In recent years, together with many of our friends in Israel, we have repeatedly condemned the crimes that the State of Israel has committed against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. We have worked to protect Palestinians’ rights. We have called for the imposition of sanctions on Israel, and also for international intervention.But it was not only the support for the rights of the Palestinian people that created the connection between the two of us. In recent years, we have worked together to try to reveal all the documents in Israel from its security and diplomatic relationship with the Pinochet regime in Chile, including any information that exists in Israel regarding Daniel’s father, David Silberman, who was kidnapped and disappeared by the Pinochet regime’s intelligence agency (DINA), which at the time was in good relationship with its Israeli counterpart (the Mossad). After 49 years, the fate of David is still unknown. The legal proceedings in Israel that were conducted together with another family of a disappeared Chilean, were all rejected in the Israeli courts.Last weekend, the citizens of the State of Israel were under a murderous and barbaric attack, with Hamas using the same tactics as ISIS. Hamas fighters raided an outdoor party attended by crowds of young Jews, took control of Jewish kibbutzim and towns and then went from house to house and slaughtered entire families at gunpoint.During the Hamas attack, it kidnapped an unknown number of elderly people, men, women, children and infants. Among the abductees there are Jews as well as non-Jews, some with non-Israeli citizenship. The photos and videos that have already been published on social media and in international media of kidnapped mothers with children, elderly women, and the body of a naked woman are shocking and devastating. As with ISIS, Hamas fighters displayed the kidnapped women and drove around with them in the cities of the Gaza Strip.Hamas is hiding the identity of most of the abductees, their location, their medical condition and their fate. The abductees are defined according to international law as victims of enforced disappearance. That is as defined in the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (2006) and in the United Nations Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (A/RES/47/133).Beyond the fact that there is a real and imminent danger that the abductees will be tortured, raped and murdered, and notwithstanding talk of a Qatar-mediated deal to swap hostages for Palestinians in Israeli jails, there is also a real fear that Hamas will hand over the Israeli abductees to other Palestinian militant organisations. Hamas has already announced that 30 of them have been handed to the Islamic Jihad.The clock is ticking. Disappearances may become irreversible. For example, some of the elderly could die due to the lack of medication, some of the women due to physical and sexual assault. The history of abductions in Chile and elsewhere shows that Hamas may deny their abduction in order to avoid being responsible for their fate. There is already a discrepancy between the number of abductees that Hamas has admitted to be holding and the number of missing persons whose bodies are still not found at the places of the massacre.Preventing enforced disappearances and finding the disappeared is not only an international duty but also a human and moral duty. Not knowing the fate of a loved one and the inability to receive him or her back alive or bring them to burial prevents the human possibility of their family for personal closure and to try to come to terms with the disaster that happened. As long as the person continues to be with the status of disappeared, there is always hope, even after many years, in defiance of logic, that the person might return, which also prevents the family from moving on and rehabilitating their lives.We believe that there are enough people in the world who are unable to justify in any way the kidnapping and enforced disappearance of people regardless of the national origin of the victims. We call on them to raise their voice and to ask their governments to demand from Hamas the immediate freeing of all the Israeli and non-Israeli civilians who were kidnapped.Daniel Silberman Abarzua, is an Israeli human rights activist and author. His Father David Silberman Gurovich was kidnapped on October 4, 1974 and since then considered disappeared. Eitay Mack is an Israeli human rights lawyer and activist who represented Palestinians whose rights were violated by Israel and also families of the disappeared people from Chile and Argentina.