The grandmothers who returned from captivity

 They were taken from their homes that Saturday morning. Some of them after hiding in the protected room in their houses when the terrorists were shooting and burning their houses, they could no longer breathe the smoke and left. On the way to captivity they saw the bodies of their friends or their children or their husbands on the sidewalks near the burned houses.                                                                                           The terrorists drove them on motorcycles or on the scooters they stole from them or took them barefoot on a dirt road with spikes, women in their seventies, eighties and eighty-five. The terrorists filmed it on video and they look very amused and happy there. They make fun of the older women.                   These women are women who lived near the border with Gaza and every Friday they would wait there with vehicles that they had ordered in advance to take patients from Gaza for treatment in hospitals in Israel. They believed in peace and were very innocent. They did it for years. In the hospitals they took care of the mothers from Gaza who came with the sick children and gave them everything they needed.                      It didn't help them. They were taken captive without medication and some of them did not survive there. The Red Cross received a list of medications but did not see them.                                                        For 54 days they did not shower, ate pita bread a day, divided the pita into four parts, a quarter for each meal, they lost 20 kilograms of their weight in 54 days.

Before returning home, the terrorists let them shower and dressed them in strange clothes, they did not change clothes for 54 days.

Despite everything, they returned proud and upright and asked the families who received them not to cry. These are the women they are.                                                                                                                                       They also really have nowhere to return to because their houses were burned. Some of them have their husbands still in captivity, there are some whose husbands did not survive captivity because he did not receive medicine or was taken wounded and not treated.

Yesterday in a TV report I saw a young couple of parents announcing to their granddaughter that grandma is coming back. The granddaughter said "Grandma is free?" , in what world should a granddaughter say such a thing?

The children who returned from captivity

 The children who returned from captivity are two, three, four, eight or twelve years old. Still talking in whispers. They lost their voice after being banned from speaking out loud for more than fifty days in dark tunnels.                                                                                                                                                                                        They came back very thin. Eat a pita bread or two a day. They have not seen sunlight and have skin problems. Also orthopedic problems because they haven't been on the move for so long.                                                Some of them returned with the mothers and the father remained captive or was murdered on the first day of what happened here. Some of them returned without parents. They can't really go home because they don't have a home. Their houses were destroyed and burned.                                                     They stay with their whole community in small rooms in hotels in Israel and are basically refugees in their own country. They have nowhere to return.                                                                                         A nine-month-old baby and a two-year-old boy were still left there with their mother. Hamas claims that it does not know where they are. What does a baby do in captivity? Recently there are rumors that they are no longer alive.                                                                                                                                              Twelve-year-old Eitan, who was there alone all these days, said that they beat him and forced him to watch the horror films of the massacres that Hamas committed here. His father is still in captivity. His mother was also kidnapped from the house with a baby and a four-year-old girl but managed to escape on the way. Yesterday they met after fifty-four days.                                                                                                            There is still a ceasefire here and no one knows if it will last two more days and what will happen next.

 My daughter came back from London this morning. As usual my worries were in vain and everything is fine. Due to the nature of her work she had two security guards there and she even enjoyed the streets of London which she loves so much.

Here the girl enjoys the sweets and perfumes that her mother brought.

Luckily for us there is still a ceasefire and our lives are going on like life anywhere else in the world, more or less.

The television is still on since six in the morning and we are following the return of the captives to Gaza. In the meantime, children and mothers and grandmothers who were kidnapped on Saturday morning are being returned, they were taken barefoot and with their pyjamas.                                                           Now on TV the  daughter of one of the grandmothers)84( who was returned yesterday,   she is in danger of life because for 54 days she did not receive her medication. Her son met with the representatives of the Red Cross and gave them the medicines but they never reached her,                               The four-year-old girl Abigail also returned yesterday from captivity in Gaza. She was there alone because her parents were murdered in their home. She fled to the neighbors' house and was taken prisoner with the mother and the three children of the neighbors, ages 4, 10 and 9.                                             Abigail also has Irish citizenship. The Prime Minister of Ireland talked about her but was unable to tell the truth. He said "Abigail got lost and came back". This tells the whole story of hypocrisy and the inability to look reality in the eyes and tell the truth.                                                                                         The children's hospitals that were preparing to receive the captive children who lived for 54 days in dark tunnels in Gaza tried to learn in advance how to receive them but were unable to find any previous experience in the world for such a case.                                                                                                       They established a department that is like a hotel and do everything for the children who return. They even brought the pets there that the kids missed so much. Unfortunately not all pets survived, they also shot dogs and cats.                                                                                                                   In an hour the additional list of the children who will return today will be published, we all hope that the nine-month-old baby will also be among them.

The day after tomorrow or tomorrow the ceasefire will end. No one really knows what will happen here.

four in the morning

 I've been awake since four in the morning, I woke up in a panic and I've been awake ever since, probably the thing that scares me the most is mice.

