a crowd of hostage families and their supporters marched with six prop coffins. A crowd gathered outside Israel's military headquarters and clashed with police on a major road.
EPA
The killing of Carmel Gat and five other hostages by their Hamas captors sparked a huge protest in Tel Aviv
By the start of 2025, international opposition to the devastating Gaza war had reached new heights as the number of Palestinians killed approached 48,000, according to Gaza's health ministry.
In Israel, polls indicated a clear shift in Israeli public opinion, with a growing majority backing a hostage deal to end the war. With the election of a new US president, the Hostages Families Forum was increasingly directing its efforts stateside.
"They needed to bypass their own government," comments Ms Schneider. "The most important person for the job was obviously [US] President [Donald] Trump. There were signs written in English carried by the people and they would pack all their messages into a one-minute video, and they'd send it to him."
Working with regional mediators, the US secured a new Gaza deal between Israel and Hamas in January 2025, just as Trump took office. The first stage brought back 33 hostages – eight of whom were dead – in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Five Thai hostages were also released.
But in mid-March, Israel ended the ceasefire, resuming its heavy bombing of Gaza, without starting talks on the deal's second stage, which involved a full end to fighting and the return of the remaining hostages.
The White House
Released hostages travelled to Washington to ask President Donald Trump to ensure the return of those left behind in Gaza
Frail and emaciated following his release in February under the ceasefire deal, Or Levy was emotionally reunited with his three-year-old son, his parents and brother Michael. However, Michael's joy was short-lived. He quickly resumed his campaigning with others in the Hostages Families Forum.
"I got what I wanted, I got my brother back, but I couldn't just stop," he says, "I couldn't be happy because in those 491 days, they became my family. I almost felt I knew all the other hostages, that every hostage still there was part of my family."
Newly freed hostages gave TV interviews saying they had been starved and beaten in captivity, sometimes in response to the ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
Despite their trauma and fragile health, a few of the former hostages travelled to the White House urging President Trump to use his influence to bring back all the living and dead Israelis they had left behind in Gaza.
Reuters
Evyatar David was among the last 20 living hostages freed shortly after the current ceasefire began in October
There were more dramatic moments.
In September, an Israeli air strike unsuccessfully targeted the exiled Hamas leadership as it met in Qatar, a regional mediator, to discuss a new ceasefire proposal presented by the US.
However, the ultimate effect was to push the Trump administration - backed up by its Arab allies – towards a new plan to end the war, which had by then killed more than 67,000 people in Gaza, according to the territory's health ministry.
Israel and Hamas agreed a ceasefire deal, under which all 20 living and 28 dead hostages still in Gaza would be handed over in return for almost 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails, as well as a surge in humanitarian aid and a partial Israeli withdrawal.
Reuters
Israel released about 250 Palestinian prisoners and 1,700 detainees from Gaza in exchange for the living hostages
When Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, arrived in Israel just after the latest ceasefire started on 10 October, they were greeted by rapturous applause on stage in Hostages Square.
On 13 October, the remaining living hostages came back.
"I'll never have a happier day in my life," says Mr Dickmann, remembering seeing his best friends reunited with their loved ones.
Mr Chorev, the Hostage Families Forum's chief strategist, considers that long-held Jewish and Israeli traditions won through.
"This basic value of the Israeli theme that you don't leave anyone behind, that you're responsible for each and every Israeli held by the enemy, this was something that was unclear to certain elements in the Israeli government," he says. "But it was very clear to the Israeli public."
Tali (L) has been helping out hostages' families since the beginning of the war
Slowly, 27 of the dead hostages' bodies have been returned to Israel over the past two months.
Amid the ruins of Gaza, where health ministry officials say the number of Palestinians killed has risen to more than 70,000, Hamas operatives and the Red Cross have been searching for Ran Gvili's body east of Gaza City.
Now, the last funds of the Hostages Families Forum are being used to support the Gvilis and a few dozen volunteers continue to head to Hostages Square on Fridays.
"We have been here in the rain and in nearly 50-degree [Celsius] heat, from winter to summer," says Tali, from Tel Aviv. "Now that this is nearly over, I have mixed emotions. There is still one hostage who hasn't come back. I told myself I would stay until the last one."
A symbolic tunnel, a large "Hope" sign and a piano put in the square in honour of now released hostage, Alon Ohel - a musician - have not yet been removed, nor has the giant countdown board which marks the days since 7 October 2023. A final mass rally is promised for when Ran Gvili's body is returned for burial.
