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.
I really don’t understand why people decided to live in these kibbutz right next to the Gaza border and never realize that this might happen.
It’s like sitting right on the very edge of the shoulder of a very busy highway. Eventually you will be hit by a fast moving car.
It’s disputed territory with the potential of becoming a war zone at any moment and people decided to buy expensive real estate and build beautiful homes next to impoverished people that have nothing.
And we should be surprised that this happened?
What the Palestinians did was terrible … but we should all be reading the headlines with a lot of history and context. None of it is justified by any side … but at the same time, none of it is a surprise.
The Palestinians didn’t do anything. Hamas, the chosen enemy actively propped up by Netanyahu, did something terrible.
Israel is TINY. EVERYTHING is near a border with one of their hostile neighbors.
“None of it is justified by any side …“
Strong disagree. Israel has a right to exist and a right to defend itself.
Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, but the Hebrews have a right to live on the land and to defend themselves from attack. The problem comes from people refusing to accept that Palestinians have a right to live there too and to defend themselves from attack too.
The borders have to come down, a new South Levantine Confederation must be established with equal rights, freedom of movement, and an absolute ban on supremacism and separatism as unassailable, reparations to all war victims must be paid out of a combined fund taken from Israel, Hamas, and the Fatah, and Northern Israel which features thriving mixed demographic communities must be used as a model to integrate the rest of the new state peacefully.
By cutting off food, electricity, water, and escape from their concentration camp? Doing that to 2 million people is “defending itself”? This is genocide.
Man, if I could upvote this comment more than once I would.
Expresses my sentiments exactly.
I visited Israel years ago - shortly after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin - and remember coming across a class (girls, around 7-8 years old) out on a school trip … and they had 3 guys carrying assault rifles to protect them. And I remember thinking: “whatever it is you’re fighting for … isn’t worth it if you have to live like this”
And sadly I think it’s only got worse since that time.
Why it should happen to us, exactly? People build up tolerance to accept this kind of gambling-as-a-routine, especially if the rules are obfuscated and conditioned by other things. Consider now how suicidal is a process of driving a car to work – but you can’t avoid it this morning and there are many safeguards at place to make it less risky. They just go with it, they rationalize it before they stop giving a fuck. And it is layered, as many parties approved such a thing to be.
Politicians push to approve construction there and guarantee it’s safe because their career depends on it, like one of safety-promising Benj. Companies buy a plot and develop this place into housing because high risk => high reward and FOMO. Young people and re-pats buys them because they need a house, it’s their best affordable option and two other parties said it won’t get them killed. Such a snowball, growing bigger at each turn, and each next party has less agency there. And it could be stopped at any of them, I guess?
I’ve seen that with Crimea: occupiers waving a hand to their rich oligarch friends in the biz, companies taking random bits of land to develop, building apartments in the middle of nowhere, people buying property there. I knew some of the latter. They had a fascinating list of reasons why to buy it and none of them thought that there’s any chance of water and energy limiting, escalation and, for sure, Ukrainian advancement. But at the time they’ve settled there, these phantom risk were outweighted by Crimea’s good climate and them not getting any housing otherwise for that price.
Frugal person pays twice, as our saing goes.
And it’s not like they are talking about cheap real estate either
https://www.timesofisrael.com/despite-rockets-arson-balloons-israeli-communities-on-gaza-border-keep-growing/
If I had access to half a million dollars to purchase or invest in real estate … I wouldn’t want to invest in a location that could be destroyed by war or risk me and my family to violence or death.
Did you see what happened? I mean all the killing of civilians, just targeting women, elderly and children on purpose? And you are not surprised in any way that humans can do that?
Ignoring the aspect that you might think that one of the best army in the world guards the border, do you expect human being to do such atrocities, especially if you are a person advocating for their rights?
I agree … It’s absolutely atrocious.
But if you have a crazy person threatening to kill you or your family, do you just ignore that and believe that they will never carry through with their threat? How about if that person or group of people shouted that threat in a regular basis for years? Would you want to build your house next to them?
There’s a reason why there are laws against uttering threats.
None of the death and destruction is justified, it’s absolutely abismal that humanity can sink this low but both sides are guilty of fanatical followers that want the other side dead.
In the context of the hatred and fanaticism, we shouldn’t be surprised at the violence.
That’s quite literally not what they said. You’ll get better responses if you don’t argue against what people are not saying.
If you’ve paid attention to the conflict in the region and you’re intelligent, yes, I would expect one to anticipate such a group could carry out such monterous acts.
Atrocities like this happen all over the world all the time. There’s just differing levels of media coverage/social interest.
This should sicken and disgust people to their core. But it really shouldn’t be surprising for a terrorist organization to commit evil acts.
