Negotiators around the world can't secure a Gaza cease-fire. These moms want to get it done.

Idit Ohel’s son is at the age when young men are building their own lives.

Like any mom who wants to help, she went to IKEA for furniture. He loves cooking, so she bought a new grill. He wanted to attend music school, so she shared how masterfully he played the piano.

Except Alon Ohel isn’t starting at the Rimon School of Music in Tel Aviv after the High Holidays in the fall, when the school year traditionally starts in Israel.

For the past year, he has been held hostage by Hamas somewhere in the Gaza Strip.

Idit Ohel and her husband, Ronen, have spent the past 365 days preparing for him to come home, keeping Alon’s dreams alive.

He loves cars, especially Teslas. So she bought him a Tesla. It sits in the garage largely undriven. She told her husband not to clean it – she wants Alon to revel in its new-car smell.

“I don't care how much it costs,” she said. “Because I want to see my son smile again.”

Over the past year, hostage mothers like Ohel have become key public faces of their push to reach a deal that will release their children – whether they are young Israeli soldiers, 20-something daughters taken from a music festival, or men with families of their own.

But negotiations remain stuck between Hamas and Israel. A widening conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel’s vow to respond to an Iranian missile attack are drawing attention from their cause as they mark a year of advocacy and pain.

To be sure, anguish and uncertainty afflict all family members whose loved ones are held hostages. But some of the mothers, who say they feel a special kind of pain, want to bolster their connection with one another in hopes of amplifying their unique moral authority to help bring hostages home.

Globally, mothers have banded together before.

There’s the Madres Buscadoras of missing children in Mexico, Argentina’s Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who fought a dictator when their children disappeared, and a "mother’s line" of demonstrators during the U.S. street protests over police killings, said Lester Kurtz, a George Mason University sociologist who studies such movements.

And in Israel, the Four Mothers movement of the 1990s sought to sway public opinion toward an Israeli military withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Israel occupied that part of the country starting 1982 amid the Lebanese civil war and pulled out in 2000.

Whether the nascent idea helps mothers further raise their voices amid the complex, fast-moving conflict is far from clear. Some hostage families believe their voices have been heard but have too often gone unheeded ever since Hamas’ unprecedented attack that slaughtered 1,200 people and sparked a war with the militant group that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

A year since the deadliest attack for Jews since the Holocaust, navigating between sea-sickening waves of hope and despair, some hostage mothers are looking for anything that might return momentum to a release deal.

Mothers of Gaza hostages thrust into activism

It’s the call that every mother fears.

“Mommy, I was shot. I'm bleeding,” Meirav Leshem Gonen’s daughter told her over the phone. “And I think I'm going to die.”

Her 24-year-old daughter, Romi Gonen, had gone to the Supernova music festival in Re'im.

When Hamas militants invaded the desert, she dialed her mother. On the other end, Leshem Gonen could hear the rockets soon after they began firing. She tried to identify where her girl was. Perhaps she could get her some help: “Go to the car and get out of there,” she told her.

When that proved impossible, Romi tried to hide in some bushes.

After all her attempts had failed, Leshem Gonen did what any mother would do: She tried to comfort her daughter – even if that meant telling her that everything was going to be OK when she didn’t believe it herself.

“I know I’m lying, because I don’t have answers,” Leshem Gonen said at a news conference in Israel a couple of weeks after the attack.

Suddenly, Romi and her friends were attacked. With the line still open, she heard terrifying sounds. Gunfire. A boy gasping for air next to her daughter, dying. Shouting in Arabic.

“I heard them coming to the door of my daughter's side, taking her out, dragging her along the road. And then they threw her inside the car,” she told USA TODAY in an interview recently.

Then the line went dead.

That day, she wanted to curl up into a ball. But soon, her mother’s instinct to fight, her fierce drive to protect her daughter, took over.

“I am a doer. I need to do things for my kids, and if one of my kids is in trouble, in danger, I'm doing. I cannot stop,” said Leshem Gonen, a former business consultant.

