 "What the discovery of Shani Louk’s remains indicates")
One of the most gruesome images of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israeli civilians was what was the lifeless, mangled body of a young woman, sprawled on the back of a truck, with the dirty boot of a terrorist on her broken leg. She was identified by her dreadlocked hair and tattoos, but the Hamas heartlessly let her parents believe she was alive somewhere in Gaza. Last Thursday the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) found her remains, and those of two others.
She was 22-year-old Israeli-German citizen Shani Louk, an avowed peacenik who was dancing along with around 3,000 other similarly minded Israeli youngsters at a music festival in the desert at Re’im when Hamas terrorists swarmed out of Gaza and mowed down over 360 of them. It is now clear that though Shani died in the attack, they took her body to Gaza—where cameras recorded the crowds jeering and even spitting on it. Why did they take her body back?
Three weeks after the October 7 attack, Israeli authorities identified a skull fragment found at Re’im as belonging to Shani via a DNA test, proving she had been killed there, thus confirming eyewitness accounts. But even then Hamas did not own up to her murder. Its leaders continued to callously negotiate the release of hostages on the basis of information Israelis had of the total number who remained missing once fatalities were tallied from all villages attacked.
The other bodies finally recovered from a tunnel besides Shani were 28-year-old Amit Buskila and Itzhak Gelerenter, 57, all killed on October 7. And yet their bodies had been carted back into Gaza. Were they meant to be trophies—as the visuals of Shani’s body suggests? There is no word just yet on the condition of the three bodies after seven months in a subterranean passage, but facts will emerge eventually. Will protesters have the guts to face them?
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe bodies being found only after months of battles and searches by IDF indicates Hamas’ intention was to hide actual death tolls. Much before the current discovery, western media reported that some 18 bodies had been carted back to Gaza after the attack. So, hostages both dead and alive were used as bargaining chips by Hamas from the outset and it has been periodically giving out selective information about hostage deaths since then, for maximum benefit.
Like the case of the Bibas family—9-month-old Kfir, his 4-year-old brother Ariel and mother Shiri. The three were seen being taken away; the father was herded off separately, bearing bloody injuries. In between Hamas leaked information that the three had been sent off to another Palestinian terror group elsewhere in Gaza. Finally, Hamas claimed that the children and their mother had been killed in Israeli air raids. Why should that ‘revelation’ even be considered true?
Amid the worldwide outrage over the 34,000 deaths caused by the inevitable Israeli counter-attack to destroy Hamas and rescue hostages, the killing of innocent peace-lovers like Shani have been conveniently forgotten. Their attitude is that Israel is on a totally unprovoked blood-thirsty rampage, that the murder of nearly 1,200 people was not reason enough for a government to decide to eliminate the forces that perpetrated the attacks and rescue the abducted.
For the past seven months, families of those missing have been swinging between hope and despair, cynically manipulated by Hamas and its supporters. Videos of hostages criticising the Israeli government and exhorting it to accept the Hamas demands are obviously being released periodically to play with the emotions of the relatives and manipulate the media. How the hostages were compelled to speak on behalf of their captors is very painful to contemplate.
More so as there is no good reason to believe anything that Hamas says is true. The UN has now found itself in an embarrassing situation regarding the mortality figures from Gaza given out by Hamas sources that it has been unquestioningly publishing without independent verification. Despite convoluted explanations it emerges that about 30% of the deaths in Gaza are “unregistered” as they are taken from local media sources rather than hospital mortuary figures.
One of the main factors in the swing of world opinion away from Israel in favour of the Palestinians despite Hamas’ brutal practices has been this huge death toll of children and women in Gaza. Before the latest UN doubletake, it was asserted that nearly 9,500 women and 14,500 children had been killed. Now, while the total toll remains unchanged at over 34,000, the latest figures for women and children have been nearly halved to 4,959 and 7,797 respectively.
The explanation now being offered for this discrepancy is that while once the figures were taken from hospital data, it was shifted to local media sources once the IDF closed in on hospitals as they were also providing cover for Hamas operation centres. Why was the reading public not informed of this shift and the resultant likelihood of “unregistered” deaths? Why were those later numbers suddenly classified as unverifiable, but the total toll was not changed?
One possibility could be that the death toll of women and children were being deliberately inflated to not only to galvanise the world into stopping IDF’s anti-Hamas operations inside Gaza but also to downplay the number of its own combatant cadres that had been killed since Israel launched its retaliatory action. The fact that all those up to the age of 18 were classified as “children” is also significant. There has never been a minimum age for terror recruits.
Death reports by local media have been taken at face value by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). But it is now known that Hamas has been spying on its own people to ensure there are no dissenters. The local media also must have had to fall in line too or else Hamas would not have allowed them to report from there either. Nothing can explain OCHA’s touching faith in the information provided by these manipulative militants.
Surely OCHA cannot be as gullible as the student protesters who either do not know or will not acknowledge the released female Israeli hostages’ accounts of sexual assault and other torture that they faced from their Hamas captors? Given that it had been silent all this while about the three people whose bodies recovered on Thursday, Hamas can hardly be believed on hostages’ safety or death tolls. So why does the world continue to give Hamas the benefit of doubt?
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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