Israel Matzav: Police told parents shots were blanks

Thursday, July 03, 2014

Police told parents shots were blanks

It was widely publicized during the kidnapping that the parents of Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach HY"D (May God Avenge their blood) had all heard the recording of Gilad's call to the police within a few days of the kidnapping. It was also reported that the IDF brass knew that it was searching for bodies and not for living people (Although I don't think I wrote it on this blog, I told Mrs. Carl within a couple of days that the boys were dead because there was no demand to free terrorists). But the parents were told otherwise.

Based on an interview with Gilad's mother, YNet reports that although the parents walked out of the room in which they heard the tape 'shaken,' police had assured them that the shots were blanks.

"Security officials told us the gunshots (heard in the recording) were blanks, because if you want to kill someone, you shoot them straight away without warning them first," she said. "We heard Gil-Ad yell in pain but it sounded like he was being pinched, (he didn't sound) like someone who was about to be murdered. They told us they must've fired out the window, and this is why they found cartridges on the sides of the car. We had real hope that they were alive."

Bat Galim said the recording hasn't been released until after the bodies were found because "we were afraid the kidnappers found out it was Gil-Ad who called, under the assumption they are holding our son captive. We didn't want them to know he's the one who made the call."

They haven't learned much about blanks in the last 19 years, have they?

But the Shaar's put their faith in the IDF, and the IDF lied to them and left them unprepared for the reality that they now face.

Despite what we now know, Shaer said security officials told the families in the days following the abduction that no blood or DNA traces had been found in the burned car. "This gave us hope," she said.

Bat Galim also described the events of that fateful Thursday night from her end. "At a certain point that night we realized it wasn't the police that needs to handle it, but the army, and that (the army) wasn't getting it. We realized they were putting roadblocks in the Beit Shemesh area . I told myself: 'We must have connections. We must have someone do something.' We're ordinary citizens so we turned to people in our community that had some connections. It was only after we got the head of security, who is in contact with the IDF, that something moved. This entire time we felt like we were losing precious time.

"When they told us at 6am that the army was now in the picture, I told myself we were in good hands. This entire time I told myself that by Shabbat, I'll have my child back. I was very naive in my trust of the system. I told Ofir (her husband, Gil-Ad's father): You are going to the army now and making sure they're sending troops to the field, so we won't later find out there were failures. I know in hindsight that at 4am, they located a phone in Judea and it was clear something was going on.

There's more - read the whole thing. The way that the IDF and the police bamboozled this entire story ought to be proof to anyone who is paying attention that it's God who Protects us and not the army. The army, in a best case scenario, is His agent.

Labels: IDF, Israel police, kidnapping, murder, Palestinian terrorism