The most tragic of the outcomes to the disappearance of Maya Villalobo, one of the two Spaniards who were lost in Israel after the Hamas attack. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has confirmed her death through a statement in which it expresses “its deepest regret” to the young woman’s family and friends.
Villalobo, of Spanish and Israeli nationality and who was 19 years old, was doing his military service at the Nahal Oz base—very close to the border with Gaza—when the attack took place. His father, a resident of Seville, asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for help through social networks on Saturday after being unable to locate his daughter.
After that message of help, the department headed by José Manuel Albares addressed the family, with whom it has been in contact all these days. It was on Monday when the highest representative of Spanish diplomacy confirmed that two Spaniards had been “affected” by the Hamas attack: Villalobo and Iván Illarramendi Saizar, 46 years old.
The family of the deceased young woman resides in Seville. Her father is a professor of Biology at the University of Seville and her mother is an Israeli researcher. She moved to Israel to do her military service, in the 414th Battalion: she left a record of her time in the military on her social media profiles.
In a statement, the Government has once again reiterated “its strongest condemnation” of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and has expressed “its deepest regret and all its condolences” to the family and relatives for the death of Maya Villalobo.
About whom, for the moment, no information has been released “for security reasons” is Iván Illarramendi Saizar, a native of the Guipuzcoan town of Zarautz. He lives with his Israeli wife in a kibbutz, located a couple of kilometers from the Gaza Strip. The missing man alerted his relatives about the Hamas attack, but when the police arrived at the house there was no one there. There they did not find any trace of a fight, so the main suspicion, according to military sources, is kidnapping.
Precisely, after receiving the information from the information services, the judge of the National Court María Tardón has agreed to accept the jurisdiction to investigate the disappearance of the young woman, now found deceased, and of the couple.
The judge indicates in her order in which she accepts jurisdiction that on October 9, a document prepared by the Head of the Information Service of Madrid was presented, giving an account of the terrorist actions that occurred on October 7 and 8, in which she reported of the disappearance of three citizens in a conflict zone, a married couple and a young woman who was serving in the Israeli forces as a holder of Spanish and Israeli nationality.
The document fell by distribution to the Central Court of Instruction Three which, once a report was requested from the Public Prosecutor’s Office in favor of initiating an investigation, assumed jurisdiction for classifying the events as terrorist crimes.
Furthermore, it is up to the Spanish jurisdiction to investigate these events as there are victims with Spanish nationality and in the third case, the wife of one of them, as she is a first-degree relative.
