Rounding the corner of a hospital corridor, nine-year-old Ohad Munder breaks into a run, hurling himself into the arms of his father after being held by militants in Gaza for nearly seven weeks.
The reunion took place at a hospital near Tel Aviv after the boy, his mother and his grandmother were freed along with 10 others on the first day of a four-day truce and hostage swap deal with Hamas that also saw dozens of Palestinian prisoners freed.
After a process followed by millions on television, the hostages were flown to meet their families at two Israeli hospitals that released clips of their poignant family reunions. The brief images have brought a glimmer of hope to a nation still reeling from the Oct. 7 attacks.
Photo: Israel Defense Forces via AP
On that day, Gaza militants stormed southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping about 240 others, among them mothers, babies, children and the elderly, according to an Israeli count. In response, Israel has hit back with a vast military campaign that Gaza’s Hamas rulers say has killed more than 15,000 people.
Awaiting the hostages was an army of Israeli medics, child protection experts and trauma specialists who had battened down the hatches to protect the former captives from the media spotlight as they start to process a seven-week ordeal that is likely to have left many of them deeply traumatized.
“Did you miss me, did you think about daddy?” asked Yoni Katz-Asher as he sat on a bed at the Schneider Children’s Medical Center holding his four-year-old daughter Raz who was snatched with her two-year-old sister Aviv and their mother, Doron.
Photo courtesy of the Schneider Children’s Medical Center via AP
“I dreamed that we came home,” she told him, her blonde curls pulled back in a ponytail, her mum and her little sister also cuddling in close. “You dreamed you came home? Look, the dream has come true,” he told her, promising the family would go home very soon.
“I am happy that I received my family back, we’re allowed to feel joy and to shed a tear, that’s a human thing,” Katz-Asher later said in a video released by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum.
“But I am not celebrating,” he said. “I will not celebrate until the last of the hostages returns home.” Although Noam Peri’s elderly father was not among the hostages brought home on Friday, those who returned brought welcome news.
“We have a sign of life from my father, we know he’s alive from other people from the community who were released yesterday,” said Peri, whose 79-year-old father Haim was snatched from his home in Nir Oz kibbutz near the Gaza border.
All but one of the hostages released on Friday — among them six elderly women, three mothers and their four children — were from Nir Oz, one of the hardest hit communities on Oct. 7.
In Nir Oz, 75 people were seized and 29 killed, Peri said.
“So one out of four people from this community were either murdered or kidnapped,” she said.
Hearing that her father was still alive has given the anguished family fresh hope, but they have no guarantees he will be getting out soon, if at all — the hostages to be released under the ceasefire deal are women and those aged 18 or under.
“It brings a lot of hope, but we don’t know how much time they’re going to be able to hold on there,” she said, describing her father as “a brave man, but not a healthy man” who survived a heart attack and “depends on medication to survive.”
Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky. Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier. Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled. “Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations. Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
Farmer Liu Bingyong used to make a tidy profit selling milk but is now leaking cash — hit by a dairy sector crisis that embodies several of China’s economic woes. Milk is not a traditional mainstay of Chinese diets, but the Chinese government has long pushed people to drink more, citing its health benefits. The country has expanded its dairy production capacity and imported vast numbers of cattle in recent years as Beijing pursues food self-sufficiency. However, chronically low consumption has left the market sloshing with unwanted milk — driving down prices and pushing farmers to the brink — while
RSS