In a heart-wrenching account, the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson covers the extraordinary story of Mandy Damari’s relentless fight to free her daughter Emily, who has been held hostage by Hamas for over a year. Here’s an excerpt.
If you have a daughter or a grand-daughter or a sister, close your eyes and try to picture her in hell. Deep underground, caged, struggling to breathe in the foetid air, unwashed, ragged clothes, a mane of curly hair crawling with lice, in pain from gunshot wounds to her hand and leg, starving, dehydrated, watched over by men who want to rape or murder her and may put a bullet through her head on a whim; a young woman stripped of everything that makes us human except, perhaps, some irreducible sense of who she was and may yet be again if she is saved. (A flickering hope, almost extinguished, but not quite.) And now the camera moves in closer and we see something etched on the young woman’s left arm, a tattoo: “My mum is always right,” it says.
This is Emily Damari, 28, and she had been held hostage by Hamas for over a year when I sat down on Wednesday to interview the mum who is always right.
“425 days,” says Mandy Damari, in a parched weary voice, the south London twang with its wide vowels still surprisingly strong after over 40 years living in Israel. Mandy has been using that voice a lot this week in the U.K., petitioning Sir Keir Starmer; Kemi Badenoch (both PM and Leader of the Opposition mentioned Emily and Mandy in the House of Commons); Nigel Farage (Mandy was impressed); Foreign Secretary David Lammy (not impressed at all, but we’ll come to that); broadcasters; ambassadors; lobby groups – basically anyone who might be able to do something to free her daughter or at least relieve her torment with some humanitarian aid.
Making speeches to world leaders is the very last thing this tiny (she is just over 5ft), unassuming kindergarten teacher would have felt comfortable doing before Emily was taken captive. But the maternal instinct – which turns out to have the tensile strength of tungsten under pressure – has over-ridden her fear of the spotlight. Earlier this week she gave a stirring address to Labour Friends of Israel, and, while welcoming their good intentions, she did not hold back from rebuking the U.K.’s actions (or rather shaming lack thereof). “Last month, the British Government voted for an unconditional ceasefire in the UN that would leave Emily and the other hostages in the hands of Hamas, giving them no incentive to ever release them,” she said, “That vote shocked me and broke my heart.”
When we speak at the kitchen table of her friend’s house in North London, Mandy Damari has a forcefield of pain around her, which lends an extraordinary stillness and gravity to that slight figure, but there is anger not far beneath. She is furious with the UN where she recently spotted an uplifting statement in pretty calligraphy on the wall about human rights. “‘No one should be subject to cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment…’, it said. Well, that’s just lip service because my daughter is getting nothing that is written down on their poster. I said to them, ‘you’d better take that down because you’re not doing your job.’”
Having visited its President twice in Geneva, she is angry too with the Red Cross. “They basically say they’re trying to do as much as they can, but Hamas is a terror organisation and we can’t force them to do anything even though it’s a war crime. What is going on? ‘We’re doing as much as possible’, but that’s what everyone says. So why aren’t you getting humanitarian aid in there to Emily and the others when we know humanitarian aid is going into Gaza? And they just say, ‘well, we can’t do it. They won’t let us in.’”
Does she believe them?
“I believe they can do more. I believe everyone can do more. The Tory Government cut funding to UNRWA (the UN relief agency in Gaza) after some staff were linked to the October 7th attacks but Labour has reinstated the funding – where is that money going?” A senior Foreign Office official told Mandy: “Don’t have a go at the Red Cross. They’ve got a difficult enough job as it is.” And I was like, you must be kidding. Their job is to help people all over the world regardless of their religion or nationality and they do nothing for the Israeli hostages who are in the most barbaric situation imaginable.” When I suggest attitudes would be different if the hostages weren’t Jewish, Mandy doesn’t disagree.
The British Government, meanwhile, has made sympathetic noises and then goes and does exactly the opposite of what it has promised. Two hours after her “very nice” meeting with David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary tweeted about writing to the Israeli Government “to urge action on the unacceptable humanitarian situation in Gaza” and he didn’t mention Emily or the hostages once. “It was a kick in the stomach straight after that meeting, and I thought, bloody hell, he knows I’ve been saying [we need] humanitarian aid for the hostages or at least a sign my daughter is alive, and there was no mention at all of what we’d said”.
A rare shaft of light came just minutes later when President-elect Trump tweeted that there would be “all hell to pay” in the Middle East if the hostages were not released before his inauguration in January. Hamas would be “hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America.”
