The mother of two children believed to have been taken by Hamas has appealed to international countries to make all efforts possible to secure the release of hostages held in Gaza.
A resident of a community close to the border with Gaza, Renana Gome Yaacov was apart from her two boys aged 12 and 16 when the attack by Hamas began on Saturday, October 7th. She was on the phone to the children as gunmen entered the house.
“I could hear my youngest who was on the phone with me saying: ‘Don’t take me, I’m too young’. And that was the last I’ve heard of him,” Gome Yaacov tearfully told reporters on Tuesday in a video conference.
The two boys were among 80 people ranging in age from six months to 86 years who were taken from her community of 400, she said. Israel estimated that at least 199 people were taken hostage in the raid, which killed 1,300.
Ms Gome Yaacov urged international countries to exert pressure to secure their release.
“I think children on both sides are not supposed to be part of the war game. Children are not playing cards. Bring them home now,” Ms Gome Yaacov said.
She suggested that the Israeli government was not working hard enough on the release of the hostages and that the state’s promise of providing security for her community had been “broken brutally”.
“As far as I’m concerned, they can release all prisoners, they can do anything,” she told reporters. “They owe me to bring my children back home.”
Film-maker Shaylee Atary, a resident of Kfar Aza kibbutz, which was one of those that suffered most in the Hamas attack, told of how she had fled a back door of her house barefoot carrying her one-month-old baby as her husband stayed behind to delay gunmen who were trying to enter the home.
“I’m disabled in my left leg . . . I was not running fast,” she recalled. “I heard the shooting behind me. The terrorists wouldn’t leave me alone. They kept hunting us.”
She hid in a shed, but was forced to move when her baby, Shaya, started crying. She managed to cross to a nearby house, where a family let her into their barricaded “safe room”.
Ms Atary spoke of the struggle to keep Shaya from crying as the baby became dehydrated and affected by the smoke of a nearby burning house.
“Shaya was like a magnet to the terrorists. Throughout the whole 27 hours that we were besieged in that safe room without food, without water, every time Shaya cried they shot at us even more,” she recalled.
“It’s important to understand that it was not a war yet. It was a massacre like you’ve seen in the Holocaust films.”
She later found out that her husband Yahav had been killed.
“Yahav sacrificed his life for me and Shaya, so we can escape from there,” she said.
Both Ms Gome Yaacov and Ms Atary expressed empathy for people in Gaza, but said the cruelty of the actions of the Hamas militants had hardened their conviction that the group had to be defeated.
“I know there are good people in Gaza and I know they don’t want Hamas to be in their government . . . I know that there are kids over there, and they want to go to university and want to live like we do,” Ms Atary said.
“The world should see those crimes and be shocked and realise that, if they don’t condemn it, they will be on the wrong side of history,” she continued. “Because there is no justification to such a murder of civilians. Hamas must be stopped.”
