Retired Canadian Teacher Missing in Israel, Believed Kidnapped With Husband, Held Hostage in Gaza

Hamas terrorists move toward the border fence with Israel from Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, 2023. Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images

A retired English teacher with Canadian citizenship and her husband are missing following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

Idit Shamir, consulate general of Israel in Toronto and Western Canada, said in a social media update on Oct. 15 that Canadian citizen Judith Weinstein Haggai, a retired English teacher originally from Toronto, “is the 7th known Canadian victim of Hamas’s brutal attack on civilians in Israel.”

“Judith and her husband Gad were ambushed and kidnapped to Gaza during their daily peaceful morning walk. Please pray for their safe return,” said Ms. Shamir.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the couple, both in their 70s, disappeared in fields near Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7, the morning of the attack. The couple has four children, one of whom told the paper they are scrambling to find information on their parents.

The couple’s daughter, Iris Haggai Liniado, 38, who lives in Singapore with three young daughters, said she feels like she is in a “bad dream.” Ms. Liniado said her parents were ‘'60s kids” and “true soulmates” who had been together for 40 years.

Ms. Haggai, who taught English in central Israel, holds citizenship in Israel, Canada, and the United States, where she was born. She grew up in Toronto, but went to Israel at 19 years of age.

The couple’s daughter said she contacted her parents at 6:50 a.m. Israel time and asked them to check in after learning that sirens were going off in Israel. Her mother texted back saying the couple had been out for a morning walk, approximately 2 kilometres from their home, and they heard sirens and were lying on the ground. Ms. Haggai said she saw hundreds of rockets flying above them.

Their daughter didn’t hear from them again.

“After that, all contact with them was lost. I couldn’t get them to answer my calls—nothing. We were left with nothing,” she said.

She said that she “begged” a paramedic’s wife for information and was finally told that Ms. Haggai had called the paramedic station and said she and her husband were still in the fields, that she had been shot, and that her husband was seriously wounded and “wasn’t doing well.”

An ambulance that was dispatched to help was hit by a rocket, Ms. Liniado was told.

“I highly doubt my father survived,” Ms. Liniado said. “I don’t think they would kidnap him if he was severely wounded. It sounds like my mother was also wounded but not as badly—so either they shot her again, she killed herself somehow because she wouldn’t want to go on without my father, or she was kidnapped.”

Ms. Liniado told CTV in an update on Oct. 15 that she was still trying to find her missing parents and had spoken to authorities in Canada, Israel, and the United States without success.