Doctors at the Assuta hospital in Ashdod, southern Israel, fought in vain for a week to keep 9-year-old Tamar Tropiashvili alive. He had lost consciousness during a bombardment of his city with a salvo of Hamas rockets.
At the sound of the sirens she entered the protected room of the apartment with her mother and a dog and closed the armored door. She had also armed herself with a stick and a knife to feel safer because her father was at work at the time. In fact, there were rumors that Hamas terrorists were roaming the streets of Ashdod.
But when the alarm stopped, the mother heard a gasp. Her daughter was lying on the ground unconscious and she could no longer breathe. Paramedics from Magen David Adom, equivalent to the Red Cross, managed to resuscitate her after half an hour of efforts. But even hospitalization wasn’t enough to keep her alive in the end. Yesterday she was buried in the city cemetery. “She had never suffered from any illness, she was perfectly healthy”, her parents specified during the funeral, who are now tormented: “We had no idea how enormous her fear of her was”.
After October 7, with the terrible massacres perpetrated by Hamas and the descriptions that accompanied them, “the children of Israel were in shock”, said father Avi Tropiashvili. Tamar herself, without her parents knowing at the time, had begun hiding a knife under her pillow.
The affair has shocked public opinion in Israel. The father then wanted to send a message to all parents: “Listen carefully to your children, talk to them. Many do not know how to express their fears and keep them in their little hearts, which can even give in. A moment is enough. For Tamar there was no need for a missile, nor a rocket, nor a bullet. All it took was a whistle that terrifies the soul, that shakes the rooms of those little hearts. This was enough – he concluded – for Hamas to steal my daughter”.