BICOM

After a gag order was lifted on the case this morning, Haaretz reports that a 28-year-old Israeli man crossed into the Gaza Strip last year and remains missing.

The incident is reported to have occurred in September. Avera Mengistu, an Israeli of Ethiopian descent from Ashkelon, situated only a few miles from Gaza, apparently approached the border fence in the Zikim Beach area and scaled the barrier. The report says that Mengistu is known to have suffered from psychological problems in the past and may have been drinking on the day of his disappearance. Israeli soldiers monitoring the border area assumed that the man climbing the fence was a Palestinian returning to the Gaza Strip. When IDF soldiers rushed to the scene, they quickly ascertained that an Israeli had entered Gaza.

Israeli authorities reportedly immediately contacted the Red Cross and demanded that an Israeli man suffering from psychological difficulties be returned immediately. Mengistu’s whereabouts since then or his condition are unknown. Mengistu’s family say that the Shin Bet internal security service informed them of Avera’s disappearance and that since then, Penina Tamano-Shata, who was at the time a Yesh Atid MK and is of Ethiopian descent, took up their case and arranged meetings with senior army officials.

Just minutes after Haaretz published the claims surrounding Mengistu’s fate this morning, Ynet news said that a second Israeli man, an unnamed Bedouin citizen from Hura in the south of the country, is also missing in the Gaza Strip.

In Gaza itself, Hamas held a rally yesterday to mark a year since Operation Protective Edge, during which they unveiled two apparent new rockets. The event also featured a model of three IDF military dog tags. One displayed the name and identification number of Oron Shaul, one of two Israeli soldiers killed in last summer’s conflict whose bodies were not retrieved. The other two dog tags displayed question marks, a possible reference to Mengistu and the missing Bedouin man.