Itzik and Talik Gvili are determined to bring their son Ran home for a proper burial
Israel's prime minister has never appeared in Hostages Square, but he has met with released hostages and hostage families, including those from a small, alternative group to the Hostages Families Forum, the Tikva Forum. The Gvilis belong to both.
The family joined a candle-lighting ceremony on the first night of Hanukkah with Netanyahu.
"We will bring Ran back, just as we brought back 254 out of our 255 abductees," the prime minister said. "Some did not believe. I believe. My friends in the government believed. They said: 'It will be a miracle.' I said: 'This nation performs miracles.'"
But in Israel, painful questions linger over why more hostages' lives were not saved.
The Hostages Families Forum recently released harrowing Hamas videos recovered in Gaza which show the six hostages who were later murdered, including Carmel Gat, celebrating Hanukkah in a tunnel in 2023.
The hostage crisis continues to cast a long shadow over Israeli society; even as many take heart from the families' message of endurance and solidarity.
Additional reporting by Davide Ghiglione and Gidi Kleiman
Jimmy Lai, 78, faces life in prison for national security offences
On a winter morning in 2022 Raphael Wong and Figo Chan walked into Hong Kong's Stanley prison to meet Jimmy Lai, the media billionaire who had been arrested two years before and was awaiting trial charged with national security offences.
They had all been part of the turbulent protests that had rocked Hong Kong in 2019, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets demanding democracy and more freedom in the Chinese territory.
They would also often meet for dinner, sometimes lavish meals, gossiping and bantering over dim sum, pizza or claypot rice.
In prison, he "loved eating rice with pickled ginger," Chan said. "No-one could have imagined Jimmy Lai would eat something like that!"
But neither had they imagined a reunion at a maximum security prison, the protests crushed, friends and fellow activists jailed, Hong Kong just as boisterous and yet, changed. And gone was the owner of the irreverent nickname "Fatty Lai": he had lost considerable weight.
Decades apart - Lai in his 70s, Wong and Chan about 40 years younger - they had still dreamed of a different Hong Kong. Lai was a key figure in the protests, wielding his most influential asset, the hugely popular newspaper, Apple Daily, in the hope of shaping Hong Kong into a liberal democracy.
That proved risky under a contentious national security law imposed in 2020 by China's Communist Party rulers in Beijing.
Lai always said he owed Hong Kong. Although he is a UK citizen, he refused to leave.
"I got everything I have because of this place," he told the BBC hours before he was arrested in 2020. "This is my redemption," he said, choking up.
He wanted the city to continue to have the freedom it had given him. That's what drove his politics - fiercely critical of the Communist Party and avowedly supportive of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement. It cost him his own freedom.
Watch: Jimmy Lai's last interview as a free man in 2020
Lai harboured "a rabid hatred" of the Chinese Communist Party and "an obsession to change the Party's values to those of the Western world", the High Court ruled on Monday as it delivered the verdict in his trial.
It said that Lai had hoped the party would be ousted - or, at the very least, that its leader Xi Jinping would be removed.
Lai was found guilty on all counts of charges he had always denied. The most serious one - colluding with foreign forces - carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.
"Never," Lai had said to that charge when he testified, arguing that he had only advocated for what he believed were Hong Kong's values: "rule of law, freedom, pursuit of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly".
Monday's verdict was welcomed by Hong Kong's chief executive John Lee, who said Lai had used his newspaper to "wantonly create social conflicts" and "glorify violence". The law, he added, never allows anyone to harm the country "under the guise of human rights, democracy and freedom".
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Lai's wife Teresa and son Shun-yan at court for Lai's verdict, along with Cardinal Joseph Zen, former bishop of Hong Kong who baptised Lai in 1997
Back in 2022, before Wong and Chan left the prison, Lai asked them to pray with him, to Wong's surprise.
Lai's Catholic faith had deepened in solitary confinement - an arrangement he had requested, according to authorities. He prayed six hours a day and he made drawings of Christ, which he sent in the mail to friends. "Even though he was suffering," Wong said, "he didn't complain nor was he afraid. He was at peace."
Peace was not what Jimmy Lai had pursued for much of his life - not when he fled China as a 12-year-old, not while he worked his way up the gruelling factory chain, not even after he became a famous Hong Kong tycoon, and certainly not as his media empire took on Beijing.
For Lai, Hong Kong was everything that China was not - deeply capitalist, a land of opportunity and limitless wealth, and free. In the city, which was still a British colony when he arrived in 1959, he found success - and then a voice.
Apple Daily became one of the top-selling papers almost instantly after its debut in 1995. Modelled on USA Today, it revolutionised the aesthetics and layout of newspapers, and kicked off a cut-throat price war.