“I thought, thank God for that,” says Mandy, a disillusioned peacenik finding allies in unlikely quarters. …
The one sliver of hope she has is that Emily is worth more to the terrorists alive than dead. “But they’re not nice, rational people, Allison, they’re psychopathic monsters and they might suddenly think, ‘Oh well, we’re losing, let’s just kill them all.’ And that will be a good way to get back at Israel in the same way they raped those women at the Nova festival because rape is a way of destroying your enemy, or so I’ve learnt this past year. So if Hamas feel they’re in a corner and they’re not going to get what they want, they’ll just kill them all. So we need a ceasefire now to get as many people out alive as possible, and they would feel that they’re getting something for it, rather than dragging this thing on and on until it’s too late, because they feel they’ve lost so much that they’re going to kill them all.”
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“Today’s bonus prize question is: which other government is treating its people like fools when it comes to energy policy?”
They are fools – at least anyone who voted Labour in Australia on the basis of “cheap green energy” is a fool, and anyone in the UK who voted for any major party other than Reform expecting to have cheaper energy.
I’m sorely tempted to use Hitler as an exponent of a politically sound strategy here¹. :->
It’s of no use to call people who have been fooled fools. That’s just going alienate them and make them dig in their heels wrt insisting that they certainly weren’t fooled. The trick is to un-fool them gently, preferably without them noticing what’s going on, to make them change their minds.
¹ Because of his conviction that a political movement which meant to have any success cannot afford elitism but must have mass appeal, that is, must manage to appeal to masses of factory workers politically associated with SPD and KPD.
I’m not advocating calling them fools in so many words as a political strategy. Just pointing out the current reality. Maybe you should go into politics (not a sarky comment – the world needs logical people in politics).
Perhaps a shadowy Peter Mandelson figure lurking in the background?
I don’t like being “handled” and prefer straightforward honesty, but I guess I am weird. In my experience, it’s actually not that hard to tell when someone is being honest rather than rude, but maybe that’s just me.
Ron Smith
2 months ago
” Labour’s extraordinary loss of support to the SNP thanks to its litany of broken promises”
Not sure the SNP want to Drill Baby Drill. Rab.C.Nesbitt would do a better job than those boys.
Last edited 2 months ago by Ron Smith
Ron Smith
2 months ago
“rush to Net Zero is not solving climate change”…..Why is there something wrong with it!
Theatre of the Absurd just runs and runs at venues throughout the newest and oldest continents. The largest continent of all just wants the cheapest possible energy to lift the other half of the continent out of poverty. Even despots know which side their bread is buttered on.
The second largest continent hangs in the balance. Luxury beliefs have a lot to answer for. If Governor Grewsom of California and the Dame from New York with the Hispanic name get their wicked way, it’ll be all beliefs for them and all no luxuries for you.
Grewsom and Dame best packed off to join chums Justin and Lucinda on a pristine Arctic island powered solely by breezes and sunbeams. What a foursome that would be. Good luck avoiding your turn on the emptying the privvy rota on cold and still, dark winter middays lasting for 4 months at a time. Have fun when Red Ed drops by for supper bearing frozen bacon butties. Bad luck, the microwave back-up battery ran out of charge months ago.
The most impoverished continent of all aspires to the energy riches whose largesse the oldest continent has taken for granted for over a century. Strictly fobidden on orders of the frosty foursome. Same goes for the proles back home. Our beliefs matter more than your energy prices.
A big unanswered question remains, who are the con-artist ventriloquists pulling these energy dummies’ strings? Along with the other big question of why did anybody ever fall for climate claptrap in the first place?
Answers on postcard please, sent back in plain English to the Club of Rome and the Jason Committee. Usual explicit two words should suffice.
These people won’t be around for much longer. Resistance to their evil is growing exponentially in two ways: understanding of the real nature of their agenda and the false science used to justify it and also people fighting back because it is becoming a matter of survival. Stuffed shirt bureaucrats will fade to nothing in the face of such undestanding and resistance. If you remember film of Ceausescu after he was deposed or any potentate once they are forced out. It is as if all power has gone from their demeanour they look like frightened husks. As Sun Tzu said. sit by the river long enough and you will see the heads of your enemies come floating by.
Rejecting the push from food distributors, a spokesman for Mr Bowen said experts had found that “unreliable coal generators are driving price spikes”.
