Two Canadians are dead and one is missing after Hamas’ brutal terrorist attack in Israel.
And an Air Canada pilot has been taken “out of service” for vehement anti-Israel messaging displayed publicly and on social media.
Plus, Canadian soldiers are seeking donations to cope with the high cost of living.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and Lindsay Shepherd!
Hamas’ attack on Israel last weekend sparked nationwide protests in Canada with demonstrations held in cities such as Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Montreal.
Tensions often ran high, with occasional clashes between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli demonstrators. Protests often featured particularly controversial statements, including calls for violence and escalation.
Ottawa
In the heart of Ottawa, a pro-Hamas rally erupted on Sunday as approximately 200 demonstrators gathered to voice their support for Hamas’ attack on Israel.
Protestors were heard chanting slogans calling for the eradication of Israel from the Middle East.
Toronto
On Monday, in the aftermath of the recent deadly Hamas attacks on Israel, anti-Israel protestors gathered unsanctioned outside Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square.
The march, organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, featured provocative signs like “Smash Israeli Apartheid,” and “USA is a terrorist.”
Toronto Police allowed street closures as protesters advanced toward the Israeli consulate, and some participants openly justified the Hamas attack.
Edmonton
An open call for violence against Israelis emerged at a rally in Edmonton, Canada on Sunday, prompting a local Conservative MP to denounce the event.
Protesters claimed that “there’s no civilians” when it comes to the indiscriminate killing by Hamas of Israeli citizens.
The event included a street party, rally, and vehicle convoy celebrating the tragic loss of innocent Israeli civilians to Hamas terrorists. MEP Michael Cooper expressed his deep dismay, emphasizing that the victims of the recent attack were civilians—men, women, and children who were entirely blameless.
Vancouver
At a pro-Palestinian rally outside the Vancouver Art Gallery, police maintained a strong presence while tensions flared as a small group of pro-Israeli protesters arrived to denounce the gathering.
A representative from the Canadian Palestine Association claimed the conflict was not with Israel but with the United States and NATO. The use of the inflammatory “from the river to the sea” slogan was also present.
Montreal
In Montreal, Canada, a large pro-Hamas celebration rally took place in downtown following the tragic killing of Israeli civilians. Protesters at the Montréal rally chanted provocative slogans, including “Israel Terrorist, Canada Accomplice.”
The rally garnered condemnation from prominent figures, including Quebec Premier François Legault
Once the initial outrage begins to subside, a storm of lies will quickly emerge justifying the barbaric Hamas attack against Israel on Saturday, one of the holiest days in Judaism.
Some have already been told.
Many media outlets have repeated the Hamas claim that what its leadership calls operation “Al-Aqsa Storm” is a response to Israeli attacks on women, the desecration of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, and the ongoing security siege of Gaza.
In a protest called “All Out for Palestine,” New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America declared they were “in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid.”
The anti-Zionist group IfNotNow argued the attacks can be justified by decades of Israeli oppression.
Such rhetorical canards will reach a fever pitch as Israelis fight back against this heinous and unprovoked invasion of their sovereign country, a deadly assault accompanied by the willful slaughter of hundreds of men, women, and children, the largest number of one-day terrorist murders since the Holocaust.
Many of these claims hide behind deeply flawed and biased reports from seemingly respectable international organizations. For example, a Feb. 2022 Amnesty International report claimed “Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians.”
The “apartheid” claim is laughable given that Israeli Arab citizens are the freest and comparatively most prosperous in the undemocratic and steeply wealth-stratified Middle East.
More important still, is whether the ethnic group called the “Palestinian people” deserves special recognition and treatment based on historical and cultural realities: Israel is routinely termed an illegitimate entity by its many enemies, a charge almost never made about “Palestine” and the “Palestinians.”
It is often claimed that the Palestinians had a country of their own in the past that was lost or stolen from them.
