Bring Them Home Now: Romi Gonen, 23

The last time Meirav Lesham Gonen spoke with her daughter, she'd just been shot, her friends were dead and dying. "I decided that I'll just calm her. So if she will die, she will be very calm."

“She went to a festival for peace and love,” Meirav Lesham Gonen says, of the last time she knew the exact location of her daughter Romi. A mother of five, Meirav was not initially overly concerned when Romi called from the Nova festival at 6:35am to say, they could hear rockets…

“It's unusual to have them, but it happens,” says Meirav.

What happened next was not. Romi said the space was too open, there was no place to hide, that she and her friend were running for the car but all was chaos.

“I was so helpless knowing what to do,” says Mierav. “You are trying to be a mother. You learn how to do a lot of things but not that.”

At 10:14, a final call: Romi had been shot, her friends were dead and dying, there was no one to help.

“We could not do anything to help them,” says Meirav. “And then I decided that I'll just calm her. So if she will die, she will be very calm.”

But Romi did not die, she was taken to Gaza, one of what are believed to be 17 women still held hostage. Meirev here talks about how she is managing the terror of not knowing where her child is, the reason she thinks some people refuse to believe that Hamas committed atrocities, and the unexpected 30-second video that gives her hope.

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