The horror live. TO Yoni Asher, 37 years old, can only place his hopes in the remnant of humanity that he 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 have eaten enough, if they are hot or cold, if they are 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 when the terrorists broke in. Shortly after, he sat down in front of the computer and managed to geolocate the mobile phone from his wife through his Gmail account: there is no doubt, the signal comes 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. EITHER the murder of an elderly lady, broadcast live by the executors on their Facebook page, as reported by the 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 Adi Maizel21, who was participating with hundreds of other young people at the Nova festival, the rave next to Kibbutz Re’im, near the Gaza border, may have taken his mother’s number, Huvawho 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.'”