In fact, since the destruction of the second kingdom of Judea (the southern half of the so-called “occupied territories”) in the second century AD, the land the Roman conquerors re-named Syria Palaestina has been governed by one foreign power after another. For nearly 13 centuries from 638 to 1917 (when the British took charge following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire headquartered in Turkey), no separate administrative or socio-cultural entity called “Palestine” existed.
Nor are the Palestinians an ancient people, as old as or older than the Jews.
Before the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan to divide Palestine into two states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs, the latter rarely regarded themselves as a distinct people with a separate Palestinian identity. Indeed, in 1937, mid-way through the British Mandate, a local Arab leader told the Palestine Royal Commission, “There is no such Country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented! Our country for centuries was part of Syria.”
During the British Mandate (1922-1948), it was the Jewish people who were called Palestinians. It was the Israeli capture of the West Bank from Jordan in the Six-Day War in 1967, not some ancient sense of nationalism, that gave birth to an organized demand for an autonomous Palestinian state. And it was not until 1988 that the Palestine Liberation Organization declared its aim of creating a Palestinian Arab state separate from the neighbouring Arab states.
It is also false to say the Palestinians are a distinct people.
There is no unique and separate Palestinian language, religion, nationality, or culture. The people who have recently begun calling themselves Palestinians are the Arab Muslim descendants of numerous localized lineages, clans, and tribal groups. A strong sense of pan-Arab identity and belief in Islam, not some fictitious ethnic identity, are what has always united the “Palestinians.”
The claim that all the Palestinians want is a state of their own separate from Israel is disputed by the new 2017 Hamas Charter which neither recognizes the existence of Israel nor repudiates its goal of “liberating all of Palestine.”
The explicit aim of the Palestinians and their Arab supporters has always been to appropriate the whole of what they call “occupied Palestine” — all present-day Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza strip — and “drive the Jews into the sea.”
Activists who support this goal routinely say Jews have a flimsy claim to a homeland in the Middle East.
In fact Jews have three ironclad claims to Israel: a religious one based on the will of God, as expressed in many places in the Old Testament; the 1917 Balfour Declaration which called for a revitalized Jewish homeland; and the 1947 United Nations vote to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab sections.
From the beginning of recorded history to the present, Israel has been the only indigenous sovereign state west of the Jordan River. Conversely, the Arab-speaking residents of modern Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip whose ancestors have lived there for hundreds of years never composed a locally controlled sovereign nation.
Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba.
Western University’s mandatory “anti-racism” e-learning module was leaked on social media exposing how students are taught racially charged and ideological lessons.
The London, Ontario post-secondary school is forcing their staff, students, and faculty to pass a 45-minute e-learning program before November 24th.
Some of the module’s contents uploaded to X (formerly Twitter) revealed a series of highly contentious and racially inflammatory claims about white people and “people of colour,” including the idea that certain behaviours are linked to race.
The module begins by narrowly defining racism as “prejudice plus power,” and “the belief of superiority of White people over non-White people.”
In contrast, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines racism as “a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”
The module goes on to claim that white people hold “internalized racism” – private prejudices and biases about members of other races that reside inside the “mind and body,” while black people hold internalized oppression.
“For white people, this can be internalized privilege, entitlement, and superiority; for People of Colour, this can be internalized oppression,” reads the module prompt on internalized racism.
The module also defines institutional racism as policies that result in better outcomes for white people rather than for black people, “people of colour,” and indigenous communities.
“It [institutional racism] involves unjust policies, practices, procedures, and outcomes that work better for White people than Indigenous, Black, or People of Colour, whether intentional or not,” reads the module.
Microaggressions are defined in the module as intentional or unintentional slights and insults based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion, and claims that equity deserving groups often face microaggressions daily.
“Because microaggressions are common and because they occur in the context of systemic oppression, exposure to them can cause serious harm to people’s health and well-being,” claims the module.
Despite Western requiring that all students must complete the anti-racism module,some have opposed the teaching of divisive social theories.
