Tel Aviv /
Sitting next to the portrait of her two children, Ruthi Strum talks about the pain he feels due to the kidnapping of Iair and Eitan, who since October 7, 2023 are hostages of the terrorist group Hamasin the Gaza Strip.
It is a Argentinian Jewess who lives with her third childto whom he turns from time to time to tell him that he listens as if his brothers had returned. But he brings her back to reality.
“I heard their voices. I was in my house and I was startled because I heard the voices. But he tells me: ‘old lady, please look under the bed, in one of those, we are looking for them and they are under the bed.’ I said, ‘No, Amoz, they’re not under the bed.’
“Unfortunately. But from the first day I feel that they are alive. I have been talking to them since the first day. I speak at any time. I talk to them from the heart and out loud too. I also shout their names,” she says distressed to MILLENNIUM and other Latin American media that visited the relatives of those kidnapped in Tel Aviv.
The testimony of Ruthi is one of the 101 that are heard in Israel. The same number of families waiting for the return of their relatives, who are crying out for their release.
“We don’t know anything about the moment they were taken, how they were taken, if they were taken together, separately. We didn’t see videos, we didn’t see photos, we didn’t see anything. So we don’t know anything about that. Apparently they are all in the tunnels now, but no… I don’t know more about that,” the woman acknowledges.
Ricardo Grichener Yes, he has more than one video and he goes through life showing them from his cell phone.
In one of them, obtained from a Telegram channel used by Hamas terrorists to spread their raids and frighten the population ─the war is also in the media and is lived on social networks─, you see how the terrorists take away your nephew Omer Wenkert, 23 years oldat machine gunpoint in a white Toyota truck.
They took the young man from the field where the Nova Festivalwhere 360 men and women were murdered in cold blood by the militiamen of Hamasthe morning of October 7.
Grichener talks about how difficult it has been for his nephew, who works in a restaurant in Tel Aviv, and other hostages can be rescued by the Israeli army, despite the fact that it advances on Loop.
“It happens that they arrived at a ‘tunale’ (tunnel) and automatically, the Hamas killed the hostages. They arrived at another “tunale” and saw with a temperature camera that there were people hostage there, but they were tied up and had bombs, so they understood that, if they were going to break in and enter, they were going to kill them,” he explains sadly.
Grichener and Strum They have not lost hope. A year later, they share the same blind trust: “They are alive and they will return.”
The return of the hostages is the main demand of Israeli society, which, during the last year, has filled the public space with Tel Aviv and in other cities, the squares, streets, buildings and parks with the legend “Bring them home, now!” (bring them home, now).
Ruthi also distributes yellow bracelets with the same phrase. “I want to give each one, so that they have, the little yellow ribbon, because yellow means a lot, it is the wish that they all come back,” she tells the journalists who interview her.
IOGE
