Over the course of an hour, a once-vacant area of the sidewalk along Jaffa Street across from Mahane Yehuda in Jerusalem was transformed into a demonstration of border observer workstations at IDF bases on Thursday evening.
The five built-on-the-spot stations mimicked the stations on the IDF’s Nahal Oz base, from which five female lookout observers were kidnapped by Hamas in the October 7 attacks—Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniella Gilboa, and Naama Levy. A loudspeaker blared audio recordings from the morning of the attacks, repeating the voices of two young women who were murdered, Roni Eshel and Yael Leibushor.
Sasha Ariev, 25, the older sister of hostage Karina Ariev, said volunteers working in the demonstration were themselves observers for the army in the past.
“After what happened with the current observers who were kidnapped, they came together to help us raise awareness about soldiers, about people who are in captivity, about what it is [like] to be an observer,” she said.
The demonstrations have been brought to each city of the young women who were taken hostage, including Petah Tikva—the city of Gilboa— and Hostages Square in Tel Aviv. The next locations are Holon and Ramat Hasharon, explained Ariev.
Awareness of IDF observers
“People can come, can see it, and feel what the duty of being an observer is—that you need to see four to eight hours looking at the monitor without moving your head,” Ariev said. “So they can feel the job, which is very meaningful in the protection of their own country. And people in Jerusalem—-because it is the city of Karina—so they will know her.”
A crowd of a couple dozen people gathered around the fence surrounding the workstations, and many passersby stopped to learn more about the demonstration. Volunteers in yellow shirts invited people to sit at the stations.
“I know that people who saw it, they really liked it in the way that they understood what the job [is], and understood that the girls were put on the border to do their job, just to protect their country, and they were kidnapped,” she said. “So the country needs to bring them back home.”
Karina Ariev’s birthday was in August, and she turned 20 while in captivity.