MAPS | The war between Israel and Hamas, context and situation
MADRID, 19 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Israeli Foreign Ministry released this Thursday a video of the father-in-law of the Spanish Iván Illarramendi, kidnapped along with his wife, the Chilean-Israeli Dafna Garcovich, by Hamas on October 7, in which he narrates the attack and expresses his confidence that both can return “safe and sound.”
According to Dan Garcovich, both his daughter and her husband and he and his wife received the alarm at 6:30 in the morning about the firing of missiles from the Gaza Strip and took refuge in the safe rooms of their respective houses in the kibbutz. Kissufim, very close to the border.
From that moment on, both couples were in telephone contact. At one point, her daughter told them that “Arabic-speaking people had entered their house and were breaking everything.” “‘Help, help, it’s horrible what’s happening right now,'” she told them.
Half an hour later, according to Garcovich, her daughter began to communicate in writing “out of fear” that if she spoke on the phone they would overhear her. “We were like this until around 12:30 p.m.,” she says.
Finally, he and his wife were rescued by Israeli soldiers more than 24 hours later “with great caution because there was still fighting in the kibbutz, which was not yet clean of terrorists” but they have had no news of their daughter and her husband. “My daughter and her husband are my only family in Israel,” he emphasizes.
Garcovich has trusted that through diplomatic channels “something can be done” for both of them and has stressed that he knows that everything possible is being done to “get some information about the state in which they are, where they are.”
“The faith and hope that they can return safely is never lost, it should never be lost,” he highlights. “We have hope and faith in God that this will happen,” he concludes in the recording released by the Israeli Foreign Ministry on X, the old Twitter.
Precisely, it was the Israeli Foreign Ministry that was the first to confirm this Tuesday that Illarramendi was kidnapped by Hamas, including the Spanish flag among those of the 42 countries of which there are citizens in the hands of Hamas. In total, the militiamen would have almost 200 hostages. Subsequently, the acting President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, also confirmed the kidnapping and requested his immediate release.
