“My mother is my mother,” says Natalia Madmon, Argentine and a teacher like her, between sobs. An obvious thing that says it all. Mom, 77, was alone at home on October 7 when the terrorists seized her and took her, along with eighty other people, from the Nir Oz kibbutz, the same one where the two Israeli octogenarians who were freed the night before last lived.
Hamas holds 22 Latin American hostages in Gaza, among whom is Ofelia Roitman, awakened by gunshots at half past six in the morning of October 7. She was alone at home: her husband had broken his hip a week earlier on a tourist trip to Poland and is still in hospital.
Mrs. Roitman made herself a coffee, still calm, turned on the television to listen to the news and phoned her daughter, with whom she spoke every ten minutes, already inside the shelter of each single-family home. “She tried to reassure us.” In less than two hours, at 9:37, the last communication, the tranquility had turned into fear, almost panic.
Late at night, a neighbor dared to enter the house and told them that he was not there. The house seemed raided as if thieves had entered.
Since then, Natalia – who has two brothers – has led an impossible life: she doesn’t sleep, she barely eats, she cries a lot and always thinks about whether her mother can do what she does. “Time stands still. It’s getting up one more day, thinking about things, watching television, waiting for things to happen, wondering if he’s sleeping, if he’s eating, if he can go to the bathroom, if he’s wearing slippers, if he’s cold, if he’s not cold, if they give him food. I’m sure he’s going through a lot of fear. It’s been 18 days without mom and I’m sure time goes by faster than it does for her.”
The parents arrived from Argentina in 1985, resentful of some episodes of anti-Semitism and convinced of the community life of the kibbutzim in southern Israel and that their neighbors, the Palestinians, were human beings like them. Coexistence seemed possible to them, and so they actively defended it all their lives. They never wanted to live anywhere else in Israel further away from the Gaza Strip.
The Argentine president, Alberto Fernández, contacted them from China last week to find out the details, offer them his telephone number and the promise that they will do everything in their power to achieve their release. But there are so many hostages! And the desperation is great. Through a cousin, a sports announcer, they have transferred the case to Lionel Messi’s entourage and those things that are requested in these cases: if you could intercede for mom…
After all, Leo Messi was crowned in 2022 in Qatar, the most influential country in terms of mediation with Hamas (among other details, they pay the monthly salaries of 80% of the officials in the Gaza Strip, which is not exactly the land of entrepreneurs in the private sector).
“My mom, I don’t know what she thinks now, but my dad has lost faith in people. It hurt him so much… It has been done by the people he thought he could talk to. And what he believed all his life was broken, wham, in one day. He had written verses, made exhibitions with paintings for peace.”
–How does it feel when, on two different nights, they report that they have freed two kidnapped women and neither of them is your mother?
–First, I am very happy because they are families that I know, they were neighbors, and I have treated their children. I was able to talk to them, although they did not agree with my mother, they did not see mom. I wanted to know how they had been treated and I want to think that mom is being treated like them. I want to think….
The time goes by. The United States has asked Israel for patience before launching the ground attack on Gaza. This inexorable fact would make the hostage situation even more dramatic and delicate due to the additional degree of uncertainty. And that, family members know.
“I’m afraid. I ask the Government to do everything for the elderly hostages first. My mother was not a soldier. Israel does not do that, Israel defends but it does not kill. She warns with pamphlets. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to them, but no one told my mother before.” Israel, 2023.
