2023-10-23 18:00:03
Their names were Omri Belkin, Ilan Lipovetsky, Maya Poder, Bruna Valeanu, Avraham Giad Tiberg, Roee Negri, Uri Arad… These young men and women should have entered Tel Aviv University in those hot and beautiful autumn days to study law, economics, psychology, cinema or communication. But they died on Saturday October 7 during the Hamas attack. The youth of Tel Aviv, more TikTok than orthodox, liberal, often on the left – in any case far from the extreme right –, among the most tolerant, also the most open to the rights of the Palestinians, were cut down by bullets terrorists when they attacked border soldiers and thousands of participants in a rave party near the Gaza Strip.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers The history of Gaza, or the making of a powder magazine
A festive youth who we see, on the videos recovered from the attackers’ GoPro cameras, being shot dead with a Kalashnikov. Pursued then executed in the middle of fields or inside cars. Taken, with kibbutz residents, terrified, on motorbikes or in the back of cars, hostage of Hamas.
The list of the university’s dead continues to grow, with the discovery of remains in the countryside, then the long process of identifying the mutilated bodies. Thursday, October 19, Professor Drorit Neumann, dean in charge of student life, reads an email received a few minutes earlier. “Dear Drorit, I regret to inform you of the death of another of our students, Maayana, on October 7, near Gaza. » Survivors and teachers carry out funerals. Around sixty in total, counting the children, brothers, sisters or parents of students – all those who constitute the immediate entourage of the deceased, so important in the Jewish culture of mourning.
At Tel Aviv University (Israel), October 19, 2023. LUCIEN LUNG/RIVA PRESS POUR “LE MONDE”
In the immense amphitheater of the university, the photograph of each of the 1,300 dead and the two hundred hostages was placed on each seat in the auditorium. The vanished youth of Israel seem to be staring at you. The faces of a generation cut down on October 7. Because, on the death lists published nationwide by the government, 18-30 year olds constitute the majority of victims, i.e. they were killed while carrying out their military service near Gaza (310 soldiers dead in total), or that they participated in the rave party (250 deaths).
” The story repeats itself “
A generation which has not finished paying its price to the war: the young men and women who are doing their military service (60% of each age group) and those under 40 who form the reserve will constitute the essential troops engaged against Hamas for months, perhaps years. Of the 30,000 students at Tel Aviv University, more than 5,000 were called upon to rally their unit.
You have 78.17% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
#Tel #Aviv #words #pain #rage #traumatized #youth