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Father of American kidnapped by Hamas: I have one mission - bring Hersh home

Jon Polin details the search for his son Hersh Goldberg-Polin amid the Israel-Hamas conflict on 'The Story with Martha MacCallum.'

The father of an American kidnapped by Hamas will not stop searching until he brings his son home. 

Hersh Goldberg-Polin was last seen being loaded into a pickup truck by Hamas militants when they attacked an Israeli music festival Oct. 7, kidnapping and killing hundreds of attendees.

"I have one mission: Get Hersch home," Jon Polin told "The Story with Martha MacCallum" on Tuesday. "There's no partial success here. There's no 90% success here. It's either success or failure, and I want to bring Hersh home." 

Polin said Hersh, who lived in California until moving to Israel at 8 years-old, is "a child of both countries" and called on people to stop politicizing the attack. 

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"Let's turn this into what [it] is, a global humanitarian catastrophe, and the whole world and foreign ministers everywhere should be screaming to get these people out and don't politicize them." 

Polin said video of the kidnapping shows his son "with a stump of a left arm bleeding out" and the family hopes he has received medical care and is alive.

"The Israeli government lists him officially as a hostage, as taken by Hamas, as we've seen in the video, and still lists him as a hostage, but we don't know. We have no proof of life," he told MacCallum. "We don't know if once he was loaded into that pickup truck at 9:00 in the morning on October 7, if he was tossed off the truck after 30 seconds or if he made it into Gaza where his phone was last pinged. We don't know his status, but officially he's still listed as ‘kidnapped’." 

The father said the pain is "unimaginable." 

"We can't imagine the life we are living," he reflected. "We wake up every day after barely sleeping. We continue the mission. Like I said, it's either we succeed, or we don't. There's nothing in the middle. That is what carries us. It helps that we are in support and feeling love from around the world, hearing from people who we know, people who we don't know, with messages of support, tracking on "Bring Hersh Home’ on social media. It all strengthens us. Those one-line messages of support and people saying they were thinking of us, it all helps. It all is part of what's carrying us through life right now." 

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