The next day, she spoke at a news conference with several families of hostages. Soon she became part of the Hostages and Missing Family Forum, whose “Bring Them Home Now” campaign has spanned the globe. The group has organized protests, marches, media interviews and meetings with lawmakers and leaders including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Joe Biden.

She recalled a public event when she noticed the crowd’s emotional reaction to her story told through a mother’s lens. “I understood the power I have as a mother,” she said.

That power also came to Ohel, whose son Alon, 23, was abducted from the same festival after climbing into a shelter with others to take cover. But it wasn’t any easier.

She was walking her dog on Oct. 7 when her father phoned to see if Alon was safe. She texted him. “Everything is fine, we’re in a shelter,” he replied, she recalled in a column in the Los Angeles-based The Free Press. They kept calling.

Past midnight that day, her husband had found out what happened: “He was kidnapped alive,” she recalled him telling her.

The news hit like a hammer.

“I closed my eyes, and I was breathing for a second,” she said. “My other kids – my son who is 20 now and my daughter, she's 14 – looking at me to see, what I will say? How will I react?”

She took a breath.

“We are going to fight this. We're going to make sure that Alon comes home,” Ohel said. “It was either I crawl up in bed until he comes home and do nothing and cry and cry and cry – or I am fighting for him.”

The pain is still fresh, even a year later.

Ohel likes to think of the smile that beamed from Alon’s face when they met during his travels in Southeast Asia. At the Bangkok airport, he wrapped his arms around his ima.

She doesn't like to think of the videos she has seen of Hamas militants dragging her bloodied son by his hair across the ground before he disappeared.

“I cried today for about an hour. … It's right here. It's with me,” she said recently. “But it doesn't stop me from doing what I need to do to bring him home.”

Over the past year, some of the mothers who were initially reluctant to become public activists because of their private pain have joined the efforts, Leshem Gonen said.

Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst in Israel, said mothers as individuals have been important figures in the Israeli debate over how to handle the hostage crisis, including by their sheer drive and devotion to their children that many find relatable.

“You see how tormented they are. You see they're out there giving their entire lives to this,” Scheindlin said.

Of the original 251 hostages, more than 100 hostages have been released, most of them women and children, in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners and a four day-truce in November.

Eight more hostages have been rescued by Israeli troops, and three were mistakenly killed by Israeli forces. On Aug. 31, Israeli authorities said the bodies of six hostages were found in a tunnel in Gaza shot multiple times at close range by Hamas.

One of them was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, who had been in the shelter with Alon.

Frustrated mothers seek a stronger voice

Rachel Goldberg-Polin called the months her son was held as an “odyssey of torture.” But by late summer this year, she had become convinced her son would come back alive.

She has described Hersh as a happy-go-lucky son, born in Oakland, California, a respectful young man who loved soccer and had a bedroom filled with atlases, globes and National Geographic magazines. On Oct. 7, he too was at the music festival, celebrating his birthday.

When the attack broke out, he and others took shelter in a small bomb shelter. Hamas attackers threw grenades into the shelter, killing one person and blowing off Hersh's left forearm. He eventually was loaded into a pickup and taken to Gaza.

The days since had been like “living on another planet,” she said at an appearance alongside her husband at the Democratic National Convention in August, part of her work becoming a public face in the U.S. of the hostage crisis. She wore the number 320, marking the number of days since his kidnapping.

Not long after, in early September, she was in Jerusalem, eulogizing her son. She spoke directly to him, almost like an outcry of teshuvah, or atonement, pleading with him to forgive her. She asked to be forgiven if she didn’t think of something that perhaps could have freed him.

“Hersh, for all of these months I have been in such torment and worry about you every millisecond of every single day. It was such a specific type of misery that I have never experienced before. I tried hard to suppress the missing you part. Because that, I was convinced, would break me. So I spent 330 days terrified, scared, worrying and frightened. It closed my throat and made my soul throb with third-degree burns,” she said.

