“I open WhatsApp and see a photo of Dafna sitting on a mattress in Gaza in her pajamas with the comment ‘It would be better in prayer clothes,'” said the mother of the kidnapped 15-year-old Israeli with her eight-year-old little sister of Hamas.
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“I tell myself it’s not possible,” Maayan Zin, 52, told AFP, with no news about her daughters Dafna and Ela since that unique show of life on October 8, the day after the Palestinian Islamist’s unprecedented attack Elyakim moved.
AFP
Two days earlier, on the 6th, her daughters had returned from vacation in Turkey. Maayan went to the airport to kiss her before they went to sleep with her father Noam and his partner Dikla at their home in Nahal Oz, a kibbutz on the Gaza border.
When the first warning sirens sounded in the morning on Saturday, October 7, Maayan texted her ex-husband, who reassured her. Last message on the family group screen.
The rest of the ordeal was documented on video. A Facebook live stream from Dikla’s account begins in the late morning.
Two masked men with green Hamas headbands film themselves in the Israeli house, the father is covered in blood. Ela is on her knees and her eyes are wide with fear.
Relatives try to communicate via chat: “Mom, I love you,” writes one of Dikla’s sons, who is not at home at 1:20 p.m.
His other son, Tomer, 17, who was present at the attack, was then used at gunpoint by his executioners for “several hours” to go door-to-door on the kibbutz, luring his holed-up neighbors to shelters in Hebrew .
“They (also) forced him to enter houses to hunt everyone,” says Maayan Zin.
“I see her dead”
The bullet-riddled bodies of Tomer, Dikla and Noam were found in a vacant lot.
Dafna and Ella were spared without anyone understanding why and taken to Gaza.
Hundreds of Hamas fighters crossed into Israeli soil from Gaza on October 7, particularly in kibbutzim, where they carried out the deadliest attack since Israel’s founding in 1948.
Since then, more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in this unprecedented attack by Hamas, which Israeli authorities say is still holding at least 240 hostages.
According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, nearly 8,800 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the Israeli army’s incessant bombings in the Gaza Strip, which was under total siege.
“Sometimes I imagine that we are raping them, that we are beating them, and a little later (…) I tell myself that there are so many children there that they are obliged to treat them,” says Maayan Zin torn back and forth.
“I see them in tunnels, in rooms without light, underground or in hospitals where they seek refuge to avoid being bombed,” she says with a breath. “I see her dead, injured.”
“Nightmare”
Every morning, Maayan Zin rushes to her phone to scan Facebook, Telegram and WhatsApp groups in search of a new video from Gaza or a message from the kidnappers.
She breaks into a sweat several times a day and copes with these bouts of anxiety by forcing herself not to “implode” in the event of the return of her daughters, who now only have her.
But three weeks after her abduction, Maayan Zin, who sleeps every night with her daughters’ pajamas over her face to smell their scent, is also afraid of paying dearly for this hope that comes from her womb.
AFP
“Maybe they killed my daughters? Maybe there are 230 bodies there?” she asks with a look.
It could take “days, weeks, years, I don’t know,” Ms. Zin continues, also fearing that her daughters “will come back different.”
Among the scenarios upon her return, in addition to her dilemma of how to hold both of them at the same time, is also the desire to “buy a big bed so the three of us can sleep together,” she says. before closing.
She explains that taking children hostage in Gaza is like a “constant rollercoaster ride.” “Only when I wake up from this nightmare can I start dreaming.”