One student who spoke to True North last week said that the content being taught in the anti-racism module is upsetting and concerning.
“This push towards racial division and segregation which I see as anathema to something I stand for is something I am deeply concerned for and I think it’s fracturing society,” the student told True North.
The student chose to remain anonymous so as to avoid blowback and punishment from the university.
When I first learned about the Holocaust – really learned about it, in all its ghoulish details – I was 16 years old and on an exchange program in Stuttgart, Germany. As a rather sheltered and naive Western Canadian teenager, abroad without my family for the very first time, I really wasn’t prepared for what I was about to learn.
When I did, I was terrified. I was shaken to the core.
It was a week or so after I had arrived in this strange new country. I was homesick and trying to find my footing, when I was invited on a school trip with the teenage daughter in my host family, who was a little older than me.
There I was, at a Holocaust museum in former Nazi Germany, learning about the depths of human evil. I was led by a tour guide who witnessed the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and a class full of students whose parents would have been young children during the Second World War. My classmates were two generations removed from the actual Nazis who carried out the extermination of the Jewish people.
As I walked through the museum, I saw children’s shoes, letters they had written, and images of them being taken away on cattle carts.
I remember reading and re-reading the placards describing concentration camps, gas chambers and firing squads and feeling beside myself with terror and grief. How could humans be so evil? How could these people have committed such unspeakable crimes? I looked around at the blond-haired, blue-eyed students I was standing with, and I remember feeling like I was living in some kind of a dystopian horror movie. I wanted to get on the first plane back to Vancouver.
“Germans didn’t know the extent of the campaign until it was too late,” I was told. “Nobody knew about the gas chambers.”
I remember struggling with these concepts, particularly wondering how this could possibly have happened in our modern world and system of Western liberal democracy. How did humanity lose itself so quickly and so fully?
I remember how sure I was that it could never happen again.
And yet, here we are. On October 7th, 2023, the modern world got another glimpse into the depth of human evil. We witnessed a Holocaust-inspired pogrom, streaming live on Telegram and TikTok.
Armed gunmen went door to door, murdering any and every Jew they could find. Fathers, mothers, elderly grandparents, children, toddlers, babies. They raped teenage girls, dececrated dead bodies, beheaded soldiers. And now, we’re learning, they beheaded babies too.
I saw early comparisons saying that October 7 was Israel’s September 11th. I don’t tend to like these sorts of comparisons, that “900 dead in Israel is the equivalent of 25,000 dead in the United States.” In my mind, one dead civilian is the equivalent of one dead civilian.
Now that the full scale of the horror is being revealed, however, I think the truth is even worse.
This isn’t 9/11, it’s a continuation of the Holocaust. And shockingly, in a few ways, Hamas are even worse than the Nazis.
The last few days have been difficult, and demoralizing. Realizing that the Holocaust was not an isolated incident in history – a glitch in an otherwise peaceful and liberal society – but rather an ongoing story.
It’s particularly distressing that in the West, we see this Jew-hatred up close and personal. Thousands of fanatics took to the streets in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Edmonton, joining fellow travellers in London, Rotterdam, Sydney, New York and Chicago to name a few, to showcase their unwavering support for Arabs in Palestine. “By any means necessary” as one sign read.
Slaughtering children is a necessary means of resistance, they say, while waiving Swastikas and chanting “gas the Jews.” (This is not hyperbole. These things happened over the weekend).
Are these protesters a “fringe minority”? Or do they represent the popular opinion of Muslims in the West and the “woke” decolonization crowd? Only time will tell. Either way, as Sean Spear of the Hub points out, it’s testing the limits of Western pluralism.
Now is not the time for a conversation on a complicated history. Now is not the time to critique Israel’s flawed government or its heavy-handed approach to national security.
Instead we must unite, grieve for humanity, and stand together in our steadfast support for the Jewish people and their right to self-determination in their homeland.
