Who was Soumya Santosh? A 32-year-old woman from India has been killed in Israel in a rocket attack by Palestinian militants from Gaza. Soumya Santosh, who came from the Idukki district of Kerala, worked as a caregiver and attended to an old woman living in the Southern Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon.
On Tuesday, about 31 people reportedly died till 9 pm (local time) as Gaza based militants fired hundreds of rockets on Israel since the morning of Monday. Ashkelon shares its borders with the Gaza Strip and thus is under a massive fire attack from the Palestinian militants. Israel too has carried out airstrikes at the Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets on the coastal strip of Gaza.
Several people have lost their lives from both sides, and Santosh is one of them. Here are 10 things about Soumya Santosh, the woman from Kerala who was killed in Israel:
1. Santosh who hails from Kerala was based in Israel for the last seven years as a caregiver.
2. She has a nine-year-old son who she had left back in Kerala with her husband.
3. The rocket that killed her directly struck the house of the elderly woman whom she was look after.
4. The 80-year-old woman Santosh was caring for too passed away in the attack, as per Santosh's sister-in-law.
5. According to Channel 12's report, the rocket shelter in the area was about a minute's run away from the old woman's house. However, both of them could not manage to reach it in time. The home did not have any fortified room of its own.
6. According to Santosh's family in Kerala, she was talking to her husband on a video call at the time of the incident.
7. Her brother talked to PTI and said that a huge sound was heard during the video call and the phone got disconnected suddenly. The family then contacted fellow Malayalees who were working Ashkelon and got to know about the incident.
8. Ron Malka, the Israeli ambassador to India took to Twitter on Tuesday to condole Soumya Santosh's death.
9. “On behalf of the state of Israel, I convey heartfelt condolences to the family of Ms Soumya Santosh, murdered by Hamas indiscriminate terror attack on innocent lives. Our hearts are crying with her 9 years old son that lost his mother in this cruel Terrorist attack,” Malka wrote in his tweet.
10. Mani C Kappan, the newly elected MLA and a leader of the Nationalist Congress Kerala condemned the incident. Kapan, who won from the Pala seat in the Kerala Assembly said in a Facebook post that thousands of Keralites working in Israel were living in fear due to escalation of the situation.
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