While the devastating attacks from Hamas have sent a ripple wave across the globe, it’s their efforts to ensure nothing is hidden from the families of their victims that is so horrific. Sending them graphic photos, haunting text messages, and videos of their loved ones suffering, they are waging an all-out psychological warfare on their victims.
According to Mor Bayder, Hamas terrorists broke into her grandmother’s home in Nir Oz, near Gaza, and took her mobile phone. Once inside it, they accessed her Facebook and live-streamed her death for her family and others to see. They then took pictures and uploaded them to her feed. “A terrorist came home to her, killed her, took her phone, filmed the horror, and published it on her Facebook wall. This is how we found out. The purest thing in the world, the light of my life, my whole world, my grandmother, can’t make it real.”
A woman named Tamar David was another recipient of these Hamas phone calls on October 8th, with hers focused on her daughters 25-year-old Hodia and 27-year-old Tair. Both girls had been at the fateful music festival in the desert and had been dragged back to Gaza as prisoners. Another girl Tamar was captured from the same festival, and a Hamas member called and, in broken Hebrew, asked family members if they wanted to marry her and laughed as they saw her broken body.
CNN spoke with one woman (who remained anonymous for fear of her kid’s safety) spoke with her young kids as Hamas began breaking into their home.
“Since I was away, they were alone in the security room. They were with me on the phone, and by 8:00 in the morning, there was starting to be shooting in the streets, guns shooting. I started getting messages, texts, from other people saying that terrorists are walking around, trying to break into people’s houses I was on the phone, and I said to be quiet, to stay quiet, stay in the security room, and lock the door – but the doors don’t really lock.”
Sobbing now, she continued, “I heard the terrorists speaking in Arabic to my teenagers, and my youngest saying to them, ‘I’m too young to go.’ They’re 16 and 12, so it was very, very hard to hear. They took babies. They took two-year-olds. They took five-year-olds, mothers – just innocent citizens who did nothing wrong, that were just sleeping in their beds.”
Family members who were close to the Tribe of Nova festival found themselves trying to get there to rescue loved ones. Mark Peretz was one of them. The 51-year-old went after his 20-year-old daughter Maya who was attending the festival. Maya has been reported as making it to safety, and emerged unscathed, Mark on the other hand has yet to make it home.
Instead, Mark’s cell phone has been zigzagging across the countryside. According to loved ones, the patterns of the phone’s movement are incredibly erratic and lead them to suspect terrorists have captured his phone and possibly him as well. According to his daughter-in-law, Jessica Cohen, they are doing everything they can to find him. They have contacted the police and other organizations, but given the severity of the situation, no news has been delivered.
Waging this kind of warfare isn’t conventional, nor is it anything we even saw post 9/11. A decision to involve the families this deeply is not something many would expect. Given the terror and anxiety that would rightfully fill the families of their victims, of course, they would quickly answer their phones. Opening it to see a scene like terrorists are always depicted as in bad TV dramas is the last thing many expected.
Hamas and Palestine know full well that this isn’t the method that will get them sympathy or support from anyone with any common sense. This is an attempt at genocide of the people of Israel, and the Jewish people. Dragging them back to Gaza to kill them makes it even worse. This personal war could quickly become the one to turn the whole region into a glass-domed parking lot.
