In Thailand, relatives of Thai hostages in Gaza call for their release: ‘This is too barbaric’
A mattress stained with blood at the Thai workers’ accommodation in Nir Oz after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023
Hagar Shezaf reports in Haaretz on 13 November 2023:
Gong Sae Lao began his live broadcast on Facebook at 6:41 AM on Saturday. “Bang, bang, bang, it’s so scary,” someone is heard saying in Thai. “Look at the bombs flying in straight lines across the sky.” The video was taken from the workers’ quarters next to an avocado orchard in southern Israel, about three kilometers from the Gaza Strip.
This clip shows when the horror began. Skies turning light with dawn and avocado trees, with explosions and gunfire in the background. “It was never like this before,” says somebody whose voice can be heard in the video. “I heard three shots in a row. I don’t think anybody will survive this,” another is heard saying.
Thousands of kilometers away, Gong’s partner watched the clip and immediately realized that something was badly wrong. “What the hell is this?” Suntharee Saelee, nicknamed Fah, wrote to him. She called Gong, who told her that he could hear shots, and that he was surprised at the ground attack. “I told him to take care of himself,” she says from her home in the Chang Rai district of Thailand. They haven’t spoken since.
Fah and Gong belong to the Hmong ethnic minority in northern Thailand. They’ve been a couple for almost a decade. He had decided to go work in Israel and make money before they start a family. He knew about the conflict, but they didn’t really talk about it. “I worried about him,” she says, “but I thought that the attacks are only from the air, he’ll be able to find shelter.”
But after the Hamas attack, he disappeared. “His friends wrote posts and asked people to find him, but nobody kept me updated,” she says.
What little information she has about what happened after the Facebook broadcast she received from two of his friends who managed to escape. One, she says, climbed an avocado tree, staying on it till night. “But he saw nothing. And when he came down he found out that they [the Hamas] had set their living quarters on fire,” she says.
Some days later a Thai journalist sent her a photo showing Gong abducted by Hamas terrorists, captured from a video posted on social media after the massacre. She hasn’t had the motivation to do anything since then, she attests: “I just follow the news.”
Gong Saa Lao seen in the Hamas video of his abduction on 7 October 2023
On the eve of the massacre there were 30,000 Thai nationals working on farms in Israel, 5,000 by the Gaza border area. So far it seems 34 Thais were killed in the attack but the number may be higher, as not all the bodies have been identified. The identification of the dead, already a difficult and protracted process, becomes that much more complicated when dealing with foreign nationals. Also, 25 Thai nationals were kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip.
After the war broke out, Thai prime minister Srettha Thavisin called on the country’s citizens to come home. Over 8,500 Thai nationals did so, including many not working near the front lines in the south and north. Meanwhile the Israeli government promised to extend the visas of the ones who stay, and says it will allow those who left to return.
Concurrently, Thailand has begun negotiating with Iran for the release of its citizens, bypassing Israel’s efforts. The Thai media is covering the story of the murders and abductions of Thai nationals quite intensely; also, the social media pages associated with the Thai farmhands are filled with posts asking for information. The Thai press has also reported that Thavisin complained to the Israeli ambassador that Israeli employers are trying to tempt the workers to stay with money, and the Thai public was upset that Israel published the video of a Thai man being executed without his family’s consent.
Thought they were uninvolved
About an hour before Gong began his Facebook livecast, Nir Zrihan woke up in Kibbutz Re’im, and realized that something was going on outside that was completely different than anything he had known.
“I heard the gunfire, stuck my head out of the door, and realized that something was wrong,” recalls Zrihan (29). He didn’t need notification to realize this was a terrorist event.
Zrihan wanted to warn his parents but realized he couldn’t get to them at this point, but he could warn the Thai laborers living in the kibbutz. He was particularly worried at the fact that they had no true safe room. He woke them and warned them that an attack was happening: “They were frightened,” he says. Then speaking “a mix of Thai and Hebrew,” he tried to persuade the workers to join him, until five of them collected their money and passports and got in the car with him.
“I called my sister’s husband who’s on the security detail, and I asked what to do with them,” Zrihan relates. “He told me ‘I don’t know. There are terrorists and we can’t get control of the situation. Figure it out yourself.’” After a few moments the Thai laborers changed their minds. As he understands it, they were afraid to be with an Israeli at this stage. Ten minutes after they parted ways he was called by one of the Thai laborers, a guy named Mani. “He was screaming, apparently they got them. Two minutes later I lost contact with them,” Zrihan recalls. “At first I lied to myself, I said maybe they’re not answering because they’re in a shelter.” Zrihan managed to flee the kibbutz in his car.
