Elizabeth Naftali
Bearing Testament to the October 7th Massacre
Elizabeth Natfali - Bearing Testament to the October 7th Massacre
- [Host] Welcome everyone, today we are joined by Liz Hirsh Naftali, and she is the great aunt of Abigail Mor Edan, who was kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas for 50 days after her parents were murdered by Hamas on October seventh. We are also joined by Noa Naftali, her daughter. Noa is the cousin of Abigail Mor Edan’s mother who was murdered on October seventh by Hamas. Her six and 10-year-old children survived by hiding in a closet. Hamas kidnapped their youngest child, three-year-old Abigail. And Liz, I will let you introduce Orna.
Great, so we’re going to skip around a bit because we have a couple of guests who are going to speak, and I’m respectful of their time. The first is Orna Neutra, and she is the mother of Omer, and she will tell you his story. First, we should have a short video, but she’s in DC speaking with people on the Hill, organisations and strategizing on all the ways we can get the remaining 136 hostages. I’ve spent time, Noa and my daughter and I have spent time with Orna with doing this work. We happen to be in Israel tonight, but we have done this work and she is a fearless leader and has been tireless. And obviously, she has a son who is an American Israeli and she’ll tell you his story. So what I think we should do is just run the video, and then afterwards, Orna can add on. But I just want to first thank Orna for joining us, and thank all of you for joining us. And we hope that tonight will give you an idea of what happened on the seventh in a personal way and the work that we have done since the seventh, one, to honour those of our family who were murdered that day, but also to fight for those who were taken and kidnapped and not let their stories go into the background, but keep them in the forefront fighting to make sure that all of them come home to their loved ones. So with that, if you would start the video and then Orna will jump in, thank you.
We had an opportunity to come to United States, and little did we know that we’re going to start a business, we’re going to have our children born here.
[Orna] We embarked on our journey with our new family, which is the Schechter family.
[Ronen] He was the captain of the soccer team. Then he was the captain of the volleyball team, then a captain of the basketball team.
He started off at the Mid-Island YJCC. Then he went two years in Sprout Lake. Then he was Y Wheels, then JNF Roots in Israel. And then he was a staff at Ramah Nyack. He’s a person that brings people together and he does it out of the good of his heart. He went through the process of applying to colleges. He was accepted to a few places. He committed to going to Binghamton. We felt that it would be a good idea to take a gap year. And so he joined a programme, it’s called Mechina, for Israeli kids before they join the army,
[Ronen] Slowly, he started to build some internal conflict. Am I going back to university or am I drafting?
And he made his decision.
You don’t draught to an army mainly because of a culture. You volunteer because you believe it’s the right thing to do, and that’s what he believed.
Every time he could, he called home and he put a lot of effort into maintaining it.
He was stationed with his team on the Gaza border. There was a lot of activity generated by the Hamas on the fence. They were throwing all kind of small bombs. They’ve been in the tanks working 18 hours a day. The night of October sixth, he calls and he speaks with Orna.
Omer was fairly relaxed. He said that it had been quiet on the border.
I’m checking my phone just before going sleep. I’m starting to read reports on ground attack. So immediately I’m texting Omer, “Omer, what’s going on? "Talk to me. "Are you okay?” But we never got an answer.
[Orna] Few hours later, what I’m hearing from high command, most likely he was kidnapped by Hamas.
That’s the last we know about Omer. We don’t know his condition. We don’t know if he was hurt.
No matter what your political opinion is, why is it so difficult to see that there’s a humane crisis here? This is my child. He’s an American citizen. He was born here. He grew up here. Bring Omer home. Bring all the hostages home now. Hi everyone, it’s difficult for me to watch this and I appreciate your joining this webinar today and listening in. Obviously since October seventh, our life has turned upside down and we shifted every waking hour and it’s most of the day and night to doing everything that we can to secure Omer’s release and the release of all the other hostages. As Liz said, I’m joining now from Washington. We live on Long Island in New York, but we’ve been here almost every week since on The Hill, advocating with senators and representatives and making sure that they’re supportive of the government in ensuring the release of the hostages. And they’re doing everything that can be done, raising awareness. We’ve had a lot of media appearances and we continue to do that. Believe me, we’re very private people. This is not something that we enjoy doing, but we’re out there, we’re out there in rallies. I spoke at the big rally in Washington a couple of weeks back, and we speak everywhere we can. We have to give Omer and the hostages a voice. They can’t speak from themselves. And so we’re on a mission and we’re doing everything that we can to raise awareness, to be a voice for them, and to make sure that they come home as soon as possible. It’s been 61 days today. 61 days with no sign of life. We don’t know what the condition Omer is in, where he’s held. We really know nothing. And we feel like we’re all hostages in Hamas’ dark tunnels and it’s really tough. So I hope that you hear this today and that you join us in speaking in their name and doing everything that you can to support their release. And thank you Liz, for having me on.
