Hope, tragedy and loss

Tragedy dominates the Hebrew press on Thursday with the disappearance of a 12-year-old Israeli girl amid an inferno aboard a tour ship in Thailand making front page news back home.

The Ao Nang Princess 5, with 117 passengers aboard, caught fire between the resort of Krabi and the island of Phuket. The 12-year-old girl, whose family had taken her on vacation for her bat mitzvah, was trapped in the bathroom, Yedioth Ahronoth reports. The rest of the family, who haven’t been named, were rescued and made their way to Phuket, the paper reports, and remain “optimistic” despite the odds, the local Chabad rabbi tells the paper.

“We wanted a vacation which would unite the family,” Israel Hayom quotes the family telling one of the rescue crew. “We didn’t dream it would end like this.” The paper reports that search and rescue teams scoured the water for the girl’s body in vain until nightfall, and were expected to renew their efforts with first light.

While the two tabloids hang on to flotsam of hope that the girl will be found safe and sound, Haaretz reports that the 12-year-old girl was killed in the fire. The paper reports that the Israeli Embassy in Thailand and Foreign Ministry were attending to the transport of her remains to Israel. (The child’s death was indeed confirmed Thursday morning.)

The girl’s death in Thailand is just one of a trifecta of tragedies involving Israelis getting killed abroad in recent days that make the press. A 22-year-old Israeli man was apparently murdered in Berlin, and an Israeli tourist fell to his death in the Andes while on vacation. Israel Hayom reports that the 22-year-old Israeli man from Petah Tikva killed in Berlin had apparently encountered financial problems and sought out help from the Israeli consulate and Chabad. He was meant to attend the Seder Friday night at the Chabad House in Berlin, but never showed up. A body was discovered Sunday, but police couldn’t identify it due to severe injuries to the head and face. It did carry, however, the Israeli passport of the missing Petah Tikva man.

With all the focus on Israelis in harm’s way abroad, the stabbing attack on two IDF soldiers in the West Bank gets shunted farther back in Thursday’s papers. Haaretz runs a front page brief about the incident, in which one soldier was seriously injured and a second lightly wounded, and the Palestinian attacker, identified as 32-year-old Muhammad Jasser Karakera, was shot dead.

The paper reports that the stabbing was the second of its kind in the West Bank in the past week; last Thursday a soldier was attacked and lightly wounded at a checkpoint.

Yedioth Ahronoth speaks to the soldier, First Sergeant Tomer Lan, who was lightly injured but managed to shoot his assailant.

“He didn’t seem suspicious to me” at first, Lan recounts to the paper. “I saw him walk 100 meters, and then he disappeared. But after a few seconds he suddenly turned around and came back in my direction. When he was a few meters away from me he started running at me shouting, pulled a knife and stabbed me twice in the back. I fell on the gravel by the road.” The Palestinian then reportedly attacked an IDF paramedic in a nearby vehicle, stabbing him five times in the head, neck and hand.

“I got up off the floor, cocked my weapon, aimed it at the terrorist, shot him and killed him,” Lan tells Yedioth Ahronoth.

Israel Hayom extols Lan as a hero, quoting him saying with modesty that “I acted as expected of a combat soldier.” The paper reports that the IDF paramedic who was seriously injured remains hospitalized, but doctors don’t consider his life at risk.

Headlining Haaretz is an interview with the IDF’s Military Advocate General, Maj. Gen. Danny Efroni, who tells the paper that he doesn’t buy into the politicians’ mantra that Israel is the “most moral army in the world.” The paper notes the phrase was first uttered by then IDF chief of staff Shaul Mofaz during the Second Intifada and has since become “like the Torah from Sinai” among politicians and senior IDF officers.

“You won’t hear me say: the IDF is the most moral army in the world,” he tells the paper, just days before a UN report is expected to be published detailing alleged war crimes by both sides in last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip.”

“I think that our military is moral, but part of its morality rests in the fact that it investigates and checks suspicions of crimes in a professional manner. If we don’t do this, it will be a big question mark about our morals,” Efroni says. Haaretz reports that 120 cases of suspected breach of the rules of engagement were looked at by the investigation team, of which 65 were given to the Military Advocate General for investigation. Seventeen were closed prior to investigation, six are under investigation, and another 13 are being investigated by the MAG’s own initiative.