Mani, who called Zrihan, is the son of Lah, a Thai man who worked in the kibbutz until recently, and who was replaced by his son. “The neighbor who lives across from their rooms said that when the terrorists came they stood innocently outside, because they thought they had nothing to do with it,” he says, adding that two of the Thai laborers living in the kibbutz were murdered, and four were kidnapped. “The father of one of them won’t accept that his son is dead. He keeps calling and asking if there are photos of him,” he adds.
A sign in Thai at the demonstration of the families of hostages in Gaza in Tel Aviv, November 2023
The problem with identifying the bodies
After the war began, a group of Israelis organized under the heading of Aid for Agricultural Workers has been tryign to help, first to evacuate survivors and later also to link between the worried families in Thailand and people here, including civilian and institutional efforts to identify bodies and confirm the identities of the hostages. The disarray is palpable in this aspect too.
“There is still an unacceptable gap between the knowledge that exists about the Thai workers and the contact with their families,” says sociologist Dr. Yahel Kurlander of Tel Hai Academic College. Kurlander, who researches the labor market with a focus on immigration, says no Israeli officials have spoken with any of the families. This in and of itself is slowing the identification of the dead and the missing. It is also slowing down the possibility of families of people recognized as terror victims to receive compensation. For families that until now have been relying on the wages sent from their relative who was a farm worker in Israel, this compensation is significant.
Part of the difficulty, she says is that identifying a hostage depends partly on people who know them, seeing them get abducted. She also notes that there were about a thousand Thais who were registered with employers elsewhere in Israel, so their stay by Gaza wasn’t documented. The activists working on identification are assisted by lists from manpower companies, she says, to help find out who to search for,
Also, when Thai workers enter Israel they have to provide a biometric fingerprint, which can help. But another difficulty is that the Thais, unlike Israelis, do not have a full medical chart with the local authorities, that could enable forensic identification. Instead the families are required to send DNA samples. To try to expedite the process, the activists asked the families to send them pictures showing their relatives’ tattoos. They recently also created a hotline in cooperation with a university in Bangkok that will offer mental help for the survivors among the workers, and their families.
Until very recently the civilian aid group Brothers in Arms was helping in this too, and operated a desk for foreign missing persons, which was coordinated by attorney Shahar Ben-Meir. They created a database of the identities of people with foreign citizenship, and tried to find out, in each casem, if any were killed or missing, or taken hostage.
A mattress stained with blood at the Thai workers’ accommodation after the Hamas attack of October 7.Credit: Moti Milrod
He called the Israeli ambassadors in the relevant countries, to try to obtain more information and collect pictures of the missing, and the staff put this information through the AI program that cross checked them with the Hamas videos and other videos that were taken on October 7, he says.
Ben-Meir’s description attests to total chaos on the part of the authorities. He says the police and ambassadors have also relied on the volunteer desk to get information. “This is what the government is supposed to do,” he says. “What we did with 200 volunteers, Gal Hirsch [the officer in charge of hostage negotiations] won’t get done even in another year.”
Peanuts and blood on the floor
A look at the Thais’ living quarters in Nir Oz makes the scale of the disaster that hit them painfully clear. Eleven men who worked at the kibbutz were murdered. Five are missing, and at least some of them are presumed to be hostages.
The living quarters are arranged in two long rows with an open area in between. At the entrance to the area is a garden, where the Thais grew fruits and vegetables like papaya and chili peppers.
A stench of death still hangs in the air even a month after the massacre. Heaped on the floor are piles of clothes, spilled peanuts, Thai sauces, and bits of leftover food with flies swarming around them. In one room is a blood-soaked mattress. The sights in the adjacent bomb shelter are even worse. A bloody handprint is visible on the outside wall, and inside, there is much blood on the floor, and the walls are pocked with a huge amount of bullet holes.
The Thais at Nir Oz helped grow potatoes, carrots, peanuts, radishes, wheat and pomegranates, and more. Many other communities and facilities in the area also relied on Thai workers.
One was the Ego Growers packing house in the Eshkol region. Workers there said this week that terrorists entered the fenced facility, kidnapped the Bedouin guard and two Thais and burned down their living quarters. It’s unknown what happened to the men who were taken. Inside the adjacent bomb shelter, someone had written in Thai characters: “Thais in the Middle East.”
In northern Thailand, Fah still awaits her partner’s return. Despite the reports in recent days that the Thai government obtained pictures showing that the hostages are alive, she says she hasn’t heard anything new. “His mother sent a DNA sample, but we still haven’t heard anything,” she says. “I still can’t believe that this happened, but I’m trying to stay positive. I’m angry at Hamas, I don’t understand how they could do this. I understand that there’s a conflict, but this is just too barbaric and cruel.”
This article is reproduced in its entirety