The parents of a Berkeley-born 23-year-old spoke publicly Tuesday in Israel hoping that their son would return home safely after his arm was blown off and he was taken hostage.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who moved to Israel from Berkeley in 2008, had attended the Saturday music festival with three other friends near Kibbutz Re-eim by the Gaza strip, when they were all taken by Hamas militants, his parents said.Speaking at a news conference at the Carlton hotel, his father, Jon Polin, said his son and friends fled to a bomb shelter when the "masked gunman attacked."
"As grenades were being thrown in, they were tossing them back out," Polin said, adding that they were told of his son's actions by other eyewitnesses. "We know his arm was severed from the elbow-down, blown off," his mother, Rachel Goldberg, said. "They were fish in a barrel." And then Hamas told the group in the bomb shelter, anyone who can walk, let's move, his mother recounted.His last-known cell phone signal was on the border with Gaza, she said. Goldberg described her son's last words, albeit written in a text.
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