It’s good to know that – 141 years after the invention of the steam turbine and after about century of all high-power applications on this planet being driven by steam turbines – ‘experts’ have finally discovered that they don’t really work. Or was this supposed to be a statement about some unreliable process for generating coal artificially? Maybe try mining instead. That works.
This guy is essentially spouting perfectly random nonsense by sticking words together whose meaning he obviously doesn’t understand. There is no such thing as a coal generator (unless they’re really trying to generate coal). Coal is burnt to heat water to turn it into steam which then drives steam turbines which are connected to alternators to generate electricity. Obviously, it doesn’t really matter how exactly the water is turned into steam, be it by burning coal, oil, gas or wood or some by nuclear reaction. Once the water has been turned into steam, the remaining process is principally identical.
The problem here is that crooked politicians get away with this kind of stuff, exactly as during COVID. They don’t even have to make sense when making up stuff. Mere flim-flam with technically sounding words and some mentioning of ‘experts’ is enough. Or so they believe.
Presumably these tame ‘experts’ did not say that Bowen’s government policy of sidelining the coal plants had reduced their operating hours and so the funding available to spend on their maintenance.
Trying to make sense of this gibberish is a mistake. That’s exactly what these ‘experts’ speculate on. They throw a few cheap words which mean nothing into the arena to distract from the issue at hand and other people then try come up with explanations what could have been meant by this instead of simply rejecting this out of hand and demanding that politicians actually talk sense instead of ominously waving their hands and whispering darkly about very important issues which aren’t ever actually named themselves.
It’s a safe bet that the sole reason this sentence contains an unreliable is to assert by implication that actually unreliable sources of energy, like wind, are really reliable, while actually reliable sources of energy, like coal, are really unreliable because people have been calling renewable unreliables already and hence, this must be politically defused by hijacking the catchy term and attaching it to the exact opposite of what it can sensibly apply to.
That’s same pattern also evident in cheap green energy: So-called green energy is anything but cheap, not the least because the state is willing to guarantee seriously inflated prices for it, and hence, whenever green energy is mentioned, cheap must somehow be attached to it to make people hope that the route through this valley of tears will eventually end if they put up with ever rising prices because of green energy for just a little longer. Just another two curves to flatten the week and then, it’ll all be over for good! Again and again and again and again.
Last edited 2 months ago by RW
DrDan
2 months ago
Yes they gaslight us that the extremely efficient supermarkets are price gouging when its the cost of energy that is driving up prices, in production, transport and storage. They tells us they are addressing cost of living pressures by throwing our tax dollars around like confetti.
marebobowl
2 months ago
Why would britain have any concerns about what happens in australia with net zero when Rome is burning, right here at home?
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Morons rule ! Unfortunately
“Today’s bonus prize question is: which other government is treating its people like fools when it comes to energy policy?”
They are fools – at least anyone who voted Labour in Australia on the basis of “cheap green energy” is a fool, and anyone in the UK who voted for any major party other than Reform expecting to have cheaper energy.
I’m sorely tempted to use Hitler as an exponent of a politically sound strategy here¹. :->
It’s of no use to call people who have been fooled fools. That’s just going alienate them and make them dig in their heels wrt insisting that they certainly weren’t fooled. The trick is to un-fool them gently, preferably without them noticing what’s going on, to make them change their minds.
¹ Because of his conviction that a political movement which meant to have any success cannot afford elitism but must have mass appeal, that is, must manage to appeal to masses of factory workers politically associated with SPD and KPD.
I’m not advocating calling them fools in so many words as a political strategy. Just pointing out the current reality. Maybe you should go into politics (not a sarky comment – the world needs logical people in politics).
I absolutely suck at handling people.
[Not proud of it because I tend to get bitten by this, but that’s how it happens to be.]
Perhaps a shadowy Peter Mandelson figure lurking in the background?
I don’t like being “handled” and prefer straightforward honesty, but I guess I am weird. In my experience, it’s actually not that hard to tell when someone is being honest rather than rude, but maybe that’s just me.
” Labour’s extraordinary loss of support to the SNP thanks to its litany of broken promises”
Not sure the SNP want to Drill Baby Drill. Rab.C.Nesbitt would do a better job than those boys.
“rush to Net Zero is not solving climate change”…..Why is there something wrong with it!
Theatre of the Absurd just runs and runs at venues throughout the newest and oldest continents. The largest continent of all just wants the cheapest possible energy to lift the other half of the continent out of poverty. Even despots know which side their bread is buttered on.