Well, I just want to say thank you and I’ve now watched this video a few times and I also, I get teary-eyed and emotional. And I think what people sometimes don’t understand is we talk about hostages, we talk about numbers, but they’re real people and they have moms and dads, and brothers and sisters, and family. And what I hope for people is that we bring a face to, and like you said, people will share your story, share Omer’s story. And I want to say thank you for continuing to be a leader in this advocacy because there is nothing more important. And we’re not political. I just want to say this before you jump off. We’re really focused on this one issue, which is that everybody that we have met with and we’ve met together, Orna and with others and Noa, and Abbey who’s going to join us, the one thing that everybody agrees on, no matter what side of the aisle and really how far apart they may be on just about everything else, is that these hostages need to come home to their families, and that must happen. And you said it, they’ve been there 61 days, very, very dire circumstances. And so I thank you for coming here and talking, and I will continue and Noa will. And I believe everybody on this call will now have a new story to share and to work to help us. And I thank you, Orna, and I know you have to jump, so we will talk soon. But thank you for coming and thank you for sharing the story.
Thank you, thank you everyone. Thank you Liz.
Okay, bye. So I’m going to introduce Abbey. There she is, hi Abbey. I’m not going to read a bio, but I’m going to jump right in ‘cause I also really appreciate that you’ve given some time. It’s nighttime here in Israel and thank you for joining us. And I will just say one of the first people that when I started, when we realised that, and we’ll get to Abigail’s story, that she was a hostage. One of the first people that reached out to me was you, Abbey to say, “Let me help you, let me introduce you, "let me get you started.” Because I was sort of working independently in America and you connected us. And I want to say thank you, and I want you to introduce yourself and your family because your story is horrific, incredible. And what you have done for your family, again, I say thank you on behalf of all of us for this work because you’ve done it for your immediate family, but for all of us. And thank you for being one of the first people to embrace me. And I’ll just say this, which is Noa and I like to talk about this, we’re all a family now, all of these hostage families, and we didn’t plan it, we didn’t expect it, but through all of our work, whether we’re in America or in Israel, we’ve become this family. So we continue to support each other. So thank you for coming on.
Thank you for having me. That was what I was going to start with is that I’m so grateful to the two of you and I feel like when I see you, I feel like a piece of home and a piece of sunlight and all of this darkness. And it is that feeling that we have become family in the worst circumstances. So, hi everyone. Thank you for taking your time to listen to all of us. My name is Abbey Onn. I am born in the United States, and I moved to Israel close to nine years ago. My family moved to Israel initially almost 90 years ago to help build a state in the '30s. And they built a Kibbutz in the north. My aunt Carmela was born on this Kibbutz in the north, and she did her service on Nir Oz, which you might’ve heard the name of this Kibbutz. It’s on the southern part of kind of on the edge of the Gaza border. And she stayed there. She and her family were there for close to six decades. So she built her whole life and she helped build Nir Oz. And on October seventh, when everything began, our first response was to check on this family because we had so many of them living there. And we got the kind of okays from everyone that they were in their bomb shelters and everyone was safe because bomb shelters are to protect people from rockets. But very quickly, the messages turned from A okay, we’re where we should be to, we hear terrorists on our Kibbutz, we hear them outside, we can hear Arabic. And then very quickly, they began to hear them in their homes overturning furniture. They were hearing gunshots, they were hearing people killed, and there were messages flying back and forth. And at a certain point in the morning, we lost communication with everyone, and we knew that some people had escaped through a window. That was one piece of information we had. But in the way that October seventh unfolded, it was an unbelievable, the attack was so brutal that it was very hard to understand who was alive and who was dead, and if they weren’t among those two, where they would be.
