Sasha, here is a copy of the article. '
True Soulmates' Shot by Hamas on a Field Near Gaza – and Their Family Scrambles for Answers
Judith Weinstein Haggai phoned in that she and her husband had both been shot near their Kibbutz on Saturday morning. What happened next is unclear – and their children have been begging the authorities for help
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Judith Weinstein Haggai and Gad Haggai, who remained "idealistic '60s kids," their daughter says.Credit: Courtesy Iris Haggai Liniado
Allison Kaplan Sommer
Oct 11, 2023 11:19 pm IDT
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Like thousands of other relatives of Israelis missing from Gaza border communities brutally attacked by Hamas, Iris Haggai Liniado feels alone.
While the army's bureaucracy has proved reasonably organized when a soldier is killed, wounded or missing, the government has been utterly unprepared to cope with so many civilians dead and missing.
Neither Haggai Liniado, 38, nor her three younger siblings have been contacted by a military or government authority about the fate of their parents. Judith Weinstein Haggai and Gad Haggai, both in their early 70s, disappeared in the fields surrounding Kibbutz Nir Oz early Saturday.
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And so Haggai Liniado and her siblings, like so many others across Israel, have been forced to search for clues and make countless phone calls to anyone who might be able to help. As they scramble for information, they're posting photos wherever they can on social media.
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In Haggai Liniado’s case, all this is taking place from half a world away, in Singapore, where she lives with her husband, who works there. She takes care of their three young daughters and was working on launching a new business. But this plan is now on hold.
“We feel abandoned,” she says. “And it isn’t just me and my family who don’t know what happened. I have friends who know for a fact that their family is kidnapped but nobody has confirmed it officially.
“Nobody’s talking to them. I feel like I’m in a bad dream – a nightmare and I’m waiting for somebody to wake me up. I honestly can't believe how unimportant I feel to this government. It’s crazy – crazy that it’s been four days since this happened and nobody has spoken to us.”
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The couple and their four children, including Iris Haggai Liniado, third from right.Credit: Courtesy the family
Like members of the other families, Haggai Liniado wants her parents known to the world as more than a news headline. She describes them as idealistic '60s kids who lived and loved each other as “true soulmates” for 40 years.
Her mother, Judy, is a citizen of Israel, Canada and the United States. Judy was born in New York and her family moved to Canada when she was 3. She grew up in Toronto and came to Israel in a twist of fate at 19 after planning a trip to Greece; her travel partner suggested they go to Israel instead and volunteer on a kibbutz.
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Judy found herself on Kibbutz Ein Hashofet in the north, where she met Gad, a young kibbutz member launching a music career. Actually, romance didn't bloom between them there; Judy married a different Israeli but kept tabs on Gad’s music career and attended his concerts.
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Their paths diverged when he moved to the United States and later married as well, while Judy returned to Canada with her Israeli husband. Time passed, both couples divorced, and, separately, Judy and Gad returned to Israel and the kibbutz to restart their lives – and found each other.
It gives me comfort that they might have been together when they died because they loved each other so much.
Iris Haggai Liniado
They left Ein Hashofet and moved to central Israel, where Gad continued to play music professionally and Judy taught English and pursued her passion for puppeteering, leading puppet-making workshops for children. According to Haggai Liniado, her father eventually “realized that being a musician wouldn’t pay the bills” for a growing family, so he went to culinary school, studied to be a chef and went to work at Tel Aviv’s Dan Hotel.
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When she was 10, her parents decided they wanted a less stressful life. They craved the kind of environment where they met, so in the '90s they went south and ended up at Kibbutz Nir Oz on the Gaza border.
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A destroyed house at Kibbutz Nir Oz after Hamas' onslaught on Saturday.Credit: Adi Negev
Throughout her childhood, “my father woke up every morning at 4 to cook; he was passionate about doing the job well. It had to be perfect; he still played music in his free time and read a lot,” Haggai Liniado says.
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“Both he and my mom never stopped studying and learning – they were into mindfulness and all kinds of things. After he retired, and after his brother died, my father decided his new motto was 'Be the healthiest I can be.'”
He began following a whole-food vegan diet and would wake early to run, ride his bicycle or walk with his wife in the fields outside the kibbutz after their morning coffee. That's where they were when terror struck Nir Oz; Haggai Liniado believes they may have been Hamas’ first victims at the kibbutz.
