Righteous Gentile returns award after relatives killed in Gaza

A 91-year-old Dutch man who received the Righteous Among the Nations award, along with his late mother, for saving a Jewish child during the Holocaust gives back his certificate and award after his relatives were killed in Gaza last month during Operation Protective Edge, Haaretz reports.

Three years ago, Yad Vashem awarded Henk Zanoli and his late mother, Johana Zanoli-Smit (posthumously), the title for saving Elhanan Pinto during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Pinto was 11 years old at the time and was hidden by the Zanoli family for two years, from 1943-1945. His parents and siblings died in concentration camps.

Zanoli’s great-niece, Angelique Eijpe, is married to Gaza-born Isma’il Ziadah, from the al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. The family home was reportedly hit by an IDF bomb, killing six of his relatives.

On Thursday, Zanoli expressed his outrage for the killings by sending the Righteous Among the Nations award and certificate to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague, via messenger, along with a letter addressed to the ambassador.

Zanoli’s father and an unknown number of his six siblings were involved in the Dutch resistance. Henk Zanoli, Sr. died in 1945 in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

“Against this background it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza. Murder carried out by the State of Israel,” Zanoli wrote.

“The great-great-grandchildren of my mother have lost their [Palestinian] grandmother, three uncles, an aunt and a cousin at the hands of the Israeli army… For me to hold on to the honor granted by the State of Israel, under these circumstances, will be both an insult to the memory of my courageous mother who risked her life and that of her children fighting against suppression and for the preservation of human life as well as an insult to those in my family, four generations on, who lost no less than six of their relatives in Gaza at the hands of the State of Israel,” he wrote, as quoted by Haaretz.