One of the iconic pictures of the hostages being released from Hamas is that of 17-year-old Mia Leimberg, 17, who was seen leaving captivity on Tuesday while carrying her dog. This was when the world – including the Leimberg family itself – found out that the pet was also kidnapped on October 7, together with its owner, her mother and other family members.
Before the release, Mia Leimberg’s father Moshe Leimberg had been actively looking for the family’s Shih Tzu named Bella as he wanted the beloved animal to be there for his wife and daughter’s return. “I want Bella to wait for Mia and Gabriela when they get home,” he explained in a Facebook post urging the community to help him find the dog that he believed was missing after Hamas’s attack on Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak.
On October 7, Mia Leimberg, together with her mother Gabriela Leimberg, 59, who live in Jerusalem, visited her aunt Clara Merman, 63, in Nir Yitzhak. On the day of the attack, the three women as well as Clara Merman’s partner Luis Har and her brother, Fernando Merman were kidnapped by Hamas.
Clara Merman, Mia and Gabriela Leimberg were released on the fifth day of ceasefire on Tuesday. Luis Har and Fernando Merman remain in the Gaza Strip. In a stunning video clip released by Hamas, Mia can be seen marching out of the vehicle Hamas had driven her into the exchange with the Red Cross with both arms wrapped around that fluffy little dog. In the video a terrorist can be seen pointing at the dog in surprise, and Mia, all curly hair and brazen, seems to determinedly tell him — the dog is mine, back off.
Mia was captured on Oct. 7th while still in her pajamas. After the gunfire and explosions started, little Bella was incredibly frightened, and Mia, trying to assuage her fears, held her tight. When the Hamas militants broke into their safe room, they saw a young girl in her pajamas, holding what appeared to be a doll of a dog. They didn’t think much of it, and took the five captives with them into Gaza.
When the kidnappers first saw that doll move a few hours later, and realized it was an actual animal, a fight erupted, but Mia, an “only child who knows exactly what she wants and gets exactly what she wants,” as her cousins affectionately described her, won out.
“It was not easy to keep her,” her aunt said. Mia made sure to clean up quickly after Bella in the bathroom, kept her close, and shared whatever scraps of food she got with the pup. She told her homeroom teacher that Bella didn’t bark there at all.
Yet caring for Bella helped the Leimbergs survive captivity. “The most important thing was that they were together. When a person is with their best friend, the dog, the most loyal, the most beloved, it gives them strength,” her cousin said.
The popular British Sunday Times magazine dedicated its front page today to Hamas' assaults on women, including shocking testimonies of rape and other brutality and cruelty perpetrated against young women, female soldiers, and others.
In the article, under the headline 'I saw Hamas rape women before killing them' some of the survivors of the massacre describe the acts of sexual assault against women before murdering them.
Yoni Saadon, one of the witnesses, recounts in the Times:“I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head. I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too. I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’."
“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters, or my sister — I had bought her a ticket but last minute she couldn’t come.”
"I hid in the bushes and saw that they had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to... They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too,” he says.
The article also quotes Shelly Harush, the police officer appointed to investigate sexual violence and crimes against women by Hamas.
"It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people. We gathered thousands of declarations, photos, and videos. As a Jewish mother, my soul and spirit cannot take this."
Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, a voluntary religious organisation that collects the remains of the dead, including their blood, so they can be buried in accordance with Jewish tradition, adds his testimony to the article.
“We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim,” he said. “No one saw more than us. “It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape … it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”
Among volunteers in an all-female team to prepare female corpses for burial was Shari, 60, an architect who lives in Jerusalem. Shari commented in the article on how some of the victims arrived:
"Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”
Pro-Palestinian groups such as those who spread hate at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting this week, have been lavishly funded by the Rockefeller family’s main charitable arm.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has links to two groups the Israeli government designated “terrorist organizations,” a review of public records by The Post shows.
Founded in 1940, the famous clan’s $1.3 billion fund — where Justin, Wyatt and David Rockefeller Jr. sit on the board of trustees — has shelled out more than $2.6 million since 2018 directly or indirectly to at least six anti-Israel organizations, several of which openly celebrated Hamas’ Oct 7 terrorist attack on the Jewish state.
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, whose logo was affixed to an ad promoting Wednesday’s rally, is a “fiscally sponsored project” of the nonprofit Alliance for Global Justice.
In August 2022, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave the Alliance $100,000.
Israel designated Samidoun a terrorist organization in February 2021 and Germany banned it last month.
Samidoun, founded in 2011, condemned the United Kingdom in 2021 for classifying Hamas a terrorist organization, and cheered the Oct 7 terrorist incursion:
The Iranian regime has executed more than 127 people, including women and children, since the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, human rights groups said on Saturday, according to The Guardian.
Data collected by Iran Human Rights (IHR) and the Norway-based organization Hengaw, which have been cross-referenced by the Observer, there has been an alarming rise in executions since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas.
A third group, Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA), confirmed that there has been a significant increase in executions since the October 7 attacks, stating that on Wednesday last week, the regime executed seven people within a 24-hour period.
Human rights activists and the families of those put to death have accused the regime of using the world’s preoccupation with the war in Gaza as a cover to exact revenge on dissidents and put people to death without due judicial process.
Those who have been put to death in the last two months include a child, 17-year-old Hamidreza Azari, whose death was labeled “deplorable” by the UN last week, according to The Guardian.
Iran has also executed 22-year-old Milad Zohrevand, the eighth protester linked to the Women, Life, Freedom movement to face the death penalty for participating in the nationwide anti-regime protests that erupted across Iran last year following the death of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman who died while in police custody after allegedly being arrested for breaching Iran’s strict dress code.
In October, the UN condemned the Iranian regime for carrying out executions at an “alarming rate”. It said, according to its data, at least 419 people were put to death between January and July this year, which constitutes a 30% increase compared with the same time period in 2022.
This past April, rights groups said that Iran hanged 75 percent more people in 2022 than the previous year.
There has long been a concern over the number of executions in Iran, which activists say disproportionately target members of the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, notably Kurds in the northwest, Arabs in the southwest and Baluch in the southeast.
