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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