When in Singapore she learned that sirens were blaring in Israel at 6:50 A.M. – nothing unusual in the Gaza region – she posted in the family text group, asking her parents to check in.
Her mother texted back that she and her husband had been on their morning walk, the siren sounded, and they were now lying on the ground to protect themselves. They saw hundreds of rockets flying overhead.
Their daughter asked how far they were from the kibbutz – they estimated it was about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles), so she told her mother to let them know when they made it home. “After that, all contact with them was lost. I couldn’t get them to answer my calls – nothing. We were left with nothing.”
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Iris Haggai Liniado, right, and her sister, Zohar, with their father.Credit: Courtesy Iris Haggai Liniado
Contacting her childhood friends on the kibbutz, Haggai Liniado learned by 7:30 A.M. Israel time that the kibbutz had been “flooded with terrorists,” as one friend put it. It wasn't clear if the couple had made it back to the community.
“We started to believe that my parents met them along the way, that they were the first people the terrorists encountered. Everyone was in pure hell, nobody knew anything.”
Haggai Liniado spent Saturday in tears on the phone with her relatives in Israel. Eventually she learned that seven hours had passed before any troops arrived. Amid the chaos, it was impossible to find out what had happened to her parents.
"It feels very crazy to me that the Israelis who are hurt and broken right now are doing all the work," Haggai Liniado says.
By Monday, two days later, her surviving kibbutz friends had been evacuated to the resort town of Eilat far to the southeast. About the people of Nir Oz, she heard that “their houses were set on fire, their children were kidnapped.” All sorts of horrible stories were coming in on TikTok.
She heard that searches for bodies had taken place inside the kibbutz, but it seemed highly likely that her parents would have encountered the Hamas terrorists while still on their walk. “No one has looked in the fields outside yet to see if there are bodies there,” Haggai Liniado says.
There were rumors that her father’s body had been found in the house. At one point, a neighbor said he had security-camera footage of what he thought was a Hamas man taking her mother from the couple's house on a motorbike.
After “begging and speaking to a million people,” she received the stills from the security footage. The woman being kidnapped wasn't her mother, so she passed on the photos to a neighbor of a man from Mexico who had made contact. It turned out that the abducted woman was his sister.
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CCTV footage showing a Hamas gunman entering Kibbutz Be'eri on Saturday as mortally wounded Israelis sit in their car behind.Credit: South First Responders via Telegram/Reuters
Ultimately, “it was brought to my attention that the kibbutz paramedic was taking the bodies out of the houses – I needed to know if there was a body in my house,” Haggai Liniado says.
After she located the wife of the kibbutz paramedic and “begged,” the couple revealed the kind of information they had been instructed not to tell. Around 7 A.M. Saturday – shortly after the Haggai Liniado family's flurry of texts – Judy called the paramedic station and reported that she and Gad were still in the fields. They had both been shot and her husband “wasn’t doing well.”
The paramedic was heading to his ambulance to go to them when he learned that the ambulance had been hit by a rocket – and the gunmen were attacking the kibbutz.
“I highly doubt my father survived,” Haggai Liniado says. “I don’t think they would kidnap him if he was severely wounded. It sounds like my mother was also wounded but not as badly – so either they shot her again, she killed herself somehow because she wouldn’t want to go on without my father, or she was kidnapped.”
Haggai Liniado says she isn’t sure which fate she should be wishing for her mother. “At first I thought the best scenario was that she was kidnapped. But now, it gives me comfort that they might have been together when they died because they loved each other so much,” she says.
“They lived their best life, they lived every day like it was their last and did everything they could to make the world peaceful and better. They were so true to who they were and didn’t care what other people thought. What keeps me going is knowing they were happy while they were alive.”
That strength is needed, Haggai Liniado says, as she and her family continue to hunt for answers on their own. “It feels very crazy to me that the Israelis who are hurt and broken right now are doing all the work. I don't mind doing it – they're my parents, after all – but I'd like some support from the government.
“We all gave to this country. We all served in the army, we all pay a crazy amount of taxes, and we live in our country where our paychecks don’t support the cost of living. The only thing we believed that our government was good for was keeping us safe and helping us when we were in distress. But even that wasn't true.”
