NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {R} uth Peretz was 16 years old and had both cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy. She was wheelchair-bound — severely disabled. But she loved music. So her father, Erick, brought her to the desert concert in Israel that was so infamously and so brutally attacked by Hamas. They were among the missing. They have both now been found dead. I hate to say I figured as much. Despite Hamas’s deep desire for human shields, Ruth would have been too much work — keeping her alive would have required a tenderness likely unknown to terrorists. And dead Jews are what they ultimately desire. Ruth’s older sister told media that their father would regularly take Ruth to concerts. Ruth was nonverbal, but she would want to stay, she enjoyed them so much. Ruth and her father are among those we cannot forget.
We’re barely two weeks into the attack on Israel, and it’s striking how many in the West have forgotten the existential war on Ukraine. At the same time, the particularly insidious evil of antisemitism insists we look at the human faces of the attack on Israel in a particularly personal way. It’s as if we can’t recognize multiple simultaneous injustices in the world. Hamas hated Ruth and her father because they were Jewish. Never mind that he was simply a father who loved his daughter and made sacrifices for her and shared joy, even when inconvenient. God must reward such love with great joy.
Dr. Eitan Ne’eman was a 45-year-old pediatrician and father of seven. On his first day of combat on the front lines, he was killed. He grew up in the Old City of Jerusalem — such a remarkable place, with such history — with five older sisters. Dr. Ne’eman “was saving lives on the first day of combat, in the trauma room in Soroka, and was recruited into the reserves to help rescue and save more lives,” the hospital where he worked said in a statement. “May his memory be for a blessing.” In the last photo taken of him, he was praying. Perhaps his prayers are all the more powerful now.
“They’re here. They’re in the clinic. I don’t think I’ll make it out of here. I love you.” Those were the last words that 22-year-old paramedic Amit Mann sent her sister over WhatsApp. She was in her clinic, working to save lives in Kibbutz Be’eri. Her sister told a reporter:
My heart is broken and bleeding. I just can’t take in the bad news. We’ll say goodbye to our Amit. She was the princess of our home, the light of our lives who lost her life in the battle for Be’eri, and as an experienced medic, tried saving lives until the last moment when she was murdered by evil terrorists. We love you so much. You’ll always be the heroine love of our lives.
Speaking of reporters: What horror, to walk into some of these homes and see what Hamas has done. Tortured children, burned alive. And then the reality of people in the West who do not believe what you report. I abhor releasing and looking at graphic images of torture and death — life at its most vulnerable and intimate. Hamas wants us to see their evil and be terrified. And yet, people don’t believe the depths of evil that man is capable of. So it is necessary to release some of the images to the public, so we will see: This is how much Jews are hated. This is how demonic man can become. The inhumanity cries out — we must not only notice and never forget but look at as many of the human faces as we can, those who have been eradicated from this earth because of pure hatred.
We’ve already seen heroic first responders die, and there will be more of that as the war unfolds. But the death of young people, enjoying a music festival, is a unique cruelty. As much as Israel is always on alert, the thought of paragliding terrorists making a massacre of their Shabbat celebration must never have entered their minds. It is hard to find peace in this world, and even beyond the evil and torture, there is a terrible cruelty about the whole way it went down.
J. K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, highlighted a smiling photo of Noya Dan, twelve years old, while we thought she also might still be a hostage. Autistic, she was a Harry Potter fan, and was seen on social media in a Hogwarts uniform. In Hebrew, she shared a voice message with her mother, as she was staying with her grandmother. “Mom, there was a big boom at the door that scared me. All the windows in Grandma’s house were broken at the entrance. Because there was another boom, there are many broken windows. Mommy . . . I’m scared.” She and her grandmother have since been counted among the murdered.
During a press conference, the newly elevated Catholic cardinal of Jerusalem offered his life in exchange for children being held hostage by Hamas. The terrorists presumably would never take him up on it, because torturing innocent children and taking them as human shields is more of the horrific image they are going for. It wasn’t clear how much the cardinal had thought through his proposal, but it was the right move for a Christian. Jesus, of course, gave His life for others. In all of the barbarity, if any of this can make us more willing to look at each human face with love, no life so horrifically ended will be in vain. In the West, we will experience war fatigue. Ukraine knows that all too well. Please, keep looking at the human faces and reading the stories of family and hope and love.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.