Group puts up fliers of abduction victims at MIT
CAMBRIDGE — A student group at MIT is urging support for Israelis who were abducted by Hamas in the militant group’s brutal attack last weekend that left more than 1,300 Israelis dead and prompted retaliatory bombardments of Gaza that have killed more than 1,400 people.
The group, Mishelanu, a Hebrew word that roughly translates to “one of us,” placed fliers around campus that show photographs of the abduction victims beneath a heading that says, “KIDNAPPED” in block capital letters.
“Their whereabouts remain unknown,” the fliers read. “More than 3,000 women, men, and children, ranging in age from 3 months to 85 years old, were wounded, murdered, beaten, raped, and brutally separated from loved ones by Hamas.”
The fliers urge people to “take a photo of this poster and share it. Please help bring them home alive.”
Liyam Chitayat, an MIT graduate student who grew up in Israel and who was serving in the Israeli military before coming to Massachusetts for her studies, said in a phone interview that she designed the fliers.
“Everyone is treating them as numbers, and they’re not numbers,” Chitayat said of the Israeli victims. “They’re children, they’re mothers, and they were murdered in the most brutal way possible, or taken captive, and abused and raped before that.”
Initially, the Mishelanu group planned to distribute fliers with photos of the bodies of murdered Israelis but instead chose to show pictures of the abduction victims, many of whom are seen smiling together in family photographs, to “bring light and humanity” to the devastation, she said.
“This is not a game,” Chitayat said. “This is not a game about hypothetical values and what would an ideal state look like. It’s not politics. It’s our lives, and our lives are being threatened.”
Hamas’s assault killed more than 1,300 people in Israel, including 247 soldiers, and the ensuing Israeli bombardment has killed more than 1,400 people in Gaza, according to authorities on both sides. Israel says roughly 1,500 Hamas militants were killed inside Israel and that hundreds of the dead in Gaza are Hamas members.
The Israel military on Thursday blasted the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip with airstrikes, prepared for a possible ground invasion, and said its complete siege on the territory would remain in place until Hamas militants freed some 150 hostages taken during a deadly weekend incursion.