Israeli woman learns her husband has been killed by Hamas
British children of elderly hostages seized by Hamas have pleaded for more to be done by the government to save their relatives’ lives.
Pictures were handed out of British and Israeli citizens missing with the youngest being six-month-old baby Ariel.
The sweet image shows the child holding a small ball and wearing a babygrow.
Speaking in London this morning, Noam Sagi, 43, said his 75-year-old mother, Ada Sagi, who was kidnapped from her home, is one of many hostages whose failing health meant any delay could be fatal.
“The reason we feel urgency is because nature will do its course,” the London-based psychotherapist told a press conference organised by Defend Israeli Democracy UK. “If the international community and humanity is not going to say ‘stop: this is outside the lines of what is OK’ they won’t be here for too long.
“[These are] people with cancer, dementia [and] Parkinson’s. They took them on old mobility scooters.”
His mother, he revealed, was one of many without vital medication.
“My mum has severe allergies to every kind of dust and I know that her EpiPen and her inhaler are not with her. I keep on getting desperate pleas from people in Israel, mothers for [their] kid [asking] ‘can you please get someone from the Red Cross to give this medication for [my] child? My heart goes out to them,” Sagi added.
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Staring bravely to a crowd of reporters and cameras, Sagi called on the media as well as the British government to do everything in their power to help bring the hostages home.
“I’m a British citizen, I’m one of your own,” he told reporters. “On Saturday morning the [place] where I was born [and] grew up woke up to [a] massacre, the second Holocaust. They’ve been gassed, burned, butchered, slaughtered, killed and kidnapped.”
“I call on all of you the media people here in this room to connect to take responsibility and present right from the wrong. Call the Hamas for what they are: a terror group. They need to take care of the civilians and instead they taking others. They’re using you to manipulate opinions and in the psychological warfare, you are being used.”
Sagi revealed the awful way his life had been upended by events in Israel. Instead of speaking at a press conference appealing for the return of babies and elderly people, the 43-year-old should have been collecting his mother from Heathrow ahead for birthday celebrations in London.
“Nothing prepares you for that. Up until Friday. I’m working with my clients and helping them with their own emotions. Then it comes down to the basic existential reason why we’re here [and asking] Is my mum alive?” he explained.
The press conference began with shocking revelations by Defend Israeli Democracy UK about some of those kidnapped, such as a six-month-old baby who was seized.
Spokesperson Sharon Shochat described how a “modern-day death squad” had entered Israeli civilian communities in the south of the country.
“They went door to door, snatched babies from their mothers and children from their beds, handcuffed them and then brutally, cold-bloodedly slaughtered their entire families in their homes,” she told reporters.
“Young people at a music festival were surrounded and attacked, terrorised and assaulted. Young people who are in a music festival for peace. Girls were raped over their friends’ bodies.”
Sagi sat beside Sharon Lifschitz, 52, an artist and academic whose peace activist parents in their 80s have also been taken hostage. Growing emotional she repeatedly told reporters there had been no updates on the wellbeing of her family members.
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“I keep telling my son that they are very ‘valuable assets’ and therefore people are looking after them. I have no clue [if they are], but I have to somehow find a way through this reality.”
Lifschitz said her parents were incredibly strong in “heart” and “will” but were in precarious physical condition. “When my mum was taken out she was disconnected from her oxygen,” she added.
Sagi and Lifschitz’s parents both lived in the Kibbutz Nir Oz, a tight-knit collectivist community established in the 1950s. Defend Israeli Democracy UK estimated around 80% of those who lived there died in the attack and the rest are missing.
“There is evidence that this was premeditated,” Lifschitz said. “These people knew the location of every house on every kibbutz, they had planned which way they were going to go through the houses [and] brought equipment to break in. They planned it all, this has been planned for a long time.”
Lifschitz explained her father had at times been marginalised for his moderate views on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It was a family joke that, despite often speaking to journalists, he rarely made the final cut because his opinions were not extreme enough.
A caring person, he regularly drove sick Palestinians to doctor appointments on the other side of Jerusalem. Lifschitz wonders if it could be these small gestures could make a difference.
“I grew up on all these Holocaust stories about how my uncle’s life was saved because he gave a coat to a Polish man-where small acts of kindness made the difference when everything became impossible. Do I want that to be the story here? yes”
Asked if her father’s mission for peace became all the more distant in the wake of the weekend’s events Lifschitz replied now was not the time for such analysis.
“Think about the hostages, think about how long we have for them because there’s something that we can do here. There’s so much I cannot do. I cannot return to Israel or tell my father to take the ambulance that came to see him on Friday night because then he would safe and I cannot do anything for the dead.”
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