White Home officers Stated on Tuesday that 14 Americans had been killed and 20 or extra had been lacking after the brazen assault on Israel, which President Biden condemned as an act of “pure unadulterated evil.”

Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s nationwide safety adviser, instructed reporters on Tuesday that it stays unclear how most of the lacking had been within the palms of Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza and carried out the assaults that started on Saturday morning and have killed greater than 1,000 individuals in Israel.

Mr. Sullivan stated the federal government was in common contact with the households of the lacking, a few of whom have pleaded with authorities in the US and Israel to assist discover and convey again their family members.

“I’ve no larger precedence than the security of People being held hostage around the globe,” President Biden stated in his speech from the White Home on Tuesday.

U.S. officers had not shared identities of any of the lacking or lifeless People, however based mostly on media and household studies, many seemed to be twin U.S.-Israeli residents, with household in each nations, at the least a few of whom lived in small agricultural communities close to the border with Gaza that got here underneath assault from Hamas.

The lacking: Members of the family plead for assist

At a information convention in Tel Aviv, Nahar Neta fought again tears as he described being on the telephone making an attempt to calm his 66-year-old mom, Adrienne Neta, who was born and raised in California however residing in a kibbutz close to the border with Gaza as Saturday’s assault unfolded.

His siblings had been on the telephone together with her as attackers broke into her dwelling in Be’eri, he stated. They heard screaming, he added, and haven’t heard from her since.

Rachel Goldberg stated she wakened on Saturday in Jerusalem to the sound of sirens warning of incoming rocket fireplace. Her 23-year-old son, Hersh Golberg-Polin, was at a music competition close to Gaza’s border. When she turned her telephone on 10 minutes later, she noticed two consecutive textual content messages from him that learn “I like you” and “I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Goldberg — who moved together with her household from California to Jerusalem in 2008 — has not heard from her son since. She stated the one factor the police might inform her was that his final identified cellphone sign was close to the border with Gaza.

Additionally among the many lacking People had been a mom and daughter from Evanston, Unwell., a suburb of Chicago, who had been visiting kin in Nahal Oz, a kibbutz lower than a mile from the Israel-Gaza border. Rabbi Dov Hillel Klein, the chief director of Chabad of Evanston, stated Judith Raanan and her teenage daughter, Natalie, who not too long ago graduated from highschool, had not been heard from since Saturday.

“This was a girl that was filled with hope,” Rabbi Klein stated of Judith Raanan. “And I do know she has a resilience to beat her tormentors.”

The misplaced: A mom shielded her son from bullets

In her last moments, Deborah Martias, who was born in Missouri and whose father is a longtime professor at Brandeis College in Massachusetts, lined her teenage son together with her personal physique to guard him, her kin instructed a number of information retailers on Tuesday.

Within the moments earlier than she and her husband had been killed by the assailants who burst into the household’s dwelling, Ms. Martias was on the telephone together with her father, Ilan Troen, he recounted in a televised interview, saying that she heard glass breaking, gunshots and folks talking in Arabic.

In an e-mail to The New York Occasions, Mr. Troen, who additionally teaches at Ben-Gurion College of the Negev, stated that he was heading to a hospital in Israel to go to his 16-year-old grandson, Rotem, who had been shot within the abdomen however survived, hiding till he may very well be rescued.

Mr. Troen described his daughter and son-in-law within the interview with MSNBC as “idealists.” They lived at Kibbutz Holit, a small neighborhood simply over a mile from Gaza, and had despatched their kids to a faculty that taught each Hebrew and Arabic, he stated, “within the hope that one way or the other Jews and Arabs would study to know extra about one another,” and “change the course of historical past right here.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed analysis.