The British children of elderly hostages abducted by Hamas have pleaded for their return as they described the invasion of Israel as a “second Holocaust”.
The parents of Sharone Lifschitz, 52, and the mother of Noam Sagi, 53, were abducted after Hamas gunmen stormed the Nir Oz kibbutz near the border with Gaza on Saturday.
At an emotional press conference in London, Sagi said: “People who survived the Holocaust find themselves facing another one … We are bleeding, we are in pain, we are hurting and we are in disbelief.”
The psychotherapist, who grew up in the kibbutz but now lives in London, said he should have been celebrating his mother’s 75th birthday but that he had not heard from her since Saturday morning. He said Ada Sagi escaped to a panic room after she “woke up to a massacre, to a second Holocaust”.
“[She was] living on her own, dealing with the grief of losing my dad just over a year ago,” he said. “Snatched by men in their 20s, 30s, 40s, who took and kids and elderly people as captives.”
Sagi urged the international community to take action, saying: “They need to be back home now.”
Sitting in front of a table displaying photographs of some of the 150 hostages, including a six-month-old baby and young children, he added: “The reason we feel an urgency is because nature will do its course if we don’t act quickly. If the international community … don’t show up and say stop, they won’t be here for too long. My mum has severe allergies to every kind of dust, I know that her EpiPens and inhaler are at home.”
Lifschitz, an artist and academic who grew up with Sagi, said her peace activist parents, 85 and 83, whom she did not want to name, were also kidnapped from the kibbutz on Saturday.
The University of East London lecturer said her mother was disconnected from her oxygen device before being bundled on to a motorbike. “You have to be a special sort of person to take an 85-year-old person out of her bed. These are frail people,” she said.
“It’s something so horrific we can’t contemplate [it]. The job in the face of all of this is: bring these people back home. There are mothers waiting for their children. These are my friends’ children, these mothers are me. I’m asking on their behalf, not on my behalf. There is no ‘I’; there is ‘we’.”
She said her father was a lifelong peace activist who spent his retirement driving sick Palestinians from Gaza to hospital appointments in East Jerusalem.
Sagi added that his mother – the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Poland – was an Arabic teacher whose mission in life was “communication, no politics”. He added: “These are peace-loving people who fought all their lives for good neighbouring relationships.
“If they will die for peace, they will take it. If they will die for war, that will be another travesty.”
The pair said they had not received any official information about their loved ones as they spoke about the horrors witnessed at the kibbutz, a community of 400, which they said included the murder of babies. Sagi said: “They had been gassed, burned, butchered, slaughtered, killed and kidnapped.”
He said one woman captured by Hamas was a Holocaust survivor who was on the Kindertransport. Lifschitz said her friend’s autistic daughter was among those being held hostage, as were people with cancer, Parkinson’s and dementia.
“The kibbutz is gone, the dead are dead and somewhere in Gaza there are children and mothers and this is our fight now,” she said. “I feel I’ve been hollow for the last few days but I feel that we are strong, together we are facing this act of such barbarity.”
The press conference was told the war had created “the biggest hostage crisis the world has faced in decades”. The Israeli government says an estimated 150 Israelis, foreigners and Israeli dual nationals have been taken hostage by Hamas.
Concerns remain high for the safety of British citizens in the region, with the war having already claimed at least 2,400 lives in total. Seventeen British nationals are feared dead or missing after the weekend’s atrocities. The deaths of Britons Nathanel Young, 20, Jake Marlowe, 26, and Bernard Cowan, 57, have been confirmed.
Lifschitz, who became tearful, urged for the safe return of all the hostages. “I am totally helpless. But there’s one thing I can do: I can sit here and tell you to do anything you can to bring these people home.”
Sagi said: “I don’t have the words to look at my son into his eyes and say ‘this is why it happened’ because I can’t comprehend and I can’t explain. I know that every person who was involved in this attack has a heart pumping in them and my wish is that they would see that these people, they’re humans.”