And so on October eighth, we really quickly mobilised as a family and we put together a flyer of the people who we couldn’t account for and began sharing that as wide and far as we could. And one of my friends wrote me in the middle of the day and said, “I think you need to look on Instagram.” There was a video that Hamas uploaded that has been now been put on Instagram. And it was my cousin’s son in the hands of a Hamas terrorist being dragged down the road on his Kibbutz. He was 11 years old at the time. And I think that was when this situation kind of crystallised for us, that people had been kidnapped, and that there were hostages and that they were children. And we learned as the kind of day and a half between the seventh and the eighth progressed that five of our family members had been taken hostage. So my Aunt Carmela, who turned 80 during all of this, and she had been in her shelter with her 13-year-old granddaughter, Noya, who was autistic. She was sensitive to noise, and sound, and light and touch. We have messages from her during the morning and this was really, really hard for her. And in the other part of the Kibbutz, we had people that survived hours on their own. And then we had this one house where my cousin’s husband and the father of her children were with two of the children. And they are the three that escaped through a window. So the five of them were taken. And it took nine days for the government to confirm that they had been taken hostage. And in that time, we had already mobilised as a group of families that had American family members who had been taken hostage. Within four days, the Secretary of State came to Israel and we had a chance to meet with him.
A few days after that, we met and addressed President Biden over Zoom. And a few days after that, we met with a group of 10 senators from bipartisan backgrounds. And so as American families, we felt deeply supported. And as Israelis, we saw the kind of complexity that was unfolding in front of our eyes and how hard it was to manage the security and defence of civilians and the hostage piece of it. On the 10th day on October 17th, the military came to my cousin, Galit my cousin Hadas, and my cousin Dor, to tell them that Carmela had indeed been murdered. Her body, we believe was found near Gaza. And Galit in the same moment learned that her mother was murdered and her daughter. So both Galit and Noya were murdered at some point. We don’t have all of the information. We know now that their house was burned to the ground. And we know that one of the strategies was to throw grenades in or to throw tyres that had been lit on fire. We don’t know exactly what happened, but we know that her house was burned and the two of them were murdered, which in the whole process of this, you feel like you’re fighting and you’re fighting. And then to get that news was heartbreaking. And we had a funeral, we buried them at the Kibbutz where Carmela was born in the north, both of them. And it almost felt like we didn’t have time to grieve because you had to continue fighting for the three that we know were still hostages, which is what we did.
And like Orna said, we are doing as much press and governmental work as possible. All five of them are French citizens and Carmela was American, so we’re working with both of those governments. And today is Wednesday. So a week ago, Monday in the slew of releases, Erez and Sahar, the now 12 and 16-year-old children of my cousin were released, which should feel like the most amazing thing in the world. And it does on one level, but their father remains there. Ofer is still there. He is 53. He is among this group of men that Hamas does not want to release. And I think the other piece is that we are seeing the releases alongside the sharing of what the experience was. And so we feel deeply grateful to have all of those that were released home. And I think we feel even more deeply traumatised knowing that what we imagined in many ways was worse. And knowing that what that means for the people that remain there and how much harder in a sense this fight got. Because as Orna said, we’re 61 days in, there is a lot of exhaustion and there are a lot of news cycles. And we as families of hostages are doing everything we can, including this conversation, which I think is so important. And again, I thank you, to make sure that people don’t forget and that people know that Ofer is a carpenter. And he’s great with one-liners, and he is a biker. He bikes with both of his sons. He’s a father of four and he has a family, an immediate family and a national family that is fighting for his return and is fighting for the return of every single hostage. My cousin Hadas addressed the rally on Saturday night. Her children are home, but their father is not. And I don’t know any one of us that will stop fighting no matter who gets returned unless they’re all home. And I think that’s the critical piece is that there’s no for us as Israelis, for us as Jews, while they remain hostage. And I think that’s why every one of us will remain in this fight until each one of them are home.
Thank you, I’ll even add beyond being Jews and Israelis, just humans.
