|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Thank you, creator of the world. There is nothing besides you.’
By: JNS
A day after her daughter was rescued from Hamas captivity, the mother of Israel Defense Forces soldier Pvt. Ori Megidish on Tuesday gave a statement to the press outside the family’s Kiryat Gat home.
“Dear people of Israel, we thank you all for your prayers and support. Our Ori has returned home, and now the prayers are with the rest of the kidnapped and the missing, and our hearts are with all the families,” said Margalit Megidish.
“Thank you, creator of the world. There is nothing besides you. Thank you, Shin Bet [Israel Security Agency]. Thank you, IDF and security forces. Thank you all,” she added.
Megidish, who was freed by Israeli ground forces on Sunday, was kidnapped by the Hamas terrorist organization on Oct. 7.
Following a medical exam, she was reunited with her family.
Megidish was among 243 people taken hostage by Hamas during the terror group’s cross-border invasion, which left at least 1,400 people dead and thousands wounded.
She was freed by IDF special forces and Israel Security Agency agents, according to Israel’s Channel 13. Though other members of her unit were also taken hostage, Megidish is believed to have been held alone.
After the news broke of her return, celebrations broke out in her hometown of Kiryat Gat in southern Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commended the security services for their “important and exciting achievement,” which he said “expresses our commitment to the release of all the hostages.”
Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza creates the possibility to free the hostages, Netanyahu told the foreign press in Israel on Monday night.
“Hamas will not do it unless they’re under pressure,” he said.
In other news, JNS.org reported that he head of Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on Tuesday criticized Israel’s U.N. ambassador for donning a yellow Star of David during an address to the U.N. Security Council, saying the stunt “dishonors both the victims of the Holocaust and the State of Israel.”
The very public dispute between the two Israeli officials comes despite calls for unity as the army is fighting Hamas on the ground in Gaza, and as pro-Palestinian students at campuses across the United States are vilifying Israel and overtly or covertly backing the Islamist terror group.
“The yellow patch symbolizes the helplessness of the Jewish people and being at the mercy of others. Today we have an independent country and a strong army,” tweeted Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan. “We are masters of our destiny. Today we place a blue-white flag on the lapel, not a yellow patch.”
Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan told the Security Council Monday that he and his staff would wear the yellow stars, inscribed with the words “Never Again,” until members of the body condemned Hamas’s atrocities.
Dayan’s criticism came a day after the Yad Vashem chief urged caution in a statement to JNS with regard to comparing Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre with the systematic mass murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Such comparisons, he said, risked belittling or marginalize both the past and present events.
The Oct. 7 massacre was the deadliest one-day attack against the Jewish people since the Shoah, and leaders and journalists in Israel and abroad have drawn unprecedented direct comparisons between the Islamic terrorist group and Nazi Germany.
(JNS.org)