I heard a mouse, or so I thought, and I couldn't continue sleeping, I brought Philip the cat into the room, I never allow him to enter the bedroom but this time he had a role, he purred happily and was excited but it didn't seem that he suspected anything. He is an excellent hunter and I trust him.                                                         Soon I will turn on the TV and reality will take over my thoughts again. The frequency of the alarms and the rocket fire here is decreasing, but there are still sounds of war in the background.                                              My daughter is supposed to go to London for work for a week and I will be with the  grandchildren. I warn her not to speak Hebrew in the street and to hide any identifying mark ץ                                                                                                                                                                      Doesn't it remind you of other dark times?                                                                                                                                                                                     

                   

thoughts

 I knew this moment would come. Now that I'm on the side of the "bad guys" I'm very sensitive to nuances. I notice who no longer comments here and make my interpretation which may be wrong but that is my sensitivity.                                                                                                                                                                  I would so much like things to go differently but I have no control over what happens.

Yesterday I was at the hairdresser, there were few people there, we talked among ourselves in the silence and pain of shared fate. This country is small and everyone knows more than one person who was killed, kidnapped or missing, there was no need to justify or explain anything. No one had to "pick a side", we are all on this side.                                                                                                                                                           I read in the blogs of people not from here how difficult it is for them with this situation in the world and I feel a little guilty, I know I'm not really guilty but I started to think that maybe it is no longer possible to separate "who I am" in blogland from a difficult story of pain and sadness,                                                             I still can't find the real reason why I'm sharing my thoughts here, I'm not sure that those who don't go through it can really understand. Blogland is a kind of "imagined reality" where real people exist, apparently their opinion is very important to me otherwise I wouldn't bother to explain it.

And finally, if I succeed I will upload a picture of the meatballs I made today. This also happens here.              before cooking.

The thirty-seventh day

I myself am surprised by what great anxiety, despair, helplessness and fear bring out of me. The flurry of comments on poor Weaver's blog who herself is a victim of misinformation, the arguments I get into here in blogland trying to explain reality as it is to people who refuse to see.                                                                                                                                                                             I always read here how much the heart of one or another blogger hurts for the children of Gaza, I have never read that the heart hurts because of an Israeli child.                                         A bit of history - the British after they finished ruling here divided what they called Palestine-Israel into two countries. Egypt should have received the Gaza Strip but refused and tried to invade Israel from the south. They were stopped by the small Israeli army in the south and thus the Gaza Strip remained outside of Egypt, no one wanted them. Israel provided them with water, electricity and more for many years. allowed them to enter and work here. The Egyptians do not allow them to stay in Egypt for more than twenty-four hours.                                        The people of Zaka, who have been collecting remains of bodies from terrorist attacks that were here for twenty years and also arrived at the homes of the victims in the houses burned on the seventh of October, say that on the refrigerators they found a list of people from Gaza and travel times, they transported people and children from Gaza to medical treatments in hospitals. These good people are hostages in Gaza or dead. Most of them are in their seventies and eighties.                                                                                                                                         In 2006 the residents of Gaza chose Hamas to rule over them and since then their lives have changed for the worse. Hamas is ISIS and it is not only an organization but also an idea, the idea is to rule Islam all over the world, even in the most brutal ways, and it will not end here. We actually also protect you in London, Yorkshire and Bath from the day they get there. They are actually already there but still quiet. Waiting for an opportunity.                                                Hamas is hiding in hospitals in Gaza, I just heard a recorded conversation between an Israeli army commander and the director of the hospital in Gaza, the Israeli instructed the doctor which streets to pass with the patients they were evacuating from the hospital, the Hamas people shoot them so they don't leave and the Israeli army guards them so they can cross safely to the south of the Gaza Strip .                                                                                                There is a video of a nurse in a hospital in Gaza crying that Hamas is stealing the medicine from the sick children.

Israel does not commit war crimes and anyone who writes like that is committing an injustice. Imagine if one day London, Yorkshire or Bath were bombarded with thousands of rockets, what would your government or army do? (Who shelled Dresden?), don't believe what you see or read on the bbc, they have been distorting the facts for a long time and always against us.                                                                                                                                   The war is now going on in the north as well and it is possible that the next few days will be even more difficult.

Yesterday there were a few sentences in Blogland that were like an arrow in my heart and I thought I would no longer write here, but this morning I woke up with the decision that I must continue precisely because of this, because of the twisting of the truth and the small chance that there are some people who understand what is happening here.                                                 

 

The picture is from another time. The children grew up in the meantime.

On my last visit to them in a conversation with the fifteen year old grandson, he wanted to give me an example of an irrational decision and gave as an example my decisions to travel to them while there is a danger of rockets. It was his attempt to show me how sometimes emotion makes us make irrational decisions. I was very happy that this was the example he chose.                                                                         I'm still debating how and what to write here. Do people really want to read with their morning coffee about such a harsh reality? On the other hand, this is my blog and maybe this is my place to write what really hurts me.                                                                                                                                                  I find myself arguing with people on other blogs, arguing in a way that only great pain and deep anxiety can bring out of me and I have a hard time with it because it leaves me in great helplessness in the face of the lack of understanding that exists regarding the real situation.                                                          The position of a victim is a position that the world accepts with understanding, but as soon as the victim is fighting for his life and does not have a multitude of options to choose from, things change.                                                                                                                                                                       I will soon be on the road again, a relative asked me to take him to visit my daughter, for the past few weeks he has been afraid to join me and if the relative calm continues we will set off. The problem is on the way, you have to get out of the car and lay on the ground, I can lie down, I'm not sure I can get up easily. I hope I don't have to test it.