Also.
Being people and understanding that this is not something that we can let happen anywhere in the world.
No.
It can be anyone’s family. So I thank you and I’m respectful of your time and I know it’s late. But thank you for joining us.
I’m so grateful. Thank you both for your work, and for your compassion and for your love. And thank you to the many, many of you that are on this call. And if you can do anything, it’s to say their names and to make them part of your conversation for the people that aren’t thinking about this. Because I think that’s our goal right now is to do what Liz said is remind people this is an issue of humanity and we can’t sleep at night until they are home. So thank you.
All right, well thank you Abbey. Thank you, Abbey.
[Abbey] Bye, guys.
Bye. So I’m going to continue, I’m going to introduce my daughter Noa, and Noa lives in Israel, and I was in Israel to visit her on October sixth. And I didn’t see her that night because she had plans, but I was so excited because on October seventh, I was going to have breakfast with her and really spent a week in Israel with her. And everything happened. And I think that I’m going to pass it over to Noa to talk a little bit about what it was like to be here on October seventh. And then to start by sharing our family story and the story of Abigail, and then we’ll follow up afterwards with more information. But I think as Orna and Abbey did, it’s important to give a grounding of what actually happened in a personal account to our family that morning.
Yeah, so I’ll start with my experience that morning, which was to wake up to sirens as we did in most of the country. And to rush to the bomb shelter. And kind of the first thing that many of us do when there are sirens is text our family members who live near Gaza in the South and make sure that they’re okay. And early on in the morning, we realised that we weren’t hearing from one of my cousins. And a few hours later, my mom called me. She had spoken to an aunt and told me that my cousin, her husband, and at this point we thought their three-year-old, Abigail had been killed. We found out this information as a family from my cousin’s son and daughter, a 10-year-old and a six-year-old who called their family members and said what they had seen. And what they had seen was that their mother was shot and they ran outside to their father who was holding their little sister in his arms. And they started to run and saw that he was gunned down while holding the three-year-old Abigail in his arms. They thought that they had both died and ran in to hide in the closet where they hid for 14 hours before being rescued. In the meantime, it had turned out that Abigail had survived.
Her father’s last act had been to shield her with his body. Abigail got out from underneath her father’s body and went over to the neighbours and she knocked on the door and the neighbours, and maybe we’ll talk about this a little more as we go forward, but all these really little acts in this horrible day of just bravery and love and community. And the neighbours opened the door, brought the little girl in. At this point there’s again, gunshots outside the window. They understand it’s dangerous to open this door, bring the little girl in. They see that Abigail is covered in blood. The father checks to make sure it’s not her blood and it wasn’t. And then puts her in the bomb shelter with his wife, his 10-year-old, eight-year-old, and four-year-old. And then he runs out to try and help defend the community. When he returned, they were all gone. And it actually took a couple of days until the Kibbutz was cleared and secured. And until we found out that eyewitnesses had seen this family, this mother, her three children and Abigail being marched to Gaza. And for 50 days after that, we had no idea about this family’s whereabouts, this little girl’s whereabouts. And I think I’ll hand it over to you.
- Yeah, so going back, we did not know anything for 50 days. But we had two sides. We had Israeli family and I was in America and I was dealing with the US government 'cause Abigail’s an Israeli American, and the family in Israel was dealing with the Israelis. And one of the things that they did was they came to us and they were very supportive. I can speak for the American government, the State Department, they were very supportive, but they really didn’t have any information. But I will say that they listened very carefully to the stories. They wanted to know everything about the family that Abigail was taken with, their social media, who they were. And so they were trying to really put all these pieces together, but literally and what you’ve heard from other speakers and what you’ve heard in the news is that once these hostages were taken to Gaza, pretty much information became non-existent. So what I want to talk about also is just a little bit about going to The Hill and doing all that work and speaking with people in organisations like the Red Cross, speaking to people who were in any way able to advocate to get us to support, to get us to speak with different diplomats. And this work has just kept going on and on. And when they had their ceasefire, peace break, humanitarian break, Abigail was in the third day of releases. Each day, the first day was one Kibbutz, the second day was another Kibbutz of survivors that had been taken to Gaza. And in Abigail’s case, she was on the third day. And we had prayed for 50 days that if Abigail was a hostage, that we hoped that she was with this mother and her three kids and that they had not been separated. And one of the things that we learned when Abigail came back was that she had been with this woman and her three kids and this woman had taken care of her like her own child.
