2 weeks Ago By [email protected] (Alex Ballingall)
OTTAWA—Partway through an interview Friday, Iris Weinstein Haggai — a Canadian-Israeli who grew up on a kibbutz devastated in last year’s Oct. 7 assaults — stopped to review a statement that would soon appear on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s social media page. She frowned briefly, reading on her lawyer’s phone, then smiled and shook her head.
“Amazing,” she said. “Amazing.” The prime minister had done what she had asked of him, one day earlier, in a private meeting on Parliament Hill.
He had her mother’s name. Judi Weinstein Haggai. “I can’t say he didn’t deliver with this,” Iris told the Star.
“So ...
that’s a start.” For more than a year, Iris and her family have anguished over the absence of her parents, Judi and Gadi. Weeks after the Oct.
7 attacks, Iris said the family learned through Israeli and American intelligence that her parents were among those that Hamas assailants had killed. The organization that Canada considers a terrorist group is still believed to be holding their bodies in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. Judi, Iris’s mother, was born in the United States but grew up in Toronto and was a Canadian citizen.
This fact, to Iris, means that a Canadian remains hostage to Hamas, a fact that has been “forgotten” as the conflict grows. More than 43,000 Palestinians in Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip since the Oct. 7 massacre, according to local health officials in the occupied territory, which has included reports of deadly airstrikes on , and .
With Hezbollah firing rockets into northern Israel from Lebanon, Israel also invaded and launched airstrikes against that country, where officials say 2,800 people have been killed since last October. Hamas assailants killed more than 1,200 people in their Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, an assault that has been described as the largest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
At the same time, Hamas took more than 250 people hostage, and Israeli media have that 97 of them are believed to remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 34 who have been confirmed dead. Iris said she wants the conflict to end, but that the plight of hostages and the bodies of those kidnapped should be addressed separately. Too often, she argued, officials in Canada and elsewhere demand the release of hostages as part of broader statements calling for a ceasefire or demanding Israel allow more aid to flow into the Gaza Strip whose borders it controls.
“The hostages are a footnote,” she said. “It’s always tied to something.” She was pleased to see the prime minister take up her cause and call for the release of the Oct.
7 hostages in a post on X Friday afternoon that included direct reference to her mother’s killing. Iris said she wants the federal government to use Canada’s moral heft in the international community to push harder for the unconditional release of the hostages, both dead and alive, and to champion that cause at every opportunity. “This is a person that shouldn’t be there,” Iris said of her mother, “just as much as a poor four-year-old doesn’t need to be in the middle of a building falling down on him in Gaza.
” In her visit to Ottawa this week, Iris met with Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, as well as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh, she said. Iris said she pressed Canadian politicians to advocate for the Oct. 7 hostages, including by calling for the International Committee of the Red Cross to finally gain access to those Hamas kidnapped last year.
Joly’s spokesperson, James Fitz-Morris, told the Star that the minister committed to Iris that she would continue raising the need to return Judi Weinstein Haggai’s remains. It’s part of her effort to bring attention to the Oct. 7 hostages that has seen her visit Washington, D.
C. and engage with American officials from her home in Singapore, where she now lives with her husband and children. Iris’s efforts also extend to the Canadian courts, where she is involved in two legal cases that she said are aimed at seeking “accountability” for the attacks against Israel.
One is a judicial challenge of Canada’s decision last March to reinstate funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which the Israeli parliament this week after the country accused 12 of its staff members — which the agency includes about 30,000 people in the region — of involvement in the Oct. 7 attacks. UNRWA has denied knowingly aiding any armed groups and says it moves quickly to purge any suspected militants from its staff.
Iris is one of two plaintiffs involved in a filed in Ontario Superior Court on last month’s anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, seeking $250 million in damages from Hamas and a host of other Palestinian groups they accuse of involvement in the assault. The suit also targets the governments of Iran and Syria, which are designated state sponsors of terror under the federal Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, a law that is meant to help people seek damages from countries that support terrorist violence.
The legal cases are occurring alongside others that include a challenge seeking to prevent Canadian military exports to Israel, as well as an effort to pressure Ottawa to try and grant visas under a special program to the family members of Canadians who are stuck in war-torn Gaza. For Iris, she is trying to channel the trauma she has endured into action, and to make sure more Canadians know that one of their co-citizens, even in death, is believed to be in the hands of her captors and killers all these months later. “Canada needs to join me in this fight,” she said.
“Everyone should know my mom’s name.”.
