The horror live. Yoni Asher, 37, can only place her hopes in the remnant of humanity that she is trying to awaken in the hearts of Hamas’s henchmen. The same ones that he heard and saw on a video kidnap his wife, his three- and five-year-old daughters at Kibbutz Nir Oz, last Saturday, where they had gone to visit their grandmother: “They are not even children, they are still two babies under three and five years old,” said the father, calmly, in an interview with American television, in which he addressed the kidnappers.
“Women, children, families are off limits,” the father recalled from his home in Netanya. “I don’t know how they are, if they’ve eaten enough, if they’re hot or cold, if they’re hurt. Don’t hurt them, show some respect.”
However, Yoni is relatively luckier than the relatives of other Israeli hostages missing in the 360 square kilometers of the Palestinian enclave. In a video circulating on the web, he recognized his wife, Duran, who called him from his mother’s house just as the terrorists broke in. Shortly after, he sat down at the computer and managed to geolocate her wife’s mobile phone through her Gmail account: no doubt, the signal is coming from inside the Gaza Strip.
The crying of the children, the screams of the terrorists, the shots, the labored breathing: the images that flood the Internet were filmed and spread by Hamas. Like the video showing three armed men taking a twelve-year-old boy, also in Nir Oz. Or the murder of an elderly woman, broadcast live by the executioners on her Facebook page, as reported by her granddaughter to a Ukrainian channel. Or the parade to which this octogenarian was forced, carried in a kind of golf cart in the middle of the protesters through the streets of Gaza.
The relatives of those kidnapped have no choice but to resort to the same instrument: videos or, if possible, television, in the hope of sending reassuring messages to their children, wives and sisters. The mobile phones of victims who managed to make a last plea for help were not always turned off or destroyed. From the phone of Adi Maizel, 21, who was participating with hundreds of other young people at the Nova festival, the rave next to Kibbutz Re’im, near the border with Gaza, the number of his mother, Uhuva, may have been extracted. who reports having received a series of calls from Arabic numbers: “I hear screams from women in the background while male voices say: ‘We are from Hamas and they have beautiful daughters.'”
“It was ten o’clock when I received a call from my daughter,” Merav Leshen Gonen said through tears. “She told me: ‘they shot us’, ‘the car was hit’, ‘we can’t escape’, ‘everyone here is hurt’, ‘they’re bleeding’, ‘mom, help us, we don’t know what to do’.” Merav did the same as her other parents: he tried to calm her down by assuring her that her rescue services were arriving, but time was quickly running out for Uri David, father of another girl whose last four deep breaths he heard. her. “Then, nothing more.”