Do we know if this is legit? Has Hamas preferentially kidnapped young women?
That looks suspicious to me.
Like maybe a mail-order bride thing.
It is on JTA’s facebook page.
Or like the kind of people who would be attending a multi-day outdoor music festival.
Looks like your link is down.
I think this is it: https://www.jta.org/2023/10/08/israel/some-hostages-freed-death-and-hostage-toll-mounts-as-hamas-attack-on-israel-enters-2nd-day
Who is JTA?
The best English language coverage I’ve heard yet has been BBC world news, on NPR. And this thread.
The JTA looks like a Jewish-centric Associated Press-type organization.
From Wiki:
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA ) is an international news agency and wire service, founded in 1917, serving Jewish community newspapers and media around the world as well as non-Jewish press, with about 70 syndication clients listed on its web site.
This guy was just on CNN. Hamas attacked his house, and his father, a retired IDF general, came to rescue his family. I do not read Hebrew.
Okay.
But I think it might be early for a list of names and pictures to be known/released.
Those are pictures of people who are missing. The idea is that if you have any info on their whereabouts - for example because you’re a kibbutznik in the area and you are hiding them (or less optimistically if you saw Hamas take or kill them), you can contact their family.
Some of them match the JTA list of people who have been killed.
This is not the thread for unfounded speculations. Please
Sure.
14 posts were split to a new topic: Why not encourage people to move from Gaza to the West Bank
Alessan can give more details-- I have never lived in Israel, just visited, and I never served in the IDF, but the attack was on a holiday. I WAS in the US army. If you attacked the US even on Columbus Day, or the day after the death of Richard Nixon, you could catch people off-guard. (I was in training when Nixon died, and we still got a day off-- not leave, but no actual training, just picnics, and softball, and you could sit a lot of it out [or sneak back to the barracks, though I did not]; we were dismissed at 2 instead of 4, and in civilian clothes by 2:05.) The holiday on Saturday was much more important than Labor day, or the death of a president who had resigned, and it was on Shabbat as well.
I imagine that more people than usual had been granted leave, and the people on duty were sort of partying. Definitely more than usual went to services that day.
I mostly read prayers and biblical Hebrew, although I can function as a tourist.
However, the first line jumped right out: “We are alive.”
I, and my parents as well, have, and have had, a number or very good Russian friends. It may be a little off-topic here, but I’m not the one who introduced Russia. The tsarist and Soviet governments both were antisemitic by policy (especially tsarist), and I have no doubt that Putin is a raging antisemite, but you cannot assume any individual Russian is antisemitic anymore that you can assume any individual US citizen is racist.
Iran appears to be a major influencer and supplier in this horrific attack.
Deleted. After consideration, I don’t think this post was appropriate.
To put it in more serious terms, to the extent that Iran is complicit, the responsible factions in that country should be dealt with by all means possible.
People have been posting photos of their missing family members on Facebook. Many young people were attending a big outdoor concert. I assume many of these photos are their Facebook/Snapchat/TikTok profile photos.