Chaos Lahav 433 offices at the airport: rows of plastic chairs, families looking for their children, siblings, parents come with a photo or item with DNA on it. Every now and then there is a sound of silent crying, oscillating between hope and despair.
After the attack at the nature party: the union between parents and their children // Photo: Shmuel Buchris
Lahav 433's offices at the airport have become a center for locating missing persons. The families looking for their loved ones were asked to come with identifying details, an item from which DNA and a photo could be extracted. A file is opened for everyone, every family is questioned.
"Just want to know about him"
The parents of 25-year-old Nir Popov, named Anna and Alexei, also came to the center. They have been looking for him since yesterday morning (Saturday), Nir is Minister Shlomo Krei's security guard. He made his way to work but has since disappeared.
His mother Ella said: "I don't know about him, they saw the car at the Negev Gate around six in the morning and since then it has disappeared. Everyone is silent, no one knows where he is. When the rockets started, we tried to get hold of him – and there is no answer. We contacted every possible hotline. We handed over his comb and toothbrush so they could issue DNA."
His father Alexei said: "There's no hospital we haven't looked for. Every four hours I came to Barzilai. We just want to know about him."
The Popov family. Nir's parents, photo: Yossi Zeliger
The center has two stations, the first where all relevant information is provided. They ask the family to provide identifying details, when they last spoke, what they described, where they were, identification methods, and more. At the second station, DNA samples such as clothes, hairbrush, toothbrush and more are removed.
Strangely, not only families of missing civilians arrived at the center, but also parents of IDF soldiers who could not find a solution in the army.
No answer
The family of a female soldier who served on the Gaza border said: "There is no one to contact in the army, some of the commanders are dying. There is no one to talk to, not with the hotlines, not with the published numbers, they are not synchronized between them. There are a lot of parents of soldiers who don't know anything. The army didn't talk to us. There's an officer from inside the army who asked us if we knew anything. No one talks about the soldiers."
Parents of 25-year-old Nir Popov, photo: Yossi Zeliger
Yogev Tamam, who is looking for his brother Adir and his brother Shiraz's wife, who are the parents of two young daughters and were at the party, said that last night they gave a statement at the police station, and today they decided to go back to searching the hospitals, and even came to the Lahav 433 offices at the airport to see if there was new information.
"There's one big chaos," Tamam said. "You call hospitals and they tell you, 'We don't have information.' Call the police - they transfer you from this officer to this hotline, they don't really give information."
"They sent us to search the army, but there is no response there either. I have nothing to say anymore, I just ask - do everything you can to bring them home, or bring us information. I sat down to watch videos of kidnappings, I saw them all and we couldn't see them."
Adir and his wife Shiraz, who are the parents of two young daughters and were at the party, photo: courtesy of the family
Adir and Shiraz were at a party in the south. In the morning they encountered the terrorist attack, contacted the family, and disappeared a short time later.
"At 6:30 in the morning, at the first sirens, there was still contact with them," Yogev Tamam said. "We spoke to them and they said they weren't well but hoped the army would come and rescue them. There telephone contact and messages were cut off. We tracked that the vehicle was in the teen lane. This morning they found the car on the levels, but they weren't there."
"They have two young daughters, aged ten and eight - we told them that at the moment we don't know where mom and dad are and that there would be information to update them." He said and burst into tears.
The joint family center of the Home Front Command and the Israel Police is located at 4 Hanegev Street, Airport City (Lahav Building 433).
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