From a guide to hiring prostitutes in the "adult section" to investigative reports, to columns by economists and novelists, it was a "buffet" targeting "a full range of readers", said Francis Lee, a journalism professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Former editors and employees spoke of Lai's encouragement - "If you dared to do it, he would dare to let you do it" - and his temper. One said he often swore.
They describe him as unconventional, and as a visionary who wasn't afraid to bet on experiments. "Even before the iPhone was launched, he kept saying mobile phones would be the future," recalled one of the paper's editors, adding that he was full of ideas. "It was as if he asked us to create a new website every day."
It had been the same when he owned a clothing label. "He was not afraid of disrupting the industry, and he was not afraid of making enemies," said Herbert Chow, a former marketing director at a rival brand.
That was both his making and undoing, Chow said: "Otherwise, there would have been no Apple Daily. Of course, he wouldn't have ended up like this either."
An early TV commercial for Apple Daily featured the then 48-year-old Lai biting the forbidden fruit while dozens of arrows took aim at him.
It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Jimmylai.substack.com
The Apple Daily commercial when it launched in 1995
Escape from China
It was his first taste of chocolate that beckoned Lai to Hong Kong as a boy.
After carrying a passenger's luggage at a railway station in China, Lai was given a tip, and a bar of chocolate. He took a bite. "I asked him where he's from. He said Hong Kong. I said, 'Hong Kong must be heaven' because I had never tasted anything like that," Lai said of the encounter in a 2007 documentary, The Call of the Entrepreneur.
Life in Mao Zedong's China was punctuated by waves of oppressive campaigns - to industrialise China overnight, to weed out capitalist "class enemies". The Lais, once a family of business people, were blacklisted. His father fled to Hong Kong, leaving them behind. His mother was sent to a labour camp.
Decades later, Lai wrote of how of he and his sisters would be dragged out of their homes to watch a crowd forcing their mother to kneel while she was shoved and taunted - cruel public shaming that soon became the norm. The first time, Lai wrote, was terrifying: "My tears flowed freely and wet my shirt. I dared not make a move. My body was burning with humiliation."
Uncowed, his grandmother finished every story with the same message: "You have to become a businessman even if you only sell seasoned peanuts!"
And so, at the age of 12, he set off for Hong Kong, among millions who fled the mainland - and Mao's devastating rule - over the years.
The day he arrived, on the bottom of a fishing boat, along with about 80 seasick travellers, he was hired by a mitten factory. He described the long working hours as a "very happy time, a time that I knew I had a future". It was there that one of his co-workers helped him learn English. Years later, he would give interviews and even testify at court in fluent English.
By his early 20s, he was managing a textile factory and after making money on the stock market, he started his own, Comitex Knitters. He was 27.
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Jimmy Lai at his home in Hong Kong in 1993
Business often took Lai to New York, and on one of those trips, he was lent a book that came to define his worldview: The Road to Serfdom by Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek, a champion of free-market capitalism. "People's spontaneous reaction" and "the exchange of information" have created the best in the world, was his takeaway. To him, that was Hong Kong's strength.
The book spurred a voracious reading habit. He would read the same book multiple times, and read every book by authors he admired. "I want to turn the author's thoughts into my backyard garden. I want to buy a garden, not cut flowers," he said in a 2009 interview.
After a decade in manufacturing, he was "bored" and founded the clothing chain Giordano in 1981, which became a fast-fashion pioneer. It was so successful that Tadashi Yanai sought advice from Lai when his Japanese label Uniqlo opened shops.
Lai launched stores in China, which had begun to open up after Mao died. He was "excited", China "was going to be changed, like a Western country", he said in the 2007 documentary.
Then in 1989, Beijing crushed pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square: a rude awakening for Lai and Hong Kong, which was set to return to Chinese rule in 1997 under a recent agreement by China and the UK.
Giordano sold tees with photos of Tiananmen protest leaders and anti-Beijing slogans, and put up pro-democracy banners in stores across Hong Kong.
A million people marched in Hong Kong in solidarity with student protesters in Beijing. Until 2020, Hong Kong held the largest vigil that mourned the massacre.
Lai said later that he "didn't feel anything about China" until then. He had always wanted to forget that part of his life but "all of a sudden, it was like my mother was calling in the darkness of the night".
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Lai was a frequent attendee at Hong Kong 's annual vigils in memory of those who died at Tiananmen Square in 1989
'Choice is freedom'
The following year Lai launched a magazine called Next, and in 1994 published an open letter to Li Peng, "the Butcher of Beijing" who played a key role in the Tiananmen massacre. He called him "the son of a turtle egg with zero intelligence".
