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While the UN devotes its human rights operations to the demonization of the democratic state of Israel above all others and condemns the United States more often than the vast majority of non-democracies around the world, the voices of real victims around the world must be heard.
U.N. Obsession with Condemning
Israel Instead
Relatives of Shaked Haran from Kibbutz Be'eri near the Gaza border in Hamas captivity since Saturday, October 7, 2023. (Courtesy)
Palestinian Authority/Gaza, October 11, 2023
10 members of same kibbutz family believed held by Hamas, including 3 children
Original source
Ten members of the same family, including three children aged three to 12, are believed to have been kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri near the Gaza border on Saturday and to be in the hands of the terror group Hamas.
Shaked Haran, a lawyer for the not-for-profit Lobby99, which champions public causes, grew up on the kibbutz but recently moved with her husband and two children to the southern city of Beersheba, and so was spared.
Her brother Yuval and his wife Anna Lee are also residents of the kibbutz but were away at an event on Saturday morning.
The rest of the family was not so lucky — her parents, her sister, her sister’s husband, their two children, Yahel, 3, and Naveh, 8, an aunt and uncle and the uncle’s carer, were all at Be’eri when it was stormed by terrorists and are now gone. Another aunt and her daughter, Noam, 12, are also missing.
On Saturday morning, after a massive rocket attack on the kibbutz, dozens of Hamas terrorists entered through the main gate, shot the security guards there and went from house to house, murdering residents, blowing up the doors of safe rooms to shoot those inside and setting houses on fire.
Emergency rescue workers subsequently found 108 bodies of residents — a 10th of the kibbutz population.
By the time Israeli armed forces reached the family’s homes on Saturday, they had all burned down, according to Shaked Haran’s colleague Rachel Gur, deputy director of Lobby99, who is helping to publicize the tragedy.
Nobody was to be found bar the grandmother, who is now with Haran in Beersheba.
Shaked and her husband frantically called everyone’s phones through Saturday night, Gur said.
On Sunday, a man answered. With an Arabic accent, he said, in broken Hebrew, “Kidnapped Gilad Shalit, Gaza.” This was a reference to former IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped by Hamas on the Israeli side of the Gaza border in June 2006 and held captive for over five years, until a prisoner exchange in October 2011.
There has been no contact with the family since.
Haran’s sister Adi and the three children have dual German citizenship.
On Wednesday, according to Gur, Haran met with the German ambassador to Israel in a bid to have the Germans pressure Hamas to release the children, at the very least.
Friends have issued appeals to the international media.
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