Israel has vast support from across the political spectrum, and around the world. In this moment, it has more support than perhaps at any other point since the Holocaust. It has a very long leash to decimate the threats on its doorstep and destroy the perpetrators who carried out those evil attacks.
Every other conversation is a conversation for another day.
Air Canada has confirmed it has taken a pilot “out of service” for vehement anti-Israel messaging displayed publicly and on social media amid escalating tensions related to Hamas’ attack on Israel which has left hundreds dead.
The airline announced on Tuesday that pilot Mostafa Ezzo was removed from service Oct. 9.
“We are aware of the unacceptable posts made by an Air Canada pilot. We are taking this matter very seriously, and he was taken out of service on Mon, Oct. 9. We firmly denounce violence in all forms,” posted Air Canada on X.
Among the posts that got Ezzo in trouble were a photograph shared on his Instagram account in which he holds a sign that reads “Israel, Hitler is proud of you.” The sign also called Israel a “terrorist state.”
Ezzo also posted on Instagram a poster for the anti-Israel protest in Montreal this weekend with the message “Fuck you Israel. Burn in hell.”
The message also featured a caricature of a dog urinating on the Israeli flag.
Other concerning posts shared on social media by the pilot included one of him holding a protest sign with a figure throwing the Israeli flag into the trash. The caption on the board reads, “Keep the world clean.”
The timing of Ezzo’s nationwide protests in Canada including major cities like including Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Montreal.
Hamas is a designated terrorist entity in Canada.
“Hamas, the Arabic acronym for the group Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamiya, is a radical Islamist-nationalist terrorist organization that emerged from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987. It uses political and violent means to pursue its goal of establishing an Islamic Palestinian state in Israel,” writes Public Safety Canada.
Over the weekend as Israeli families were left counting the dead bodies of their family members after a brutal terrorist attack by Hamas, all throughout Canada people took to the streets to celebrate Hamas’ terrorist attack. A normal country that encourages immigrants to assimilate into our society and embrace Canadian values wouldn’t have to worry about people being so heartless, but that’s not the case in Canada.
In fact, as politicians on both sides trip over themselves to commit to higher immigration targets, nobody seems interested in talking about assimilation. In fact, the last person who did was run out of politics all together.
We shouldn’t be surprised to see immigrants celebrating terror in Canada.
Watch the latest episode of Ratio’d with Harrison Faulkner
Members of Canada’s military are struggling to keep up their morale as the cost of food and housing takes a toll on their mental health and desire to stay in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF).
More and more members of the CAF are relying on the help of others to cope with the high cost of living, according to a briefing note sent to the defence chief of staff, Gen. Wayne Eyre, by the military’s chaplains.
Nonprofits like Together We Stand help support military families. Their donations are expected to double this year, reads the chaplains’ note. These donations will only provide a temporary solution, however.
The military’s housing allowance has undergone certain changes recently, including basing it on salary rather than location. This has presented new problems for soldiers depending on where they are posted.
The change has led to some wanting to be released from the military so they can avoid being posted in unaffordable locations.
An estimated 28,000 soldiers will have access to the new program but as many as 7,700 members could become ineligible with thousands of others facing a reduction in their monthly payments.
Military officials say that the new program will save the CAF $30 million annually.
The previous housing benefit started being phased out in August so that members who are set to lose payments will have some time to cope with the loss.
Those no longer qualifying under the old housing benefit will still receive some payments until July 2026. However, the increasing cost of living is making it difficult for members to stay afloat financially, even with the reduced benefits.
“Of special note are those members who made financial commitments in 2022 at the height of the housing market, or after receiving posting instructions in early 2023: some are now facing significant challenges to meet their financial obligations or to find appropriate housing,” reads the memo.
In addition to a descending morale, staff shortages at bases and wings have led to “ever-present” workplace conflicts and a tense environment, especially surrounding the differing rules about working from home for military and civilian staff.
“In understaffed environments where normal operations must be maintained, reconstitution is basically being looked upon now as just another word, rather than as something that will revitalize the CAF mission and make a real difference in the professional lives of members,” the note added.
