🚨 DOUHA TALAT—AN 8 YEAR OLD GIRL HAS BEEN ABDUCTED BY THE IOF SINCE JULY AND HER WHEREABOUTS ARE STILL UNKNOWN.

On August 30, we discovered an Instagram post by a soldier from the 432nd Battalion of the Givati ​​Brigade named Ido Zahar. One of his photos included a picture of him with a little girl in Gaza, with no family members in the picture. Shortly after, he deleted the post and made his account private. We investigated the details of the incident.

We were unable to independently verify the identity of the girl in the soldier’s post, and are relying on the soldier’s testimony and the details he provided to identify her. Name: Duha, father’s name: Talat, 8-year-old girl taken by the Israeli army near the Rafah crossing in late July.

Colleagues asked the IDF for comment on the incident and to ask what happened to Duha. The army said they would look into what happened.

We reached out to Private Edo to request an interview, but he did not want to publish the story. He told us: “No story. No face. No nothing. Please delete this completely from everywhere.”

Reports from Gaza said that hundreds of children have been missing since the war began on October 7. On December 31, Israel's Army Radio broadcast an interview with Shahar Mendelsohn, a friend of Israeli Captain Harel Itah, who was killed in the fighting in Gaza. Mendelsohn said that Itah "had a good heart" and that he once saved a crying baby in Gaza and took her to Israel. The tweet was later deleted by Israel's Army Radio.

The story was covered in Israel's largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry called for an immediate investigation, noting that the incident may constitute a serious war crime.

Two days later, the military spokesman dismissed the allegations, saying that the allegations of an Israeli soldier abducting a young girl were baseless without providing further details.

We obtained testimony from a soldier from the 432nd Battalion, who was directly involved in the incident and asked to remain anonymous. Soldier “A.” recounted that he took part in an operation near the Rafah crossing in late July.

The army was raiding houses when an elderly man and a young girl, who identified herself as Talat's 8-year-old daughter, Doha, emerged from one of the houses, surrendering and raising their hands to the army.

The soldier claimed that the elderly man offered to show the soldiers the entrances to the tunnels in the area near the crossing. A. stated that he had separated the girl from her elderly relative for “security” reasons, saying that there was concern that the tunnels might be booby-trapped. However, the justification appears fabricated, given that he said that the elderly man himself had offered to show them the entrances to the tunnels, which would have put him in danger.

The testimony revealed interesting contradictions. According to the soldiers involved, the elderly man who was supposed to offer to show them the tunnel entrances on his own, showed them the sewage openings in the area. The soldier claimed that the Shin Bet later accused him of belonging to Hamas and of passing on information about the army’s locations and operations. This is a controversial accusation that seems unjustified and contradictory, especially considering that the man initially said, according to the soldier’s claims, that he had volunteered for the job.

“I wasn’t there anymore, because I was watching the girl, but from what I understood, it turned out that it was a sewer entrance that took them to. After checking by the Shin Bet, it was revealed that the man was connected to Hamas and was watching us to pass on information about our locations of operations so that they could attack us,” the soldier said.

The soldier said that after spending time with 8-year-old Douha, he and his colleagues handed the girl over to other soldiers. “I don’t know what happened to her, she left them at some point. She’s 8 years old from Rafah.” She was left without any family members, and he doesn’t know where the other soldiers took her.

- ytirawi

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