And it goes back to what you were saying Noa, about just these acts of bravery and these acts of love and compassion. And one of the things I’ll say is that that same day on the Kibbutz, and in a second I want to show a brief video 'cause I went to that Kibbutz to see what it looked like and to see the home where Noa’s cousin, my niece, was murdered by Hamas terrorists. And that same day, one of the things that we learned was that so many people tried to keep their safety rooms locked and they had like a lever, and that lever was meant for a bomb, but it wasn’t meant for somebody trying to get in from the outside. So one of the things that we’ve learned that I think is important for people to understand is that many Kibbutz members had hand injuries and middle body body injuries because of gunshots through the bomb shelters and through that just sheer holding effort to hold the bomb shelters, the safety room shut. And another niece who lived on the Kibbutz was in her house, in her safety room with her husband and three kids. And as I think Abbey mentioned, people were hearing Arabic and it was a crazy time. And think about 3000 terrorists coming into the this area and how many were on Kibbutz Kfar Aza. And one of the things that they heard at some point was it was quiet, but they heard a woman’s voice ,and they took a chance and they opened and they found another woman who was from the Kibbutz who was holding her infant and a hammer in her hand. And of course, they took her in. And you think back to certain stories from the Holocaust about taking a chance with an infant, taking a chance with a baby who didn’t have anything to drink or to eat, no diapers, nothing. And just kind of it’s one of those stories that I think is important for people to understand just the beauty of humanity that took place on that day. And this woman’s husband had been murdered, and she had nowhere to go. What I’d like to ask Lauren is if you could play the short piece that I did filming when I was at the Kibbutz today, I think that would give people an idea of understanding where this house was located in the proximity to Gaza.
So I’m standing in front of Smadar and Roy’s house. This is just to give you an idea of what the little street looks like. And then also, just to give you an idea of the fence and how close their house is to Gaza. You can see Gaza. Thank you, and I’m going to just take a moment just to share with you 'cause today, I went to Kibbutz Kfar Aza. And I went because I really wanted to see for myself what the condition was, and the condition is. And I spent time walking and you could just see some neighbourhoods that were just destroyed, and the houses were riddled with thousands and thousands of bullets. And you could see where grenades blew up and you could see where houses were just destroyed and burned. And at the same time, you could see kind of like a frozen moment of what it was like that morning where you had dishes out and books out and life out, and it just was stopped at that moment. So really what I’m trying to explain for people is to understand that many of these homes were destroyed, and many of these homes were bullet ridden. And you could see on the outside, each house was marked by different folks, different organisations that have come. And in our case, because Smadar was murdered in there, there was a red circle with a dot in it, which was signifying that somebody had been killed there. And then there were other symbols of what the condition of the house was that it didn’t have any more explosives, that they had done certain kind of cleaning. So each house, even in homes that people survived in, or people were murdered in, or kidnapped in, had different levels of people from organisations come to check them and to do the work. And so even as you walk by, even on a street that sort of looks like it’s kind of okay in the Kibbutz, each house has all of these symbols and it really tells you that there wasn’t anything that didn’t get touched and that the human life was affected, whether it was people that managed to survive in their safe houses, people that were murdered, people that were injured, or people that were kidnapped.
