Seven months after their 22-year-old daughter was kidnapped by Hamas from the Nova music festival and paraded around Gaza in the back of a pickup truck, Shani Louk’s parents will lay their daughter’s body to rest.
Israeli Defense Forces recovered Shani’s body from Gaza on Friday alongside the bodies of Itzhak Gelerenter, 56, and Amit Buskila, 28, who were also at the music festival on October 7. Shani’s funeral will be held on her mother Ricarda’s birthday this weekend.
“I think Shani said ‘Let’s give my mother a birthday present and let’s go back and be close to her,'” her father Nissim said.
Shani “radiated light, to her and those who surrounded her, and in death she still does,” Nissim added. “She is a symbol of the people of Israel, between light and darkness. Her inner and outer beauty that shone for all the world to see is a special one.”
To confirm that his daughter’s body was among those rescued this week, Nissim said that he viewed photos of her remains, and was able to identify the tattoos on her hands.
“Now she will have her own place next to us and we can go there whenever we want. And she can rest,” he said, calling the discovery of her body “a miracle.”
Shani was a German-Israeeli tattoo artist. When a video of Hamas stomping and spitting on a half-naked, limp woman in the back of a pickup truck went viral in October, Shani’s parents were able to identify her by the tattoos on her leg. Reports that Shani was alive and in a Gaza hospital were proved false, when in late October, Israel’s volunteer emergency response organization ZAKA informed the Louk family that a fragment of bone from Shani’s skull was found.
“I’m happy,” her father said at the time. “First, that this thing is over, that we know exactly what happened. Because I know where she is, she isn’t lying in some tunnel under Gaza, where every minute we are firing at them and all the earth is shaking, and there is dust, and it’s impossible to breathe.”
“We know she is dead, we know she didn’t suffer, we also know a minute before the murderers came she was dancing, she was happy, she prayed, she went wild, with all her friends around her, and she had fun,” he added.
More than 100 hostages are still held captive in Gaza, according to Israeli estimates, along with the bodies of 30 or more Israelis Hamas refuses to return.