The mother of Noa Argamani, a woman believed to have been taken by Hamas militants during a raid in Israel, who was widely reported as a Chinese-Israeli born in Beijing, said she was in fact an Israeli native.
“[I] would like to correct this with you, she wasn’t born in Beijing, she was born in Israel,” Liora Argamani said in an interview with the Post on Wednesday.
In a post on Sunday on its official Weibo account, the Israeli embassy in China identified Noa as a Beijing-born Chinese-Israeli woman snatched by “Hamas terrorists”.
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News of Noa’s kidnapping – and her supposed ties to China’s capital – had been widely reported by international and Chinese media.
In response to media enquiries about Noa’s nationality, China’s foreign ministry said on Monday it was “verifying the situation”.
The social media notification had been amended on Thursday evening to remove the place of birth.
The attacks have left three Chinese dead, with two others missing and several injured, according to Wang Wenbin, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman.
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“She is not Chinese, she does not have a Chinese passport,” said Argamani, 61, who is known as Li Chunhong in Chinese. She married Noa’s father, Yaacov Argamani, 69, years ago in Israel, where they still live.
She said Noa had never lived in China and had only visited the country a few times, mostly to her mother’s hometown of Wuhan in central Hubei province.
Argamani said she contacted the Chinese embassy after Noa had been taken on Saturday, and as “a Chinese and a previous Chinese passport holder” she hoped the embassy could help.
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“But [my daughter] is not Chinese, and the Chinese embassy has very good reasons to refuse. If it refuses, I will not object,” she said.
In major emergencies such as wars, Chinese embassies are responsible for the safety of Chinese citizens abroad, according to the country’s first consular protection regulation, which just took effect in September.
Argamani said no one had been able to contact her daughter since she was snatched, and there was no information on her whereabouts.
A video clip of her sitting and drinking a bottle of water has been circulating on social media. The source of the video remained unclear.
“We do not know where it is from, but we feel a bit more at ease in the heart, seeing [that at least] these people can give her some water to drink,” Argamani said.
Argamani said that as of Wednesday, she had heard nothing from Chinese officials or the Chinese community within Israel.
The Organisation for Assistance to Chinese Businesses in Israel told the Post on Monday that the local Chinese community wanted to help but did not know what it could do.
Argamani said her daughter’s college friends had been staying with her and her husband to offer comfort.
Noa is an engineering student at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in southern Israel. A university spokesman told the Post on Tuesday that it would offer help and emotional support to the family.
