My Soul Is Not Similar to What It Was at All.

A Day in the Life of an Israeli MOM: Alona Ricanati Hashai
19/11/2023

Dear friends, it has been almost six weeks since the terrible Saturday that passed us by; my life and that of my family continue in a routine that is similar to our previous life, but for me, on a personal level, my soul is not similar to what it was at all.

I am in non-stop thoughts about our situation in the country, I am non-stop connected to the news, thirsty for another story of a tragedy of a murdered person or a story of the heroism of a soldier or civilian.

Almost every day we wake up in the morning with new names of soldiers killed in the battles in Gaza and it breaks our hearts. A young 20-year-old soldier who died before his time or a 40-year-old soldier who is the father of children.

This week the brother-in-law of Racheli Gelman, our friend from Momentum Israel who was on bus 2, was killed in one of the fights. We all crashed.

This is a very special person, the principal of a well-known school in Jerusalem, a person about whom beautiful stories were told and it was clear that this was a great loss.

In the last few weeks my thoughts were concentrated in three sentences that entered my soul. The first sentence was said by the father of the soldier from my community who was killed that Saturday, who said in tears at the funeral, “What a country this is, a country of crazy people” and meant that in a country like ours, fathers bury children and not children their fathers.
The second sentence was said last week by a farmer, me and Yael went to work in his field in the area near Gaza, because his Thai workers fled from Israel and since then many volunteers come to work in his fields. He told us that he is so moved by all the help he gets from people who don’t know him and he doesn’t know them and he described a guy who worked for him of efforts and he said to him “I don’t know you, man and still you help me so much” and this really perfectly describes the mutual guarantee that we feel here in Israel.
The third sentence was said by one of the children abducted to Gaza, 12-year-old Yagil, to his captors, “Don’t take me, I’m too young”, a sentence which his mother heard him on the phone saying to his captors. She was not with him in the house.

This sentence describes so accurately, to the point of pain, the terrible injustice committed by Hamas when they kidnapped babies and children, who have nothing to do with the whole situation and should not be part of this war, of course also women and the elderly, including all the abductees. This is an unbearable situation and we all pray every day that they will return home immediately.