by Elisabetta Rosaspina
The drama of the families hoping for the hostages to return. “I don’t know how they are, whether they are hurt.” “I heard women screaming and then men saying, ‘We are from Hamas and you have beautiful daughters'”
The horror of the live broadcast. Yoni Asher, 37 years old, can only pin all his hopes on the remnants of humanity he is trying to reawaken in the hearts of the Hamas thugs. The same ones who heard and saw in a video how last Saturday he kidnapped his wife and three- and five-year-old daughters from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where they had been visiting their grandmother: “They are not even little girls, they are always “Babies who are not even three and five years old yet,” the father said calmly in an interview with an American television channel, addressing the kidnappers.
“Women, children, families are taboo,” the father recalled from his home in Netanya. “I don’t know how they are, whether they have eaten enough, whether they are cold or hot, whether they are injured. Don’t hurt them, show some respect.”
Still, Yoni is relatively luckier than the families of other Israeli hostages who have disappeared in the 360-square-kilometer Palestinian enclave. In a video circulating on the Internet, he recognized his wife Duran, who had called him from her mother’s house just as the terrorists invaded. Shortly afterwards, he sat down at the computer and was able to geolocate his wife’s cell phone via her Gmail account: the signal undoubtedly came from the Gaza Strip.
The crying of children, the screams of terrorists, the beatings, the shortness of breath: the images that appear on the Internet are often filmed and distributed by Hamas itself. Like the video that shows three armed men taking away a twelve-year-old boy, again in Nir Oz. Or the murder of a grandmother, broadcast live by the perpetrators on her Facebook page, as her granddaughter reported to a Ukrainian broadcaster. Or, again, the parade imposed on the 85-year-old loaded onto a golf cart of sorts among the demonstrators on the streets of Gaza.
The families of those abducted have no choice but to use the same means: videos or, if possible, television, in the hope of conveying reassuring messages to their children, wives and sisters. The cell phones of victims who managed to make a final, futile request for help were not always turned off or destroyed. Perhaps her mother’s number, Uhuva, was taken from that of twenty-one-year-old Adi Maizel, who attended the Nova rave with hundreds of other children at Kibbutz Re’im near the Gaza border. She reported receiving a steady stream of calls from Arabic numbers: “I hear female screams in the background while male voices say: We are from Hamas and you have beautiful daughters.”
“It was ten o’clock when I received a call from my daughter,” Merav Leshen Gonen said through tears. “They shot at us,” he told me, “the car was hit, we can’t escape, everyone here is injured, they’re bleeding: Mom, help us, we don’t know what to do!” Merav liked other parents , he tried to reassure her by reassuring her that help was on the way, but time was quickly running out for Uri David, the father of another girl whose last four deep breaths he listened to. “Then nothing more.”
October 11, 2023 (modified October 11, 2023 | 12:40)
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED