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It is the saddest of sights.
Opposite the pomegranate trees in a quiet corner so at odds with the manner of their death, three graves have been dug for a mother and her daughters: Lianne, Noiya and Yahel Sharabi.
A family Hamas tried to obliterate.
The contrast between this scene and a photo of smiling mum Lianne with her arms around her two teenage daughters, taken just a few months ago as they celebrated on Kibbutz Be’eri, in southern Israel, could not be starker.
They cannot even return home in death. Be’eri has been destroyed – the scene of a massacre. Too many are dead, yet the living cannot bury their dead there.
So this British-Israeli family is being buried in a cemetery about 25 miles (40km) from the Gaza border.
The Sharabis cannot even rest in peace. The girls’ dad Eli is still missing. Their uncle Yosi has been kidnapped. Here children can’t mourn their parents. Parents can’t grieve their children.
In Israel, hundreds of people gathered for their funeral with many wearing T-shirts that read: “Lianne, Noiya and Yahel have been murdered. Bring back Eli and Yosi now.”
Teenage girls cried for their friends Yahel and Noiya, unable to comprehend what has happened to this family.
Dead, missing, kidnapped. The horror of that day, for this country, in one family.
Lianne came to Israel from Bristol aged just 19 to work on a kibbutz. She then built her life here until Hamas decided to take that from her and her daughters.
She was a caring mother, wife, daughter and sister, with a dry sense of humour.
Her 13-year-old daughter, Yahel, was a bundle of energy, full of adventure and mischief.
And Noiya, 16, was a gifted student, sensitive and fun.
Their lives are now encapsulated in just a few words.
“Our entire world is broken”, their uncle said.
Lianne’s family and friends in Bristol have been unable to travel here but said they would watch the funeral in the UK “united in grief”.
They remembered Yahel for her sense of adventure, riding her bike at “breakneck speed around the kibbutz” and for dancing along to TikTok videos with her sister and, on occasions, her British cousins.
Her family in the UK said they were left with “a Yahel-shaped hole in our lives that can never be filled”.
Noiya was described as a “beautiful and talented young woman” who was “always the big sister”.
“A beacon of light extinguished too soon,” her family said in her eulogy.
Lianne, the third of four siblings, was described as “unique, rare, special”.
Her brother Steve described her as “big in every way – her love, her personality, her attitude and her mouth”.
In a eulogy, her mother Gill said she had a dry sense of humour – “sometimes irreverent, but never malicious”.
“We will miss our girl to the end of our days and keep her in our hearts forever, tucked away with the fondest memories of her 48 years,” she said.
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