‘We didn’t know if Shani was dead or alive’: Nissim Louk’s search to find his daughter

When Hamas terrorists abducted Shani Louk from a rave festival in southern Israel her father felt helpless. A few days after her kidnapping, Nissim Louk took matters into his own hands.

The father of four used family contacts in Germany to track-down an elderly man in Gaza who he sent on a fact-finding mission against a backdrop of devastating Israeli air strikes.

“We didn’t know if she was dead or alive, we were trying to figure out how to get the information,” Mr Louk, a tall man with weary eyes, told The Telegraph in Tel Aviv earlier this week.

“That old man was travelling from one hospital to another trying to get a word.”

Three weeks later, the Israeli Defence Forces officially pronounced the 22-year-old dead, and in a rare operation last week the Israeli forces retrieved her body and brought back to Israel.

Shani is among the growing list of Israeli hostages confirmed dead in recent weeks.

Families of the hostages, both dead and alive, are advocating for a ceasefire, which they view as the only sure way to bring their loved ones home.

Mr Louk was at home with his family, just outside Jerusalem, when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct 7.

Shani, his youngest daughter who spent most of last year travelling around Europe attending music festivals, told him in a short phone call early that morning she was in the south of Israel and was going to drive back home to Tel Aviv after hearing the first air raid sirens.

Mr Louk discovered his daughter was at the now infamous Nova rave festival, where 360 concertgoers were massacred, only when Shani’s ex-boyfriend shared with him a photo of his daughter’s lifeless, half-naked body sprawling face-down on a moving pick-up truck, with armed men crowding around her.

‘We didn’t see any blood on the truck’

He immediately recognised Shani’s trademark dreadlocks and tattoos but did not know if she was dead or alive.

“We didn’t see any blood on that white truck so we thought, maybe she’s OK,” he said.

Mr Louk scrambled to contact relatives in Germany who helped him to find a man who was willing to travel to hospitals in Gaza in search of his daughter.

The elderly man came back to them with conflicting reports, including WhatsApp messages between a doctor and a nurse, purportedly discussing “the German girl” in their care. Ms Louk had dual Israeli-German citizenship.

For the three weeks before Shani was pronounced dead, her family “hoped, planned, prayed: We were looking for clues to prove she was alive,” her father said.

Mr Louk, who refused to talk about the nature of his work, was deployed to the Gaza periphery shortly after Oct 7 where he hoped his daughter could be found closeby.

“I was near Gaza, maybe two kilometres away from where my daughter was,” he said.

“I heard the bombing all day. It was never-ending. Bombs would go off every 10 seconds. I thought to myself: ‘Sometimes it was better to be dead than to be in this situation.’”

The day after he returned home, IDF officers came to the house and told the family they found a bone at the scene of the party that matched Shani’s DNA: She could not have survived the injury she sustained.

Two hours before The Telegraph met Mr Louk in central Tel Aviv, he received a white A4 envelope from the police. Inside, along with some paperwork, lay a blackened chain necklace, a couple of gold earrings and studs from Shani’s nose and lips.

Just two days earlier, the family buried Shani in the forest near their home.

Shani’s body, which was well preserved and instantly recognisable to her family, was recovered during fighting in northern Gaza’s Jabalia, near where Mr Louk was once stationed.

Having heard stories of torture and sexual violence at the hands of Hamas, Mr Louk found great comfort when he found out his daughter did not suffer the same fate.

Israel’s emergency services have shared a recording with him of the call she made reporting injured people on the ground and a pile-up of cars. Shani believed she had observed not a Hamas incursion but a car accident up the road. As she made a U-turn to drive away, she was apparently met with a second group of the terrorists and shot dead.

“I’m sure she felt terror for 20 seconds and a few seconds earlier she thought it was simply a car accident,” Mr Louk said.

“It’s important for me to know she did not suffer.”

Just a few miles south on the road where Shani was killed, Maya Goren, Amir Alfassa’s aunt, was murdered inside Nir Oz’s kindergarten.

Goren called her nephew on the morning of the attack to ask how he was. Sirens were going off across the country and the 56-year-old mother of four worried for Mr Alfassa who was alone at home outside the southern port of Ashdod, his parents abroad.

“I have this conversation recorded on my phone,” Mr Alfassa, dressed in a black T-shirt with “Bring them home now” emblazoned on it, told The Telegraph. “I sometimes go back to it to remind myself what a woman she was, how she took care of others, even when she was in a more dangerous situation than me.”

Avner, her husband, was found shot dead in their home, but their adult children – two of them living at a far end of the kibbutz and two elsewhere – survived.

“First, we knew she was kidnapped. The doctors watched CCTV video and said she was badly injured, but we didn’t know she was dead until three weeks later,” Mr Alfassa said.

As Mr Alfassa and his mother were watching some of their neighbours from the Nir Oz kibbutz getting released on live TV, they received a phone call from the IDF, confirming Goren’s death, based on the intelligence about the injuries she sustained.

Her body is still in Gaza.

“I want the government to bring Maya back. It’s the last piece of dignity she can have,” he said.

Just like Mr Alfassa, Udi Goren (no relation to Maya) has been active in the movement, putting pressure on the government to bring back the hostages.

Mr Goren who used to visit Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, a few miles away from the south-western tip of Gaza, to see his extended family for holidays is still grappling with the idea that his favourite retreat turned into a war zone.

In an old photograph shared with The Telegraph, Mr Goren stands in his great grandfather’s arms along with his cousin Tal Chaimi outside their house in the kibbutz.

His cousin, 41, was murdered a hundred metres away from where the photo was taken, Mr Goren said.

Chaimi, one of Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak’s first responders, left his home early on Oct 7 when a fire was reported at the kibbutz gate. Hamas attackers set fire to paper rolls from a nearby factory to make an ambush.

He was one of seven in the kibbutz killed by Hamas that day.

Like the other families, Chaimi’s family did not know if he was dead or alive for about three weeks.

His wife Ella, who survived the attack, kept a meticulous diary of her pregnancy after Oct 7.

“She’d make videos for Tal so that at the end she would show him everything he missed,” Mr Goren said.

“It was very painful when she found out.”

Mrs Chaimi gave birth to their fourth child earlier in May. Her husband’s body is still believed to be in Gaza.

Mr Goren, who gave up his job in the tourism sector to focus on advocacy for the hostages, is sad to see Israeli society moving on, as the time hostages have spent in captivity approaches eight months.

These days, Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial capital, is bustling with life.

The list of living hostages has grown shorter in recent weeks, with some now confirmed dead on the day they were kidnapped, and some dying in captivity.

“It’s a huge mental burden to carry this stress and anxiety for so long: [Israeli] people are distancing themselves because it is too difficult,” Mr Goren said.

“We have to work diligently to remind them this is still happening… because the families will not have any closure unless they know the bodies are laid to rest.”