Before all the crazies jump to conclusions about me, I don’t support Isreal’s expansionism or ethnic cleansing or Hamas and their terror attacks.
It really does seem like an inevitable outcome of the status quo. I think it’s silly to pretend otherwise.
wow. this is the best comment I have seen on it. I feel sorta similar. Whats been done is just monsterous but man the situation is so ridiculous and I wish the US and the rest of the world had done many different things post ww2.
WWII will continue to shape the history of the world for generations to come.
It’s a common misconception that Israel and Palestine were created post WW2 but the roots go all the way back to turn of the 20th century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_for_Palestine
People like to blame America for all things, but this region has been under conflict and conquest for literally thousands of years. It was controlled at points by Egypt, Babylon, Assyrians and Persia, In biblical times it was essentially tribal (Israelites, canaanites, samaratins, philistines who were in conflict with israelites…) until the Roman Empire took over. Then Rome broke up into two and it become part of the (Eastern Roman) Byzantine Empire, then after Muhammad’s death it was conquered by the Muslim Caliphate, then taken under control of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. Religiously it has been Jewish, Christian and Muslim and I think has historical significance to all 3. I’m sure I’ve left a bunch of stuff out because I’m no historian.
It’s one of the most complicated and protracted conflicts in history, and the people who want to make this out to be simple are either plain dumb or have some kind of alterior motive.
Well I was talking more than just the creation of isreal which was technically britain but the american end times christians who feel they need to make biblical prophesies come to pass so they can say. See look the bible prophecy we made happen came to pass so its really magic for sure darn diggety. I did not explain myself well because my little comment represents a whole bunch in my head but essentially I wish the democratic world would have gotten together and worked to protect itself and had nothing to do with the non democratic world until such time as they had evolved into decent democracies. It still cracks me up the UN is a democratically run (sorta) body that had non democratic members.
There’s really no point in history we can use to say “there, this makes X side justified and Y side the bad guys!”
Pogroms in Russia left Jewish scholars to conclude that they would only see respect and freedom if they had their own state. That morphed over time into a nationalist movement with violent insurgents.
Palestinians were just living under British colonial rule. They wanted freedom and independence too, and cooperated against violent insurgents. They wanted their land in full and to not have to give it away to and accommodate other people. And over time that’s morphed into groups like Hamas that want every Israeli dead and Israel destroyed.
Their causes have all done damnable things at some point. Their causes started from wanting fundamental freedom and independence and safety.
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Yesterday on TV over here, they showed a satellite picture of an area of Hamas’ incursion across the border were you can see both sides of the border line and the border itself.
And the commentator said: “Here you can see the destruction caused by the attack”
And it’s only after a few seconds of looking at the area that looks like a junkyard and a mess and thinking “yes indeed, it’s all trashed” that you notice that actually the black smoke is all on the opposite side of the border, the one with lots of space and nature, with little villages, which would look idyllic if not for the smoke.
The overpopulated slum on the left side that looks like a junkyard on a satellite picture is the Gaza side and just a wall away on the right side is this idyllic area with lots of space and nature, a place were the people from the left side will never be allowed to live or even just visit.
How could anybody ever imagine that it would be safe to live in spacious homes and comparative luxury, right next an area were people are forced to, since the day they were born, live in what’s basically an overcrowded slum?
Seoul is 11 km from the North Korean border. People just assume things won’t go wrong until they do.
Moving a city is quite the feat compared to just not building houses blocks from a military DMZ
If you’re a lifelong Palestinian advocate, as this women was, it makes a lot of sense to live near the Gaza border.
What doesn’t make much sense is someone like her being killed by an indiscriminate Hamas terrorist attack…
It’s not like you have a lot of options in a small country.
I was under the impression that the border was extremely well guarded and secure. At least at some point it must have been. It seems like the government recently moved troops to the west bank in order to protect settlers instead. https://lemmy.world/post/6616736
It still begs the question.
Who would want to buy real estate and settle into a home right next to a militarized border that separates you from a country that has many individuals that want to murderously destroy you and your entire family? In an area that might at any time turn into a war zone?
I guess that applies to the whole of Israel, though. Gaza is the most dangerous hot spot right now. But I don’t know if that has always been the case. Hamas came to power in 2006. I guess people just carried on, hoping for the best and trusting in the security forces. But honestly all of that is speculation. My point was just, that the reasons for people living there are complicated.
Exactly, like when people write off victims of a tornado because they would never “be dumb enough” to live in Tornado Alley. There’s a lot of reasons people end up there that have little to do with the weather. I doubt that everyone living that close to the border was doing it to flaunt their lifestyles in Palestinian faces. I have read about how aggressive some of the settlers have been but that doesn’t sound like these people in the article.