![]() ![]() And then that was it, that's the last message." "She wrote me, they're inside the house, it's time to stop joking and say goodbye," he tells me. He read out the texts they exchanged, first some black humour and suddenly serious and full of love as she realised a massacre was happening. They switched to WhatsApp as they heard gunfire and explosions in the kibbutz, hoping that if she made no noise, Hamas would bypass the house. When he heard the air raid sirens in Tel Aviv, he rang Vivian. The first time I met Yonatan, in the days after their kibbutz was attacked, he was hoping his mother had been taken into Gaza as a hostage. Vivian was in the family home in kibbutz Be'eri, on the border with Gaza, when Hamas attacked on 7 October. Among the family photos I recognised his mother, Vivian Silver, who was one of Israel's leading campaigners for peace with the Palestinians. It was a comfortable home, full of his children's toys. I visited Yonatan Zeigen at his flat in Tel Aviv. An air strike destroyed the house they were hoping would shelter them in Rafah. The two children were with their father because all three of them had just been killed by Israel. ![]() Our children Nour and Aboud are here with you. What are we supposed to do, God? Muhammad, get up! For God's sake my beloved, I swear to God, I love you. In the video, it is as if she hopes, somehow, that the power of her grief will bring him back. I haven't been able to find out her name, which was not posted alongside those of her dead husband and children. As Israel and Egypt are not allowing journalists to enter Gaza, I have not met her. I've been watching a video of a woman wracked by grief, sitting next to the body of her husband, Muhammad Abu Shaar. Will the war in Gaza shock Israelis and Palestinians into ending their century of conflict over the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan river? The widow of Muhammad Abu Shaar Old enemies who had killed each other for centuries chose peace. It happened in western Europe after World War Two. But its heat can produce changes that seemed impossible. War is a cruel furnace that puts humans through terrible agonies. It must be just as hellish for the hostages taken by Hamas and for the families of their victims. Palestinians "plead for safety", wrote Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, the main UN relief agency in Gaza, in an "endless, deepening tragedy… hell on earth". Just getting to the end of the day and surviving the night must feel like a miracle in the Gaza Strip.
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