Kfir, nine months old, and his four-year-old brother Ariel were allegedly taken hostage by Hamas terrorists < p>A baby with red hair and He looks straight into the camera with big brown eyes, his chubby hands clutching a rattle. Next to his photo hangs another photo of his older brother, smiling shyly and proud of his new hairstyle.
Two little boys. Little boys who had to deprive their parents of sleep on Saturday mornings rose early for breakfast and cartoons. The little boys whose photographs were hung in a conference room in central London on Thursday alongside photographs of other people taken hostage by Hamas.
About 150 people are believed to have been taken hostage since Saturday. Four-year-old Ariel and nine-month-old Kfir Zilberman Bibas were captured along with their mother Shiri.
The footage shows Shiri, 30, sobbing as she and her children were taken away.
Sitting behind With their photographs, Noam Sagi and Sharon Lifshitz, whose elderly parents were taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Saturday, called for the safe return of all hostages.
The photographs, hastily posted on the table, show the faces of a little girl named Abigail, a grandmother named Yafa smiling at the camera as she stands stirring something on the stove, 17-year-old Tomer Eliaz Arava and four members of his family.
At the center of a number of photographs is Mr. Saga's 75-year-old mother, Aga, who was photographed on Saturday, as were Ms. Lifshitz's parents, 85 and 83, whom she is afraid to give her name for fear it will may make them even more dangerous.
Noam Sagi's elderly parents were taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz Photo: Eddie Mulholland for The Telegraph
On Thursday they spoke on behalf of all those whose loved ones have been torn from their homes.
“There are mothers who are waiting for their children,” said Ms. Lifshitz, an artist and scholar who has lived in London for 30 years.
“These are the children of my friends, I’m asking on their behalf. They are me… There is no me, there is us.”
A total of 80 people are believed to have been abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where Mr. Sagi and Ms. Lifshitz grew up.
The community woke up on Saturday morning to “a massacre, a second Holocaust,” Mr. Sagi told a press conference in London.
“They were gassed, burned, stabbed, stabbed and kidnapped. Mostly young children and elderly people. They burned this place to the ground, they shot the dogs, there was nothing left,” he added.
What kind of person would snatch a frail 85-year-old woman from her bed and take her hostage? It's a question both have been asking since their elderly parents were taken from their homes and their friends and neighbors were killed around them.
They fear that even if their parents' lives are spared, they may not survive. without access to medications.
Ms. Lifshitz’s mother “was taken off oxygen so she could be loaded onto a motorcycle.”
“My father—I was afraid he would climb onto the chair, not not to mention this,” she said.
Sharon Lifshitz: “This has been planned for a long time” Photo: Eddie Mulholland for The Telegraph
Mr. Saga's mother has severe allergies. “I don’t know if she has an epi-pen,” she said. For Mr Saghi, there is only one answer to the question of who will do it: a terrorist.
He called on the British media to call Hamas a terrorist group, saying: “Call Hamas for what they are, a terrorist group, they need take care of civilians, but instead they take others.”
Sagi, 53, a psychotherapist, urged people to stay away from politics and find “simple humanity.”
“There is no politics here. No context, no religion, no race.
“Holocaust survivors are facing another Holocaust.”
He added: “They use you [the media] to manipulate opinion, and in this psychological war you are being used.”
Asked by a BBC reporter what he thought of the Israeli government's announcement that it would cut off electricity, water and fuel in the Gaza Strip until the hostages were freed, and whether he felt it would harm his parents, Mr. Mr Sagi said the broadcaster needed to characterize Hamas as terrorists.
Addressing a journalist who visited his home, he said: “You saw the photographs, you were at my house and you work for the BBC, and I ask the BBC to call her for what it is. Use human code and call it what it is.
Hamas is an organization that came to do one thing and one thing only.
“Everyone knew what would happen next in the Gaza Strip, and they had a year to plan for it.”
Ms. Lifshitz added that there was “evidence that this was deliberate.”
“These people knew the location of every house and every kibbutz. They brought equipment to break into their houses. This has been planned for a long time.”
Sharon Shochat, who chaired the press conference, described Hamas as a «modern death squad» and described how «girls were raped over the bodies of their friends.»
Many are still waiting for news of their captured loved ones, in what Ms. Shochat said is “the largest hostage crisis the world has faced in decades.”
For For some families, the wait is over as rescue teams pull bodies from the rubble.
One father, Thomas Hand, originally from Ireland, spoke of his relief when he learned that his eight-year-old daughter's body had been found.
«They just said, 'We found Emily and she's dead,' and I said yes.» Yes. I smiled because this was the best news of opportunity I knew. This was the best opportunity I had hoped for,” he told CNN.“She is either dead or in the Gaza Strip. And if you know anything about what they are doing to the people in Gaza, it is worse than death. That's how they treat you.»
Mr. Sagi and Ms. Lifshitz are still waiting for news about their parents.
Childhood friends, they had returned home just a month ago, sitting on the kibbutz where they were born and raised. They drank surrounded by familiar people who had known them all their lives.
In every room they entered, they were greeted by the smiling face of a surrogate parent or sibling. Peace and good neighborliness were at the center of this “little green oasis in the middle of the desert,” Mr. Sagi said, “until Saturday morning.”
Many of the people they grew up with, who helped raise them, whose grandchildren played with their young sons, are dead or missing.
«Peace-loving people»
Mr. Saga's mother was due to come to London in Thursday to celebrate his 75th birthday.
“I shouldn’t have been sitting here today – I should have gone to Heathrow to pick up my mother,” he said.
Mr Sagi and Ms Lifshitz talked about the specter of the Holocaust and the old stories they grew up with that were running through their minds this week.
«How my uncle's life was saved because he gave a coat to a Pole,» Ms. Lifshitz said.
“Stories in which a good deed mattered. Do I want this story to be here? Yes.”
Their parents belong to the generation that fought “for a better future.”
“Peace-loving people who have fought all their lives for coexistence and good neighborly relations,” said Mr. Sagi.
“If they die for peace, they will accept it. If they die for the war, it will be another travesty.”
On Saturday morning he said: “They were on the front line.”
Свежие комментарии