A young German woman has been confirmed as one of the 260 people who died when a music festival was attacked by militants from the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement on October 7.
The Israeli army informed the family of Shani Louk’s death overnight, her mother Ricarda Louk told dpa on Monday morning. The family previously thought Shani Louk had been abducted to the Gaza Strip.
The news was terrible, said Ricarda Louk. But it is good to have certainty now, she said. “At least she didn’t suffer.” Ricarda Louk had campaigned for the release of her daughter and the other hostages with numerous interviews in international media.
More than 1,400 people in Israel were killed in the Hamas massacre and in the following days. According to the Israeli military, militants abducted at least 239 people to the Gaza Strip, including several Germans.
Ricarda Louk said that her daughter’s body had not yet been found. However, a splinter of a skull bone had been found and a DNA sample had been taken with it. If you are injured on this inner skull bone, you can no longer live, said the mother. The parents had provided the necessary DNA comparison material to the authorities a long time ago.
Regarding statements by Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the mass-circulation Bild newspaper that Shani Louk had been decapitated, his spokesman said when asked: “The fact that a significant part of her skull was found triggered fears that she had been decapitated.”
The mother believes her daughter has been dead since October 7 – it is possible the 22-year-old was shot in the skull at the Supernova festival in the Negev desert.
Orly Louk, Shani Louk’s aunt, described the dramatic scenes at the music festival at the time as follows: “She was at a party, in the desert, in no man’s land. There she was dancing with a group of people … Shots were fired, the partygoers were chased. The young people were running, hiding, as far as I know. In the videos you can see what happened.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz described the murder of Shani Louk as a “terrible” act and “barbarism.”
“A human being has been brutally murdered here,” he said during his Africa trip in the Nigerian city of Lagos. “This shows what kind of people these perpetrators are. This is something that we as human beings can only despise.”
The murder shows “the whole barbarity behind this attack by Hamas,” Scholz stressed. Therefore, he said, the Islamists, classified by the EU as a terrorist organization, must be held accountable. Israel had the right to defend itself, he said.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier offered her mother his condolences: “The cruelty of the murder of your daughter appalls us all,” Steinmeier wrote. “Everywhere in Germany, people feel with you. Together we stand against hatred and terror.
According to military reports, 40 people are still considered missing since the terrorist attack. Due to the terrible condition of many of the bodies, identification has not yet been completed.
Israel is carrying out airstrikes in the Gaza Strip in response to the massacres and is also attacking with ground troops. Israel has killed more than 8,000 people since October 7, according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza.
Ricarda Louk had also asked the German government for help after the terrorist attack – including at a meeting with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in Israel. The family complained that they had received little information from the German and Israeli authorities.
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Orly Louk and her husband Wilfried Gehr were very critical of the meeting in mid-October: “Unfortunately, the feeling remains that the German foreign minister, the ambassador and also the chancellor really did not support us and all the families, only used the families concerned for their egoistic media appearances,” they said in a statement.
But there is no point in complaining about it, they said. “We hope that this senseless war in Israel and all other wars will stop soon.”
Source: dpa