The note also addressed a new performance evaluation process introduced by the CAF that was met with a negative response by members who said that the system had glitches and that it took too long to implement, according to City News.
The system has “strained relationships with subordinates” who are feeling that their work goes unappreciated even as they take on additional duties due to staffing shortages.
However, members did say that they felt their workplace had become “psychologically safer” than it was previously and that they now feel more comfortable communicating issues with their chains of command.
Other positive feedback from members included being able to take more time off to observe religious holidays as well as changes that were made to the dress code, in particular from female members, who felt the change allowed them to express their individuality more.
However, changes made to the dress code have also received criticism from some members who say it might “be eroding a sense of common mission, identity and team cohesion.”
“The pace and extent of change within the CAF impacts many areas of military life concurrently, including benefits, evaluation and culture. Though unintended, these changes, concurrent with CAF efforts to reconstitute the force, has resulted in many CAF leaders and members feeling more undervalued and underappreciated than at any point in recent memory,” concluded the note.
Information included in the briefing note was collected over a six-month period by chaplains throughout the CAF and given to Gen. Eyre last month.
Israel was tragically caught off guard, as it faced a highly coordinated, wide-ranging and devastating attack by Hamas on Saturday. In a multi-pronged operation, terrorists infiltrated Israel from Gaza, resulting in unprecedented murder and destruction. This horrifying assault, which roughly coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, left the nation in shock and mourning. It was the worst terror attack in the history of modern Israel.
A Ramat Beit Shemesh-based journalist for an English-speaking publication, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that she fled to her nearby shelter six times that Saturday morning.
“Since it was Shabbat/Simchat Torah (Jewish holy day), we didn’t realize the gravity of the situation, as we’re used to hearing sirens every now and then and running to a shelter. In the afternoon, security personnel warned everyone not to hang around outside,” the Canadian expatriate said.
“Everyone is shocked that this could happen in the State of Israel and at how Hamas managed to do this. It was a pogrom. People are sad about the hundreds of deaths and worried about the hostages, grief-stricken, but we are also confident that we’ll win this war. Prepared, though, for a long haul. Hoping this time we’ll destroy them rather than a band-aid kind of win, where you know it will only happen again, especially with all the fatalities this time. Hoping the country will be more unified after almost a year of profound division.”
Hamas terrorists went home by home targeting civilians. They also surrounded an open-air NOVA music festival attended by young Israelis, resulting in the tragic loss of approximately three hundred lives.
Reports indicate that approximately five thousand Hamas missiles rained down on Israel throughout the day and throughout the country. The relentless barrage caused extensive damage to homes and infrastructure, and claimed hundreds of lives. As of this writing, about a hundred Israelis – men, women and children – were taken hostage by Hamas terrorists, who are threatening to execute them if Israel persists in its counteroffensive.
Hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens sought refuge in bomb shelters, living in constant fear for their safety. The attack shook the nation to its core, leading many to liken it to “Israel’s 9/11” due to the scale of the attacks and the unprecedented death toll.
As of this report, nine hundred Israelis were reported dead, and dozens of Israeli men and women in uniform lost their lives while fighting Hamas. The wounded numbered in the thousands. The death toll of Jews murdered in a single day, reached a level not seen since the Holocaust.
Those murdered include Alex Look, a Montrealer who was gunned down while saving the lives of others. Ben Mizrachi from Vancouver was also killed, according to Global Affairs Canada. Two Canadians were abducted, according to the Jewish Federation of Canada, including Vivian Silver, a Canadian-Israeli from Winnipeg, from her home on Kibbutz Be’eri. A hundred and eight bodies were discovered at Kibbutz Be’eri. In Kfar Aza, the bodies of forty babies were discovered Tuesday, brutalized, and some beheaded.
