“Grandma is here, healthy and beautiful.” With these words, Adriana Adar this Saturday calmed the thousands of Israelis who were wondering about the state of Yaffa, the 85-year-old woman who became one of the symbols of resistance to jihadist terror during the Hamas attack on the 7th. October after being photographed impassive and stoic while being transported by her kidnappers in a golf cart. “Thanks to all who supported us. It’s the first drop in the sea, we are waiting for you Tamir Adar, waiting for everyone! All of them! », Adriana has written, in reference to one of Yaffa’s granddaughters, also held hostage by the militia, but who has not yet been released.
The octogenarian is part of the first group of captives handed over by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. She lived in the Nir Oz kibbutz, one of the most punished by the Islamists. The video of her capture was one of the first to circulate after the massacre. She was surprised by Yaffa’s strong spirit. Her face was unwavering, without a trace of fear despite having witnessed the massacre carried out by her captors. There was even a moment when she smiled slightly. So much was her unexpected gesture that the next day one of her daughters commented that many neighbors and acquaintances of hers had asked her if her mother suffered from some type of mental illness that prevented her from accepting reality.
Nothing further. “She is putting on a brave face, taking charge of the situation and showing her captors a glimpse of the unbreakable resolve that we all know she has,” the daughter said in an interview in ‘The Times of Israel’. Yaffa has eight children and more than a dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She has not wanted to speak in public. The doctors say that she is “in good health” and that the main thing is her reunion with her loved ones; a family that thought of the image of her grandmother “thirsty, alone, in the dark,” convinced on more than one occasion that she would die during her captivity since it was impossible to provide her with the medicines she needs.
But Grandma Adar has a past: she was a Holocaust survivor. And she has survived “the second”, some media claim, highlighting how this woman embodies the “Jewish spirit” like no one else. «Yaffa Adar is a heroine of Israel. Being kept for so many days in the den of these human monsters and then returning alive is an incredible feat,” wrote Itan Dahan in .
Happiness and sadness are called Doron. Doron Katz-Asher and her two daughters, Raz, five years old, and Aviv, just two, who returned to Israel this Friday after being kidnapped in inhumane conditions. They have emerged unscathed from a hell that, however, swallowed Doron’s mother, Efrat Katz, her whereabouts remain unknown and Israeli media do not rule out that she had been murdered by the jihadists at some point during her captivity. The three were finally able to meet in an Israeli hospital with Yoni Asher, husband and father of the former hostages, the only one who was saved from the Hamas attack and who has fought “the battle of my life” knocking on all the doors, from the Vatican to the Government. German, since they have German nationality, in search of liberation.
The three women had traveled to a kibbutz near the Strip to visit Doron’s mother. Asher stayed at her house, hundreds of miles away, because of her work commitments. At dawn on October 7, his wife called him in alarm. She told him that they were going to the safe room of the house, since gunshots could be heard outside and several terrorists were trying to attack the home.
Communication was cut off. Her husband spent the next few hours tracking Doron’s cell phone. He knew everything was going wrong: the signal placed the phone inside Gaza. The next thing he found was one of the hundreds of radical videos showing her family in the back of a van. “I was able to identify them immediately: my two daughters, my wife and my mother-in-law.” Since then, she recognized that she had stopped “having life,” as she said in one of the frequent mobilizations of the hostages’ families, although all that darkness seems to have been erased a few hours ago. “They’re here. There will be time to digest what happened,” she wrote on a social network.
The 24 freed hostages spent their first night under the control of the doctors and with their loved ones. Happy, but still overwhelmed by the trauma. Ten of them are Thai, one Filipino and another thirteen Israelis. Among these are four children and half a dozen septuagenarian and octogenarian women.
Some of their stories are miraculous.
Margalit Moses, 78 years old, diabetic, cancer patient and affected by episodes of fibromyalgia, will be able to fulfill her dream of traveling to Mozambique after overcoming captivity. “Mom is back,” her son Yair wrote on a social network, along with a photo surrounded by her children and grandchildren in the hospital room.
A commando took Margalit from her home in Nir Oz along with her ex-husband, who lives in a nearby home and is still being held by Hamas. She is fond of traveling, days before she had been photographed at a meeting of friends. Happy, smiling. For 25 years she was a teacher and later became treasurer of a company in the agricultural community where she resides. She is one of the most veteran hostages whose capture was recorded by the terrorists themselves on video. Those close to her affirm that she “loves life like few people.” They have no doubt that she will soon return to the field to continue ‘spying’ on birds, since she is an accomplished ornithologist.
Danielle Alony, 44, and her daughter Emilia, 5, constitute another of the bittersweet stories that Israelis read and listen to attentively today while the guns remain silent and the truce continues in Gaza. They are part of the contingent of those released, but a sister of Danielle, her husband, and her two twin daughters are still kidnapped. What’s worse: no one knows if the clan remains together or the father, David, has been transferred with another group of prisoners.
Danielle and her daughter were visiting relatives’ homes when the attack took place. The next two hours were a prolonged episode of horror for the Alony family, narrated message by message by Sharon to her parents and another sister, who had contacted them alerted by the news that several missile attacks had occurred in the area. . Sharon said that some assailants had entered her neighbor’s house and, later, hers, although the clan had had time to take shelter in the safe room. However, the jihadists set fire to the house, forcing them to go outside when smoke filled the room. In her last message, Sharon told her parents that it was possible that they died.
This Saturday, Danielle and Emilia are already with their loved ones in Israel, happy, but pending the fate of their four relatives. It is possible that at least Sharon and the twins, Yuli and Emma, will be handed over to the Red Cross in the three exchanges that remain until the end of the truce.
Not all those liberated have left hell behind. The cruelest case may be that of Hanna Peri, a 79-year-old veteran who ran a grocery store near the Strip. Of her three children, one remains captive and another was murdered by Hamas. Or that of Hannah Katzir, mother of three children and grandmother of six grandchildren whose husband, Rami, was also shot down by the militants before taking her to the other side of the Strip. Daughter of a family that suffered the Holocaust, Katzir was still working at the age of 71 in the laundry of her kibbutz. Her son, Elad, was determined from a young age to cultivate the lands closest to the Strip. Islamic Jihad published a video of her saying: “I am in a place that is not mine. “I miss my home, my children, my husband Rami and my beloved family.” Her inclusion on the list of freed hostages has been a surprise in Israel since Jihad itself announced her death days ago, which it attributed to the air raids on Gaza.
A Rubik’s cube and a soccer ball. Simple objects are, sometimes, the ones that best allow us to reconnect with the reality before a tragedy. Both of them await Ohad Munder, his main hobby, now that he has left the Hamas tunnels together with his mother, Keren, 54, and Ruti, his grandfather, 78. Freedom will also allow him to recover his stolen birthday; he did nine years recently in the midst of kidnapping him.
The beast encountered this family during what was supposed to be a happy gathering to celebrate Simchat Torah Shabbat at the grandparents’ house on Kibbutz Nir Oz. At ten in the morning, a sister called Keren. “I can’t talk,” she said, and hung up. An hour later, her cell phone signal was circulating in Gaza. In addition to the three kidnappings, days later security forces discovered the body of Keren’s only brother, Roi. killed by militiamen. No one could attend his funeral. “The whole world needs to help us recover faith in the human race,” one of her relatives has written on the networks.
#Mom #mothers #grandmothers #children #light #infernal #nightmare #hands #Hamas