The search for the 9-year-old girl Hymanut Kassou resumed Wednesdayday, four months after her disappearance. She was last seen on Tzahal Street in Tzfat, on Sunday, 25.02.2024.
The search included Hymanut’s family, Israel Police officers, and volunteers from the Israel Dog Unit, a nonprofit specializing in working dogs.
Searchers have been combing the Tzfat area for over 122 days, with an emphasis on caves, pits, thickets deep in the area, and abandoned buildings, as well as an intensive search of a half-kilometer radius from Hymanut's last known location near an Immigration and Absorption Ministry center.
In a meeting of the Knesset Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Committee, it was stated that more than one thousand Israel Police officers, along with multiple IDF search and rescue units, thousands of civilian volunteers, working dogs, and horseback searchers have participated in the search.
A police representative stated that the search had included door-to-door searches and the questioning of every resident of the absorption center where Hymanut was last seen. He further emphasized that every possibility was being investigated to the furthest possible extent and that the disappearance had been determined not to be connected to the disappearance of Moshe Kleinerman in the same region a few years previously.
Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Ofir Sofer have both visited the search area to review and assist in the search, along with the chairman of the Jewish Agency, Doron Almog. The Jewish Agency has offered 100,000 ILS for information leading to Hymanut.
Moshe Pines, deputy director of the Immigration Ministry, stated that Minister Sofer had visited the search area personally on five separate occasions, and that a professional team from the Ministry was visiting the search command center daily. Shai Filber, deputy director of immigration and absorption at the Jewish Agency, stated that the Agency has been arranging for busloads of volunteers to be brought to the search area from the various programs the Agency supports.
The searchers appealed to the public to aid in spreading her photo, in the hopes of reaching anyone who may have seen Hymanut since. Anyone with information that could help the search is asked to urgently contact the Tzfat police station or the IDU hotline at 0544876709.