“Imagine if the tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid actually helped the people of Gaza. Imagine if the tens of billions spent on terror tunnels and weaponry, built hospitals and infrastructure,” said former Torontonian Randy Zelcer, of Ramat Beit Shemesh. “As Golda Meir once said, correctly: ‘We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.’”
Toronto-based lawyer Brad Neufeld has spent the past month in Tel Aviv. Two Hamas missiles hit on Saturday two blocks from where he’s staying. (Gaza is 80 km from Tel Aviv – roughly the distance between Toronto and Barrie).
A local landlord in the area of Ben Yehuda and Trumpeldor streets has offered twenty empty apartments to those who cannot return to their homes, he said, while a fundraising drive has collected furniture and toys to fill the apartments. Ten blood drives were set up simultaneously, he added, while residents filled supermarket carts to donate supplies to those in need.
“The dichotomy between the togetherness that I’m seeing today, and that animosity (of judicial reform protests) that was there a few weeks ago is astounding. It’s almost as if people are so focused on trying to help and do whatever they can,” he said.
“I think the other piece that is also out there is that everybody knows someone that is impacted – whether they knew someone who lives down there, that went to the music festival, called to the reserves and is fighting in the war, friends missing, there is a true sense that everyone is in this together. That part of it is also moving.”
Meanwhile, Hershel Recht, the central regional director of Canadian Magen David Adom for Israel, the local fundraising arm for the Israeli ambulatory service, said there are currently 2,576 ambulances in action across the country.
The charitable organization is compiling a list of Canadian doctors – Jews or non-Jews – willing to go to Israel in the event of an emergency call up. So far, nearly eighty Canadian doctors have stepped up, he said, including anesthesiologists, blood doctors, vascular surgeons, emergency, OB-GYNs, nephrologists, and pediatricians.
“I can tell you that Magen David Adom is in urgent need of as much medical supplies as possible. Because the situation is fluid and constantly changing on a minute to minute basis,” said Recht.
In the midst of rescue, Magen David Adom has had many of its vehicles damaged, he added, and they now need three hundred more. Twenty are already in transit via cargo aircraft to Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on Hamas, with the Israeli Defence Forces calling up 300,000 active duty soldiers and reservists. Jason Swirsky, a Haifa-based SEO manager, said many members of his community have been called into service.
“We have connections to soldiers stationed all over the country including in the line of fire,” he said.
His 18-year old daughter has an administrative job at army headquarters in Tel Aviv. Her role has switched from a day job, to working 24-hour or so shifts. Swirsky said his children are “really struggling emotionally with the whole thing.”
Schools have been closed until further notice.
“My eight year old has been having a really hard time processing. Saturday night he was up almost the entire night. Since then we have put a limit of how much information we share around the younger kids,” Swirsky said.
“My impression of the general consensus is that Israel is going to rescue the hostages and make Hamas pay the price for their cruelty and pure evil. The days of letting them off the hook of the past are over. People are also wondering how in the world did Hamas get over the most sophisticated well defended border in the world? Someone had to of dropped the ball somewhere. At the same time, seems to be a consensus that this is not the time for finger pointing.”
Canadian political leaders responded with condemnation of the attacks.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau strongly condemned the attacks, emphasizing Canada’s unwavering support for Israel. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre denounced the “sadistic violence” and pledged solidarity with the victims. On Oct. 9 at an Ottawa rally he described Hamas as a “sadistic demonic genocidal death cult that must be defeated… this is evil in its purest form and that evil must be defeated.”
Former prime minister Stephen Harper and Ontario Premier Doug Ford also expressed staunch support for Israel.
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s now-deleted comments on X, formerly Twitter, urging people to “not forget the Palestinian pain,” drew consternation as being insensitive to the Jewish community. Social media, moreover, witnessed a disturbing surge of antisemitism, with some individuals applauding the mass death.
Brandon Montour, who is listed as a senior legal affairs advisor to Liberal Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree on the federal government’s employee directory, shared a post that supported “revolutionary violence.”
