BALTIMORE — "I don't know every minute of the day if my family's alive," said Liza Davis, who lives in Pikesville, and has several family members, incuding her sister, living in Israel.
Davis now has a lot of images like this one on her phone - all sent to her directly by her family, including her sister.
She's in touch with them as often as possible, but when they have to go to the bomb shelter, they don't always have service.
"I just checked in with my cousin about 30 minutes ago, I said, hey how are you? And if you heard his voice, he says, I don't even know where to begin. I don't even know what to say to you," Davis said.
Liza's friend, Jenny Schuster, is in the same boat. She also has many family members in Israel, and her brother-in-law is serving in the Israeli army.
"I just feel for my sister. She's basically a single mom right now. She has three babies, and they don't know where their dad is. They ask her where abba is, where their father is, and all my sister could say was - there's people that hurt somebody, and your abba doesn't like when they hurt people. So he's gonna go tell them that it's not ok," Schuster said.
The two friends are trying to stay strong for their own children, as more and more stories of innocent people murdered come out.
A few minutes down the road, Rabbi Rachel Sabath says her daughter's friend, a 20 year-old man, was killed in his sleep over the weekend. The horror for his family didn't end there, as they tried to lay him to rest in a war zone.
"They were just trying to bury their son, and there were missiles aimed at them, falling all around them. And hundreds of people at this funeral had to try to take cover just by lying on the ground and covering their heads."
Rabbi Sabath and her husband are both citizens of Israel. They have a home in Jerusalem, when they lived there full-time, they lived through periods of war.
"I lived there during the gulf war when we carried around masks to protect us from missiles that might have poisonous gas coming to us from Iraq," Sabath said.
But this time, she says, it feels different.
"Somebody said yesterday - it's as though 9/11 happened 10 times," Sabath said.
She says Israel needs international support to help in freeing the hostages, and defeating Hamas.
"Such horrific terrorists, terrorizing our people, terrorizing their own people. For the sake of Palestinian people, Hamas needs to return these captives," Sabath said.
Jewish schools are telling parents to delete social media off their kids' phones, as they fear Hamas is going to release videos of the hostages, possibly depicting the terrorists torturing and murdering them. Rabbi Sabath received an emergency alert about it through various sources. Davis says her sister also received an emergency alert.