The second largest continent hangs in the balance. Luxury beliefs have a lot to answer for. If Governor Grewsom of California and the Dame from New York with the Hispanic name get their wicked way, it’ll be all beliefs for them and all no luxuries for you.
Grewsom and Dame best packed off to join chums Justin and Lucinda on a pristine Arctic island powered solely by breezes and sunbeams. What a foursome that would be. Good luck avoiding your turn on the emptying the privvy rota on cold and still, dark winter middays lasting for 4 months at a time. Have fun when Red Ed drops by for supper bearing frozen bacon butties. Bad luck, the microwave back-up battery ran out of charge months ago.
The most impoverished continent of all aspires to the energy riches whose largesse the oldest continent has taken for granted for over a century. Strictly fobidden on orders of the frosty foursome. Same goes for the proles back home. Our beliefs matter more than your energy prices.
A big unanswered question remains, who are the con-artist ventriloquists pulling these energy dummies’ strings? Along with the other big question of why did anybody ever fall for climate claptrap in the first place?
Answers on postcard please, sent back in plain English to the Club of Rome and the Jason Committee. Usual explicit two words should suffice.
The planet is perfectly capable of saving itself.
Latest from Whitney Webb….They’re rebranding the whole plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm7Ug42xhp8
These people won’t be around for much longer. Resistance to their evil is growing exponentially in two ways: understanding of the real nature of their agenda and the false science used to justify it and also people fighting back because it is becoming a matter of survival. Stuffed shirt bureaucrats will fade to nothing in the face of such undestanding and resistance. If you remember film of Ceausescu after he was deposed or any potentate once they are forced out. It is as if all power has gone from their demeanour they look like frightened husks. As Sun Tzu said. sit by the river long enough and you will see the heads of your enemies come floating by.
Rejecting the push from food distributors, a spokesman for Mr Bowen said experts had found that “unreliable coal generators are driving price spikes”.
It’s good to know that – 141 years after the invention of the steam turbine and after about century of all high-power applications on this planet being driven by steam turbines – ‘experts’ have finally discovered that they don’t really work. Or was this supposed to be a statement about some unreliable process for generating coal artificially? Maybe try mining instead. That works.
This guy is essentially spouting perfectly random nonsense by sticking words together whose meaning he obviously doesn’t understand. There is no such thing as a coal generator (unless they’re really trying to generate coal). Coal is burnt to heat water to turn it into steam which then drives steam turbines which are connected to alternators to generate electricity. Obviously, it doesn’t really matter how exactly the water is turned into steam, be it by burning coal, oil, gas or wood or some by nuclear reaction. Once the water has been turned into steam, the remaining process is principally identical.
The problem here is that crooked politicians get away with this kind of stuff, exactly as during COVID. They don’t even have to make sense when making up stuff. Mere flim-flam with technically sounding words and some mentioning of ‘experts’ is enough. Or so they believe.
Presumably these tame ‘experts’ did not say that Bowen’s government policy of sidelining the coal plants had reduced their operating hours and so the funding available to spend on their maintenance.
Trying to make sense of this gibberish is a mistake. That’s exactly what these ‘experts’ speculate on. They throw a few cheap words which mean nothing into the arena to distract from the issue at hand and other people then try come up with explanations what could have been meant by this instead of simply rejecting this out of hand and demanding that politicians actually talk sense instead of ominously waving their hands and whispering darkly about very important issues which aren’t ever actually named themselves.
It’s a safe bet that the sole reason this sentence contains an unreliable is to assert by implication that actually unreliable sources of energy, like wind, are really reliable, while actually reliable sources of energy, like coal, are really unreliable because people have been calling renewable unreliables already and hence, this must be politically defused by hijacking the catchy term and attaching it to the exact opposite of what it can sensibly apply to.
That’s same pattern also evident in cheap green energy: So-called green energy is anything but cheap, not the least because the state is willing to guarantee seriously inflated prices for it, and hence, whenever green energy is mentioned, cheap must somehow be attached to it to make people hope that the route through this valley of tears will eventually end if they put up with ever rising prices because of green energy for just a little longer. Just another two curves to flatten the week and then, it’ll all be over for good! Again and again and again and again.
Yes they gaslight us that the extremely efficient supermarkets are price gouging when its the cost of energy that is driving up prices, in production, transport and storage. They tells us they are addressing cost of living pressures by throwing our tax dollars around like confetti.
Why would britain have any concerns about what happens in australia with net zero when Rome is burning, right here at home?