A group of Palestinian Authority residents penned a special message to the family of murdered hesder yeshiva student and IDF soldier Dvir Sorek this week, after he was killed in a stabbing attack by Hamas-linked terrorists last Wednesday night.
Sorek, who was killed just before his 19th birthday, had been a member of an interfaith dialogue group which brought together Israeli Jews and Palestinian Authority Arabs between the ages of 18 to 25 for meetings every two weeks.
In the wake of Sorek’s murder, the Arab members of the dialogue group wrote a joint letter expressing their shock and horror, while expressing hope that they could build “a bridge” to peace between Jews and Arabs:
Salam Alaykom,
For two years we have been meeting in one room, Palestinians and Israelis. At every meeting we talked about ourselves: our daily lives and the future that we want to build together. We used to meet every two weeks, bringing together young men between the ages of 18 and 25.
Every time, it was a great opportunity to talk, and we invited some friends to join us , one of them was Ahmad Manasra, I personally invited him to join the group, he agreed, and after his first meeting, and the good impression he took from the group, he was killed on the way home.
Everyone was shocked by what happened, Palestinians and Israelis cried together to lose our new friend.
Harsh reality hits us again. A few days ago, our yeshiva friend from Migdal Oz was abducted and killed, When I got the news that morning, I was shocked. I told my Palestinian friends what happened and they didn't believe me.
Dvir Sorek, 19, who was stabbed to death in the West Bank….Dvir Sorek was one of the participants in this discussion group. In no way we can imagine that someone we met yesterday will be the victim of tomorrow.
We send our condolences to his family and our friends in the yeshiva.
And for us as a group, we condemn this kind of vicious violence that target us all for our residence place, religion, identity, citizenship. It is so sad we reached the point where we are talking about the right to not be killed.
We will stay in this way until we achieve the goal of freedom and the right to life. We are building a bridge between peoples on this land and we will continue to work on it.
We hope that this incident will be the last grief on both sides.
Signed: Palestinian friends from the religious dialogue group