As dawn broke, she made her way home in an Uber with her boyfriend, safe and sound, although I slept on the sofa just to be sure of hearing the key in the front door. For hundreds of parents in Israel, and in other countries including the UK, that moment of relief will never come. Their children, at least 260 of them attending a music event billed as dedicated to 'friends, love and infinite freedom’, were hunted like animals by extremist Palestinian Hamas militants and killed in cold blood.
I just despair that this can be happening in our world; peace-loving festival-goers deliberately targeted, and whole families wiped out with machine-gun fire in their own homes in the towns of Southern Israel, as Hamas made their terrifying presence felt over the border with the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian enclave facing the eastern Mediterranean.