Pro-Hamas rallies took place in major cities, including Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg and Montreal, raising concerns about the spread of radical ideologies, as well as potential local attacks against Jews.
“Tens of thousands of people in Canada are supporting savagery, barbarism? Any reasonable person knows Israel isn’t putting up walls just for kicks. It’s precisely because they know if they don’t, an attack like this would happen writ-large, every day,” said Yehudi Ben Simon, a Toronto-based engineer, originally from Tel Aviv.
“What you see isn’t ‘resistance.’ What this is, is genocide, motivated by Islamism – and that is why they yell ‘allahu akhbar!’ (Allah is great).”
Reports are circulating of two Canadians who have been killed during the Hamas attack and two others believed to be missing, according to Global Affairs Canada.
One man is from Montreal and the other is from Vancouver.
Alain Haim Look posted on Facebook that his son, Alexandra Look, was killed in Israel on Saturday, while attempting to help those around him at a music festival.
More than 260 people were killed at the festival and many more have been taken hostage
“It is with extreme sadness that we announce the death of our son, Alexandre Look,” wrote Alain Haim Look. “He left us today in Israel after a terrorist attack. Like a true warrior, he left as a hero by trying to protect the people who were with him. Alex was a force of nature who possessed a unique charm and a generosity that can’t be matched.
“The world will never be the same without you. Goodbye my son; I love you and watch over us from above. We’ll never forget you.”
During an interview with Radio-Canada, Haim and his spouse, Raquel Ohnona Look, said that they witnessed Alexandre’s death in real time as he had video-called them from the attack. “They’re killing my son as we speak,” recalled Raquel, reflecting upon the tragic encounter.
The family is involved with the Chabad of Westmount Education Centre where Devorah Shanowitz serves as the centre’s director of education. Sahnowitz described the family as “salt of the earth people, hard working, and very much proud of their son.”
Montreal’s Jewish community is struggling to comprehend the extreme violence they’ve seen from afar since Saturday.
“I think that people are feeling a great sense of shock, a great sense of grief and also, I would say, a great sense of outrage at the callousness, the targeting of civilians, the premeditated, heinous murder of civilians,” said Shanowitz.
The death of Ben Mizrachi, a Vancouver man, has also been confirmed, following Saturday’s Hamas terrorist attack. He too was attending the music festival, according to the National Post.
Mizrachi’s death was initially reported by his former high school and later confirmed by Vancouver Granville MP Taleeb Noormohamed via social media on Tuesday.
“Please say extra prayers for King David alumnus, Ben Mizrachi, class of 2018, who was attending an event in the South (of Israel) and is missing,” posted King David High School on their social media. “Please keep Ben and his family in your prayers.”
Rabbi Jonathan Infeld of Beth Israel Synagogue in Vancouver is neighbours with the Mizrachi family.
“I was with the family and there’s no words. I’ve never made a more difficult house call,” Infeld. “There’s nothing that a person can say in a situation like that.”
On Sunday, Global Affairs Canada released a statement saying that “Canadian government officials in Israel are in contact with local authorities to confirm and gather additional information.” They have also advised Canadians to avoid all travel to Israel and for those already there to “exercise a high degree of caution in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip due to the unpredictable security situation.”
The agency was able to confirm that employees at the Canadian Embassy in Tel Aviv and Canadian personnel in Ramallah in the West Bank are “safe and accounted for.”.
There are currently 2,450 Canadians in Israel based on those registered through the Registration of Canadians Abroad. However, since registration is voluntary, the number can’t be exact.
Within Israel, 492 Canadians are living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The two other Canadians who are reported missing are potentially still alive.
An additional 480 Canadians are currently living in Palestinian territories.
As of Monday night, almost 1,600 people have been killed and thousands more have been wounded since the Hamas attacks started over the weekend in what is now the worst civilian massacre in Israel’s history.
On Sunday, Air Canada announced that they would cancel all flights to and from Tel Aviv for the time being until further notice.
