As the war between Israel and Hamas enters its third week, families of the missing are still desperate for information about their loved ones who were either missing or pronounced kidnapped by Hamas during the October 7 terror incursion.
The Israeli government announced on Thursday that it notified 203 families of abducted people. Meanwhile, there are many more who are still missing, and their families have not received any information on their whereabouts. Shira Albag spoke to The Media Line about her daughter, Liri, who is among the kidnapped.
“They took her from her bed, and I want her back in her bed at home. I don’t know what is going on with her, I don’t know what they are doing, I don’t know if she ate something, how she feels, if she is wounded there. I know nothing. I cannot breathe because I don’t know if my daughter is breathing,” she said.
Albag’s daughter, Liri, is 18 years old. “She loves music, all the time she sings, she has a lot of friends, all the time our house is full of her friends,” Albag recalled.
Liri managed to communicate with her family minutes before she was kidnapped.
“I spoke with her at 7:30 am, and she said that there was some shooting, I heard the shooting, but we did not understand from where. And 10 minutes later, she wrote to us in the family group that they shot them, but she wasn’t hurt. And that’s it,” Albag said when asked about the last contact she had with her daughter.
Liri’s family, much like many other families in Israel, saw videos of her being taken hostage in the Gaza Strip by Hamas terrorists, and now, with no information about her since, they do not know what else to do and how to deal with the desperation of not knowing anything.
Camped out in Tel Aviv
In the meantime, several families of kidnapped Israelis have pitched tents in the heart of Tel Aviv to raise awareness of the plight of their kidnapped loved ones as well as to garner support.
“Twelve days that we are not sleeping, we are not eating, we sit here in the Kiria [in front of the Israeli Army headquarters] so that people see us, people come to hug us,” said Albag.
Yael Carmel, an Israeli citizen who came to support the families of the kidnapped, told The Media Line she feels that, in light of what happened, it is her duty. “I came here because Israel had the largest disaster ever since the Holocaust,” she added.
Carmel finds it troubling that among the abducted there are people of a wide range of ages and backgrounds. “After the attack in Israel, in [all] cities of Israel, [more than] 200 citizens were kidnapped, among them babies, children, girls, boys, mothers, grandmothers, and Holocaust survivors,” she noted.
Albag said that although many are turning this into a political discussion, she does not see it as such, and her only interest is to get her daughter back. “I don’t have the words, I don’t know what to say, only that I want my daughter back and all the … people that are there.”
Albag calls the world to help her bring her daughter and all the hostages back home. She wants to raise awareness for people to understand what happened in Israel two weeks ago.
“I don’t know if they saw the pictures of what they did there, what Hamas did there. They are an organization of terror—we are not terrorists in Israel, we just want to live a regular life,” she asserted.
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