Bloody faces and clothes, looks dazed with fear, a few words spoken in the hope of being able to explain themselves, speak, return to reason. “Does anyone speak English? I have a friend in Gaza.” These are the first images of the dramatic video of the kidnapping of 5 Israeli soldiers on the morning of October 7 from the Nahal Oz kibbutz. Around the girls, sitting on the ground, around twenty Hamas militiamen insult them: “Dogs, we would crush you”. But also: “You are beautiful Zionists.” One terrorist says to another, “These are the girls who can get pregnant.”
Who are the soldiers?
They are Liri Elbag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniela Gilboa and Naama Levy, the latter already appearing in another film in the first days after the Hamas attack while, with dirty trousers, she was being taken out of the back of a jeep between the spitting and shouting of jubilation. This time it was not Hamas that released the film for its propaganda and psychological warfare with Israel, but the Forum of the families of the hostages, tired of seeing no progress in the negotiations to free their loved ones still in the Strip: “The Israeli government does not he must waste an extra minute of time, he must return to the negotiating table today.” Eli Elbag, Liri’s father, explained to the media that the girls’ families discussed for a long time whether or not to publish the images of their daughters, and then decided to shake up Benjamin Netanyahu’s government: “This is the last resource we have to tell them what we want.” A desperate move, therefore, to force the executive’s hand.
Video
“Courageous families”, called them the president of Israel Isaac Herzog, who invited “the world to watch this cruel atrocity”. The prime minister also said he was “shocked” by the images and the “brutality of the terrorists”, and increasingly “determined to eliminate Hamas so that this never happens again”. But not a word about the restart of indirect talks to negotiate a truce and the exchange of prisoners. The video, taken from the bodycams of the captured militiamen, lasts 3 minutes and 10 seconds: the families explained that it was “edited and censored to exclude the most distressing scenes”, such as the images of “many boys and girls killed in the Nahal base Oz and inside the bomb shelter” and other sequences “of extreme brutality”. But even with all the cuts, “the footage reveals the violent, humiliating and traumatizing treatment the girls endured on the day of their abduction, their eyes filled with pure terror.”
