American father tracked phone and Apple Watch to find where daughter was killed in Hamas attack
The father of an Israeli-American woman killed by Hamas militants found his daughter’s body with the help of a tracking feature on her phone and Apple Watch.
Eyal Waldman – founder of a multinational supplier of computer network products – said his 24-year-old daughter, Danielle Waldman, was attending the Nova music festival in southern Israel when the militants launched a devastating terror attack on the event.
At least 260 people were killed and scores were taken hostage by the militants, who turned the desert rave party into a massacre.
Mr Waldman initially hoped that his California-born daughter would be one of those taken hostage before finding out on Wednesday that Danielle was among those killed by Hamas.
"Three hours after I landed [in Israel], I went down south and was able to find the car that they were in," Mr Waldman told i24NEWS on Thursday.
"We found the car and we found some belongings and we knew this is the car Danielle was in because of an emergency call we had received from her cellphone that has a feature of a crash call,” he said.
The founder of IT multinational Mellanox, Mr Waldman said his daughter went to the festival with her boyfriend, Noam Shai, to celebrate life and love. "She was the happiest kid ever, everybody really loved her," the emotional father said.
Shai was a "real man" who grew up in Isreal and the couple met in the army, Mr Waldman said, adding they planned to spend their lives together.
"I have seen exactly how she was murdered from two directions by at least three to five people that had attacked it,” the father told CNN, explaining the scene from the desert. "From the shells that we have found, there were at least three guns that were shooting at the car."
He said the last time he spoke with Danielle she mentioned how the couple were planning to get married soon, but now they will be buried together.
The duo had moved into a new apartment about a month ago with a dog they share. “They had only been there for a few weeks, now we will need to see what to do with all their belongings,” he told the broadcaster.
Israeli jets have pounded Gaza City for days in retaliation against the weekend attack by Hamas militants who rampaged through towns and villages, killing more than 1,200 people.
The death toll from Israeli strikes on Gaza rose to 1,537, with 6,612 people wounded, the Gaza-based health ministry said on Thursday. Of those killed, 500 were under the age of 18, the ministry said.
Israel, meanwhile, has ordered roughly 1.1 million Palestinians to evacuate the northern regions of the Gaza Strip with immediate effect in what the UN has warned will have “devastating humanitarian consequences”.