And it was incredible to see that literally, the entire Kibbutz was touched by Hamas terrorists. And to give you an understanding, it took two days for this Kibbutz to be cleared and cleaned by the IDF to make sure that there were no more terrorists on the property. It took over 29 hours for the rest of our family to be evacuated away from the Kibbutz. And so it just gives you an idea. That’s why we did not hear that Abigail actually had been seen being, as Noa said, marched off the Kibbutz until a few days later. And so in the beginning, we all really thought that Abigail had died because her brother and sister were our reporters from a closet. What I will say is that Abigail was released after 50 days. She is with family and people say, how is it with her having her back home? And I really like to make it very clear, she did not go back home. Her home was destroyed. Her home is where her mother was murdered, and that she didn’t go back to her parents because her parents were both murdered. So Abigail has come back as an orphan with beautiful loving grandparents and aunts and uncles and a sister and a brother who literally for 47 days thought that they had abandoned their sister. And their one hope was that they would be able to have Abigail come back. And one of the things that I’ve learned, and I think Noa, you can talk about this, is the advocacy. Keeping these stories in the forefront anywhere in the world you are, and especially in countries that might not be looking at this as the number one priority. I do believe that Biden, President Biden, his administration, have made the hostage release their number one priority. As I said, I believe that folks in the Congress, the leaders, this is one thing that is a priority for everybody that they agree on. But I don’t know where you live. I’m not sure who you are and who is watching, but if in your country, or in your cities, or in your states, you can be an advocate for these families, that’s something that you can do that is needed because we still have over 130 hostages and they’re Israeli and from other nations, but they are people that need to come home to their loved ones. You want to add something?
Yeah, I think I want to reflect on some of the things that Orna and Abbey said, this idea that a lot first of that what we’re seeing in terms of advocacy for the release of the hostages, what’s been reflected to us as families of hostages is that it’s kind of unparalleled the amount of gruelling work that family members of hostages have been doing. And you think about it, these people, many of them are survivors of the massacres themselves. And kind of like Abbey mentioned, we had to bury my cousin and her husband. We obviously were beside ourselves with grief, but we also had at the same time this knowledge that their three-year-old was a hostage in Gaza and had to keep functioning as best as we could to make sure that nobody forgot her, that everyone knows about her. And the idea that as people who are here, who are listening, who are interested, I can’t underestimate how important all the little things that you can do are, and even little things like that because there’s the element of telling their stories, not letting the world forget, keeping this in your hearts and in your minds, sharing this with people around you. And also the element of supporting the families that are going through this, which for us has been like oxygen and just our ability to keep going.
Yes, and I’ll add that people, someone like Orna does not sleep. She does not eat, she does not have a moment to breathe other than the work that she is doing. And it’s going to take all of us to get these hostages back. And one of the things that I’ll also speak about is that currently, there’s still about 20 women who are hostages. There are mostly men, but there’s still an infant and a little child who we hear news reports whether they’re alive or not, but we believe they’re alive. But the reason I bring this up is because right now is really a critical time for us to be advocates to getting back these women who we are very aware are being mistreated. We know that the hostages are being tortured. We also know that they are being moved around and their conditions are very, very, very, very bad. And we also know that some of these people, they left Israel. One young man had his arm blown off when he was taken hostage. Others have bullet wounds. And then obviously, there’s medical people that don’t have their medicine. And so what we are saying is now we’re at 61 days and we are doing everything we can. And even though Abigail is home, and as Noa said, it’s like a mixed blessing because she came home to no parents, but it’s a blessing and a miracle that she is home with her siblings and she’s going to live with her aunt and uncle and their three kids. So we can’t rest either. We keep doing this work. And so we’re here in Israel to be with the family and then to continue. And one of our opportunities is to speak to all of you to share our stories. And then I’ll go back to the States in a few days and be back in DC next week 'cause until all 136 I believe it is hostages are home, we’re not going to rest. One of the things that I want to just sort of, kind of as we come to the end is I want to show you this video and it is this beautiful video talking about people doing things. And I just backtrack for a second and say that one of the most amazing things that we saw in this country is that the volunteers, the people who took it upon themselves to make sure that when these soldiers were immediately sent down in reserve and the infantry to the border, they didn’t have supplies, they didn’t have food, they didn’t have all they needed. And these individuals that were already organised for other efforts for the judicial overhaul and for other efforts, they turned all their attention to making sure that the country mobilised to support these families, to support the injured, to support those folks in the hospital 'cause sometimes, people are just talking about the deaths and the kidnapping, but there were so many people that were injured that needed support. And so one of the things that was heartwarming again, is that so many people have been volunteering and continue to volunteer. And this video is just a beautiful piece because when Abigail came home, it’s going to be in Hebrew, but when Abigail came home to her family’s home, she had missed her kitchen, which was back in the Kibbutz. And I think this video sort of sums up just this beautiful thoughtfulness of what is going on. So if you’ll play that video, that would be great.
