Grieving Thai family pleads for return of son’s body from Israel

The last time Thai mother Noopar Pansa-ard said she heard from her son, gunfire and explosions crackled in the background as he told her to stay strong if anything happened to him.
“I told him – don’t talk like that … My heart will shatter if you don’t return,” Noopar said. A day later, her son Somkuan Pansa-ard, 39, was killed during an attack by Hamas militants on Israel, where he had gone to work in a fruit plantation to send money back to help his family repay a loan.
Co-workers told his family on Sunday he had been shot by Hamas militants. It was not clear where in Israel Somkuan had been killed.
“Losing my son … is the biggest loss in my life,” said his father Khraboan Pansa-ard, hunched over on a chair as Noopar sat nearby, clutching a portrait of their son and wiping away tears.
Somkuan was one of the 30,000 Thais, mostly from the rural northeast, working in Israel’s agriculture sector, according to Thai government data.
So far, 20 Thai nationals have been killed and 14 taken hostage in the conflict, the Thai foreign ministry says. Some 5,000 Thais are looking to be repatriated home.