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