Beijing was furious. Between 1994 and 1996, Giordano's flagship store in Beijing and 11 franchises in Shanghai closed. Lai sold his shares and stepped down as chairman.
"If I just go on making money, it doesn't mean anything to me. But if I go into the media business, then I deliver information, which is choice, and choice is freedom," Lai said in the 2007 documentary.
He soon became a "very active participant" in Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, meeting leaders to discuss strategy, said Lee Wing Tat, a former lawmaker from the Democratic Party.
He became an outspoken critic of the CCP, writing in 1994: "I entirely oppose the Communist Party because I hate everything that restrains personal liberties." He also started to voice concerns about the looming handover of Hong Kong, from Britain to China, in 1997.
"After more than a century of colonial rule, Hong Kongers feel proud to return to the embrace of the motherland," he wrote. "But should we love the motherland even if it doesn't have freedom?"
During the handover, however, China's then-leader Jiang Zemin promised that Hongkongers would govern Hong Kong and the city would have a high degree of autonomy for the next 50 years.
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Lai at an "Occupy Central" protest in Admiralty in October 2014
The 2014 Umbrella Movement sparked by Beijing's refusal to allow completely free elections in Hong Kong became another turning point for Lai.
Protesters occupied the city's main commercial districts for 79 days. Lai turned up from 9am to 5pm every day, undeterred after a man threw animal entrails at him. "When the police started firing tear gas, I was with Fatty," the former lawmaker Lee recalled.
The movement ended when the court ordered protest sites to be cleared, but the government did not budge. Five years later, in 2019, Hong Kong erupted again, this time because of a controversial plan that would have allowed extradition to mainland China.
What began as peaceful marches became increasingly violent, turning the city into a battleground for six months. Black-clad protesters threw bricks and Molotov cocktails, stormed parliament and started fires; riot police fired tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons and live rounds.
Lai was at the forefront of the protests and served 20 months for participating in four unauthorised assemblies. A protester told the BBC he was surprised to see Lai: "To me, he's a busy businessman, but he showed up."
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Lai at a pro-democracy march in 2019
Apple Daily provided blanket coverage or, as critics would argue, a sounding board for an anti-government movement.
Government adviser Ronny Tong said Lai was "instrumental" in the protests because Apple Daily carried a "totally false" slogan – anti-extradition to China – which "caught the imagination of people who wanted to cause havoc in Hong Kong".
Whether Apple Daily played a seditious role, and how much control Lai exerted over its stance was at the centre of his 156-day national security trial.
Lai instructed the editorial team to "urge people to take to the streets", according to Cheung Kim-hung, former chief executive of Apple Daily's parent company Next Digital, and a defendant-turned-prosecution witness. After the National Security Law took effect, the newspaper was raided twice and eventually shut down in 2021.
During the height of the protests, Lai flew to the US where he met then Vice-President Mike Pence to discuss the situation in Hong Kong. A month before the National Security Law was imposed, Lai launched a controversial campaign, despite internal pushback, urging Apple Daily readers to send letters to then US President Donald Trump to "save Hong Kong".
All of this, the court ruled, amounted to a public appeal for a foreign government to interfere in Hong Kong's internal affairs.
"Nobody in their right mind should think that Hong Kong can undergo any kind of political reform without at least tacit acceptance from Beijing," Tong said. The protests in 2014 and 2019 "are totally against common sense".
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Copies of the last Apple Daily newspaper early on June 24, 2021
Beijing says Hong Kong has now moved from "chaos to governance" and onto "greater prosperity" because of the national security law and a "patriot-only" parliament. But critics, including hundreds of thousands of Hongkongers who have since left, say dissent has been stifled, and the city's freedoms severely curbed.
Lee, the lawmaker, is among them: "When I first came to the UK, I had nightmares. I felt very guilty. Why could we live in other places freely, while our good friends were jailed?"
Lai's family has been calling for his release for years, citing concerns for his health because he is diabetic, but their calls have been rejected so far. The government and Lai's Hong Kong legal team have said that his medical needs are being met.
Carmen Tsang, Lai's daughter-in-law who lives in Hong Kong with her family, says her children miss grandpa - and the big family dinners he hosted every two weeks. His loud voice scared her daughter when she was younger, but "they loved going to grandpa's place… They think he's a funny guy".
She is not sure today's Hong Kong has a place for Lai.
"If there's a speck of dust in your eye, you just get rid of it, right?"
Watch: What does the Jimmy Lai verdict mean for democracy in Hong Kong?
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