A father whose daughter was killed by Hamas terrorists in Israel this week revealed that he was on the phone with her when she was shot dead.
The father, Ilan Troen, said in an interview with CNN that his daughter, Debbie Shahar Troen Mathias, and her husband, Shlomi Matthias, were killed shielding their son from the terrorists. Troen was a professor of Israel Studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
“You had on before, parents who want information on their children,” Troen said. “I had too much information. This is not a normal war. It isn’t like there’s a front and rear. We were on the phone with Deborah as she was killed. We were on the phone the entire day with her son, our grandson, Rotem, as he lay first under her body and then found a place to escape under a blanket in a laundry."
“In other words, we live in an age of cell phones. We all knew, most of Israel knew what was going on. We had contact with our loved ones,” he said.
“In short, this is a human rights outrage,” he said, pointing out it’s the kind of situation that made his grandparents leave Europe and come to America.
"We were on the phone with Deborah as she was killed. We were on the phone the entire day with her son, our grandson, Rotem, as he lay first under her body and then found a place to escape under a blanket in a laundry."
— CNN This Morning (@CNNThisMorning) October 9, 2023
Israeli scholar shares the story of how his daughter died: pic.twitter.com/8PnLFQIEkq
Troen shared that Rotem hid in silence for more than 12 hours as Hamas shot people outside.
“He was in a safe room, but that made no difference because terrorists who came, they had explosives and blew up the front door to their house and then blew out the front door to their so-called safe room. This was an unbelievably well-prepared attack on a civilian population,” Troen explained.
This week, Townhall reported how an Israeli mother said in an interview with CNN that her children were kidnapped by Hamas when she was on the phone with them.
“At about a quarter to nine, I heard, on live, on the phone, the door break. I heard them, terrorists, speaking in Arabic to my teenager and my youngest saying to them, ‘I’m too young to go there.’ They’re 16 and 12, so…. Then, the phone went off. The line went off.”
“That was the last time I heard from them,” she said. “It was a very very hard day…they took babies, they took two-year-olds, five-year-olds, mothers, just innocents that did nothing wrong. They were just sleeping in their beds. Even war has rules. They just don’t have any morals. They just…it’s something that you don’t do,” she said.
“I don’t know if they’re together, I don’t know if they’re apart,” she added. “I don’t know if they’re tortured. I don’t know anything.”