They exchanged text messages and emojis. Brief status updates with words of encouragement. A picture of the beloved family dog “Tutsi.”
Until no more messages came.
And then, Cindy Flash, an American, and her Israeli husband Igal vanished into the violence, presumed kidnapped by Hamas.
Four days after Hamas attacked Israel, more than 100 Israelis and potentially dozens of foreign nationals are thought to be held captive in the Gaza Strip. At least 14 U.S. citizens have been killed and an unknown number are still unaccounted for.
Flash, 67, originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, is one of them. She lives in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz in southern Israel near Gaza, where some of the most harrowing and grisly stories have been emerging during the last few days.
“They are breaking down the safe room door,” Flash said in one of her final messages to her daughter Keren, 34. “We need someone to come by the house right now.” She had been communicating with her parents from a few houses away.
Keren described her mother, who worked as an administrator in a local college, as someone who had the “sweetest biggest heart,” who everyone knew and loved, and who had spent a lifetime advocating for the rights of Palestinians, including those who live in Gaza where she may now be held.
Living in what human rights groups and the UN describe as an open air prison under bombarded from a neighboring country isn’t exactly the best thing for life expectancy.
Roughly 2.3 million people live on the Gaza Strip out of the roughly 5 million people living in Palestine BTW, which is the area currently being bombarded by Israel in response to the terrorist attack by Hamas.
I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in how the United Nations describes anything to do with Israel. Their bias is of the charts.
Remember, this is an organization that officially denounced Israel for human rights violations 20 times in one year, and for every other nation on Earth, with all the modern slavery, sex trafficking, genial mutilation, honor killings, murder of LGBTQ, marriage and rape of 7-yr-girls, denying basic education to women, forcing women to fully cover their bodies, mass incarcerations, etc,etc… For all the rest of the world, 6 denouncements.
So yeah, the UN is not a serious organization when it comes to Israel.
Maybe Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch is better.
Any organization that calls Israel “apartheid” is comically biased.
Israel is the only country in the region where a lesbian Muslim woman can vote, get an education and hold elected office.
Claiming it’s apartheid is like claiming the US was apartheid when occupying Iraq because we didn’t allow Iraqis to be citizens of the US.
Words have meanings, and the accusation is demonstrably absurd.
I can’t help but notice your only issues here is with how terms are used in regards to Israel and Palestine but not with the bombardment of Gaza in response to a terrorist attack from Hamas. A place where nearly half of Palestine’s population lives.
Do you not have an issue with Israel’s response or something?
I have no idea who Israel is targeting, but if history is any guide, it is Hamas terrorists.
And Hamas terrorists make it a POLICY to hide among civilians.
For now, I’m giving Israel the benefit of the doubt because they have very much earned it.
Then you were living through an alternate timeline. Israel has killed more than 10.000 Palestinian civillians since 2008 before this weekend. Now they have declared the Palestinians animals when announcing the blockade starving them to death now.
Also they told the Palestinians to flee into Egypt and then bombed the road close to the border crossing.
And Egypt has closed their border to Palestinians just todaySo the situation gets worse and worse
Edit: I was mistaken, their just taking steps to make it harder currently.
I don’t dispute your numbers. But Israel has been in a non-stop battle against terrorists who use their own people as human shields. So I put the civilian death toll squarely where it belongs: at the feet of the terrorists.
I’ve seen ZERO evidence that Israel has ever as a matter of policy targeted innocent civilians. In the contrary, I’ve seen Israel go out of it’s way to send text messages to civilians to give them time to evacuate. I’ve seen they drop lead weights on rooftops as a warning to the people inside you get out before actual missiles come.
I’ve never heard of any other nation doing that. Never. They are knowingly letting terrorists escape because it spares civilian lives.
There is no scholarly consensus over the definition of the term “terrorism.” This in part derives from the fact that the term is politically and emotionally charged, "a word with intrinsically negative connotations that is generally applied to one’s enemies and opponents..
For your consideration
Just last year the IDF murdered a journalist. The illegal settlers are getting armed and protected when they assault people and Israel allowed the storming of the Al Aqsa mosque this year.
The human shield argument is also just absurd in its inhumane cynicism. “Oh look we are bombing a densely populated area. So all the people dying there were used as human shields by the terrorists who are also from that area, because we have blocked it all off. Look at what the terrorists made us do!” With this logic you can justify the annihilation of any civilian population, claiming there were military targets nearby.
Israel has every possibility to avoid the death of civillians by going in on the ground directly instead of bombing things to rubble. But that is a tactical disadvantage so they full well knowingly bomb civillians.
They also targeted numerous UN hospitals and medics, killing at least 11 so far in the current campaign. They do secondary bombings onto areas targeted before, so rescue operations are hindered.
These are all actions that speak of total disregard to civillian life and taking away their responsibility from it is absurd. In that reasoning any nation has the right to commit countless atrocities because at some point another nation did it before to them.
Even if Hamas didn’t have a policy to hide amongst civilians, do civilians really have a choice but to be close to possible Hamas members? There’s 45 square kilometers of Gaza with 2.3 million people. That’s 50,000 people per square kilometer that’s 51 people per meter approximately. So where the hell can you be in that tight space without being close to 50 or more other people.
That’s an excellent criticism … of Hamas.
If they can’t operate without endangering their own civilians by pure proximity, then… don’t?
Take the word of some random guy on internet, or an international NGO? Tough call 📞
Or, just use your brain.
Already did.
You go first.
Amnesty international wasn’t the one that faked reports on Russian concentration camps in kherson?
Someone passed Whataboutism 101! Congrats 🎉
It’s not about whataboutism but about the credibility of the source. A year ago, everybody was taking a shit on amnesty because of its tankie-bias
Gotta link? I don’t know about this.
First please note that i ended my comment with a quotation mark, cause I may very well have fell in plain disinformation propaganda.
There was quite a scandal that aroused from an amnesty report during the last year i presume this is it. The Ukrainian government apparently heavily criticized it and accused them of projecting the guilt on the victims. The head of amnesty in Ukraine’s office quit not long after because of it article from Reuters. The Times published its own opinion on that report (sorry for the paywall).
A few days later a few newsoutlets suggested that amnesty based its opinion on Russian filtration camps on interviews to people inside those camps, alleging that those persons could very well be answering at gun point. Everything apparently roots to this article from NV, an ukrainian newsoutlet. I have mixed feelings with this article because they use a facebook post from what they call a ‘government channel’ as source and i coudlnt find the original post and the channel says loud and clear NGO.
On April of this year, The New York Times published that leaked documents from Amnesty titling it “Unreleased Report Finds Faults in Amnesty International’s Criticism of Ukraine”. Another paywall, this link from the guardian abords it.
Here another review on the scandal, but its the first time i see this source.
Thanks. I saw The NY Times article, but couldn’t find much else. After reading about it, that’s gotta be a difficult job to do.
I think he’s at least at 301.