Thank you. So even if you don’t speak Hebrew, I think you understood what this volunteer did, which was to bring a little girl her kitchen. And one of the things that he said is that we pray for you to have a good life. And one of the things that I’d like to end this conversation with is just to sort of point out that we all have to play a role. We can tell the stories. I will share after with you all links if you’re interested in supporting Abigail’s family. They literally left that Kibbutz. They have nothing. Their jobs were on the Kibbutz, their homes were on their Kibbutz. They’re starting afresh in a new village in the north, in the centre of the country. So for some people, it’s really important to say, listen, I want to send some money to support this family. And they’re now a family of eight that really are starting all over. Another area, which is important is the Kibbutz itself is looking for support because there’s so many families that don’t have advocates like myself and Noa and they can’t be on the Kibbutz and they’re in temporary housing. So one of the organisations that I’m working with is to help support Kibbutz Kfar Aza. There’s other organisations, but I’m just going to tell you the ones that we’re working with. And then this group that you just saw that brought the kitchen to Abigail, they’re called Brothers and Sisters. And they are doing incredible work in making sure that whoever needs help throughout the country, whether it’s food, or clothing, or any kind of aid, or support, they are this main organisation throughout the country that is doing that work.
One of the things that I’ll just kind of close with, which I think is important to sort of think about is if you have influence with the UN, influence with the International Red Cross, influence with Doctors Without Borders, influence in any ways, one of the things that we have talked about is that these people are in the dark in tunnels and we are in the dark. We don’t know where they are, we don’t know what’s going on with them until they become part of the hostage release programme. So if you are in the position of being able to try to push, we need the Red Cross to verify that these people are alive. We need the Red Cross to go in and see what physical condition they’re in because as I said, many of them left injured or haven’t had their medication. And we just want to make sure that everybody is an advocate for these hostages. So for us, that kind of help is really important. If you have support with the UN, we need to continue this conversation because it took this UN until just a few days ago to actually talk about the women who are being raped and abused, and that is a conversation that needs to take place. And so any influence that you have with those organisations or other organisations that are in the ground or doing work in the humanitarian world, we need their support and they need to hear from people like all of us that we are concerned. And then the other last piece, which is with your state and local governments, if there are ways you can make sure that this dialogue continues and that these stories are told, this is what I truly believe is the way we move forward is bringing these hostages, these innocent people, some of them were in the military, but these are all somebody’s sons, daughters, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and we’re amongst friends here. This isn’t for the press. They need to come home. It doesn’t matter what their role is. And we have folks from 30 nations that had been kidnapped and many of them are still held hostage. So I am really just trying to ask you all to think about ways that you can help. And one of the last things I’ll say is that when these hostages all come home and are with their loved ones, we can move forward.
And one of the things that I always think about is the work that we’re doing and the work that so many of us do is because we have children, we have grandchildren, and Abigail could be our daughter, she could be our granddaughter. And she is a symbol. She is a symbol of hope, of resistance, of resilience and of peace. And so we are blessed and so, so thrilled that Abigail is back with our family. But when we look at this little three-year-old who’s now four years old, she actually turned four last week in Gaza, when we look at this four-year-old, we look at all of our children and we look at all of our families, and we do everything we can and we’re going to continue and we hope that you’ll join us in continuing to make sure that all of these hostages are released. And thank you for joining us and thank you to Lockdown University and to everybody that supported us to make this time together possible. So thank you and wherever you are, good morning, goodnight, good afternoon. And thank you so much and we appreciate you.
Thank you for making space and time for our stories. It means a lot to us.
[Host] And thank you, thank you both for sharing, and please extend the entire Lockdown communities. Thanks to everyone who was on our programme today, to everyone you know who has been affected by this, to Orna, to Abbey. This was a deeply moving programme, one that I think will stay with most of us for a very long time. And I think that we all look forward to finding ways to help and continue to support because we are one big community, one big family, and it’s more important now than ever to try and continue this work and bring everyone home so that we can continue the work afterwards. So thank you. Thank you very much. Truly appreciate you guys taking the time today to be with us and to share those stories, and we’ll be in touch, so thank you.
Thank you all, bye-bye.