By: The Editorial Board – wsj.com – October 10, 2023

Fourteen U.S. citizens dead, 20 missing, and some held hostage.

Hayim Katsman earned a doctorate from the University of Washington. His dissertation, according to the Seattle Times, was dedicated to “all life forms that exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” A friend and neighbor told CNN that when Hamas arrived at the kibbutz, she was hiding with him in a closet. “He was murdered,” she said. “I was saved because he was next to the door, and they shot him.”

Adrienne Neta, age 66 and a grandmother of seven, is missing, her son told a news conference in Tel Aviv. “Both my brother and my sister were on the call with her as the terrorists barged into her home, and we heard a little bit of screaming and that was our last contact with her,” he said. The neighbors recalled that they did not hear any shooting. “The optimistic scenario here is that she is held hostage in Gaza and not dead on the street of the kibbutz where we grew up.”

Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, attended a music festival that Hamas attacked, and he hasn’t been heard from since two text messages Saturday. “I love you,” one said. The other: “I’m sorry.” The L.A. Times reports that witnesses told the family “he had been injured, his arm perhaps sheared off in one of the explosions.” When Hamas ordered survivors onto a truck, he was seen boarding, “conscious but with a tourniquet.”

President Biden spoke Tuesday with welcome moral clarity about Hamas’s butchery. The next step is doing everything in his power to recover American hostages, which includes making clear to Hamas and its terror sponsors in Tehran that there will be hell to pay if Hamas decides to execute these innocents.

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Source: Hamas’s American Casualties – WSJ