Dressed in a T-shirt bearing her missing granddaughter, Roni Eshel’s, smiling face, Zehava Eshel addressed a crowd of protesters gathered in front of the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv. “The country was supposed to protect her,” she said, her voice hoarse.
The Israeli military have labelled 19-year-old Roni Eshel, an IDF soldier stationed at a base near the kibbutz of Nahal Oz, as a missing person. All that the Eshel family know is that Roni last texted her mother from a friend’s phone in the early hours of Saturday 7 October, during the unprecedented incursion by Hamas militants that has so far left more than 1,300 Israelis dead.