The sense of urgency to bring the rest of the hostages home were “amplified times a million” with those deaths, said Orna Neutra, of New York, who is close to Goldberg-Polin and whose own 22-year-old son, Omer, was taken hostage while serving as a commander in the Israeli Defense Force. “And I think it crushed all of our hearts.”

The six hostages' deaths led to street demonstrations across Israel to protest the government's failure to negotiate freedom for the captives. Israeli media estimated that up to 500,000 people gathered in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other cities, according to Reuters. Protesters in Jerusalem blocked streets, even outside the prime minister's residence.

Yet not everyone agrees. Though public opinion polls have often asked the question differently over time, about 60% of Israelis on average support a deal with Hamas to get the hostages back despite the price, Scheindlin said.

In September, the U.S. and France proposed a deal that would halt the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. Since then, Israel has accelerated its fight with Hezbollah, killing key leaders. And it has vowed to respond to rocket and missile attacks from Iran.

Many were frustrated that their efforts hadn’t moved the needle. Orly Gilboa, whose 20-year-old daughter was taken hostage while serving as a military observer, recalled one event in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, when she addressed lawmakers, asking them to think about what their mother would do for them if they were held hostage.

“Unfortunately, there wasn't a single woman among them,” she said.

Neutra, too, has been frustrated by leaders and negotiators posturing over strength rather than finding ways to effort to reach an agreement. “One thing that Rachel was saying early on is that if you were to put the mothers in the room, this would have been solved,” she said.

Even before some participated in this year's Oct. 7 commemorations events that called for a renewed effort to reach a hostage deal, some mothers have begun talking about what more they could do together to reach other mothers and further influence opinion.

“And so, we are acting together, as mothers, as a force,” Gilboa said. “Together we address the decision-makers, together we meet with them, together we raise our voices.”

As months tick by, private toll falls heavily on mothers

For Yael Adar, getting her son back alive is no longer an option. But that doesn’t mean she has stopped fighting.

Tamir Adar, 38, helped with Kibbutz Nir Oz's security when it was attacked. He told his wife to stay locked inside with their two children. They survived, but Tamir disappeared.

He had been taken to Gaza. And Adar hoped he was alive ? only to learn in January that he had died the day of the attack and his body was being held in Gaza.

But she hasn’t been able to properly bury him without the return of his remains, she said. She has been unable to work or find closure.

“He's still held in Gaza,” she said, arguing that she knows that the price of a hostage deal would be steep but that it’s necessary.

In the past year, the anguishing toll of worry and fear has spared few of the mothers.

Gilboa, for example, worries that her daughter Daniella could face sexual abuse, she told Israeli media this summer. Two Israeli doctors who treated released hostages, and an Israeli military official familiar with the matter, confirmed to USA TODAY last year that some former hostages revealed they suffered violent sexual assaults in captivity. And released hostage Amit Soussana has since spoken out publicly about experiencing sexual abuse while being held in Gaza.

Others wonder if their children are among those who are still alive. Netanyahu reportedly told a Knesset committee this week that only half of the 101 hostages are still alive.

Leshem Gonen said she has heard from intelligence officials and another hostage who came back that Romi was alive and was seen in the tunnels.

Now, on day 372 of their plight for their children’s return, they find ways to get through each span of 24 hours.

Leshem Gonen says she can still feel Romi. Like the time she woke up one morning and knew Romi was crying. Or the time she had difficulty breathing ? and she knew it was because Romi was struggling to breathe that day.

Neutra unspools a few inches of masking tape, inscribing a new triple-digit number in black marker – the days Omer has been held hostage – that she sticks on her shirt. It keeps her focused on her mission amid the blur of days.

And Ohel, who yearns to share that new car smell with her dear Aloni.

(This story was updated to include the Israeli prime minister's full name.)

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Israel hostage moms may be the key to a Gaza cease-fire