A month has passed since the Hamas massacre in the Israeli border area. More than 240 hostages are held by the Islamists. Her relatives are desperately fighting for her release.
Omri Schifroni is visiting Kibbutz Beeri on the edge of the Gaza Strip with his wife and two small children when all hell breaks loose. “We woke up early in the morning to the sound of loud explosions,” recalls the 38-year-old of the massacre on October 7th. “There was a missile alarm and we ran into the shelter.” It should take about twelve hours of fear and terror until they are rescued and able to leave the room again.
3,000 terrorists unexpectedly cross the border
A month after the massacre, a deep turning point in the region’s history, not all of the victims have yet been identified. What is known so far: According to estimates, 3,000 terrorists from Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, and other extremist groups crossed the border in a concerted surprise attack and killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians. More than 240 people were kidnapped into the Palestinian territory. Around 1,000 terrorists were killed in hours of fighting, around 1,800 were able to escape back into the Gaza Strip and around 200 were arrested.
Kibbutz Beeri is one of the hardest hit towns. Around ten percent of its approximately 1,200 residents were killed or deported to the Gaza Strip. “Four relatives of mine were murdered – an uncle, an aunt and twelve-year-old twins – as well as many friends and acquaintances from the kibbutz,” says Schifroni.
Terrible hours of fear
The hours in hiding are torturous. They are four adults and four children in a small space. They hide the children in a closet. Around midday, the family suddenly heard terrorists breaking into the house. “They shot around and two bullets went through the door of the shelter,” says Schifroni. He has removed the handle from the outside of the door and is keeping it closed from the inside. After about an hour the attackers leave again. The 38-year-old later learned that they had gathered 30 to 40 kibbutz members in a house two rows away and murdered them.
One of the hostages in the other house who survived is Jasmin Porat. She and her partner had escaped from a music festival that was also attacked and were hiding in a house with strangers in Beeri. She told Israeli television that she had already written farewell notes to her three children. “I hid in the closet, my grandparents are Holocaust survivors, I felt like I was during the Shoah.”
Terrorists armed with assault rifles dragged them out of the shelter. During hours of negotiations she served as their “contact” with the police and was ultimately rescued. Many others are less fortunate.
Video footage of horrific crimes
In the weeks since the massacre, more and more video recordings and images with horrifying content have been published. This includes many recordings from the terrorists’ body cameras. Paramedics in particular reported many incredibly cruelly mutilated corpses that they found in the towns along the Gaza Strip. There are also small children among them.
Journalists and diplomats were shown a 40-minute compilation of video footage to illustrate the extent of the atrocities. In Netiv Haasara, two boys had to watch their father being shot. One could no longer see in one eye, one shouted “Why am I alive?” and “I want to go to mom.” Meanwhile, one of the terrorists helped himself to the refrigerator and drank from a bottle. At the music festival, a terrorist randomly shot at toilets where people were hiding.
Paramedics spoke of scenes of extreme cruelty. About a pregnant woman whose baby was cut out of her womb and then stabbed to death. From a family with children aged six and eight who were attacked at breakfast. The father’s eyes were gouged out and the mother’s breast and fingers were cut off.
The fate of the hostages in Gaza is uncertain
Arrested Hamas terrorists said during interrogation that they had been tasked with killing as many people as possible, including civilians. They were also supposed to take hostages. More than 240 people were abducted to the Gaza Strip and have been held there ever since. It is unclear whether hostages were killed in the massive Israeli attacks and how many. The Hamas armed wing claims more than 60 hostages were killed. But this could also be psychological warfare. Four female hostages have so far been released by Hamas, and one female soldier was freed by the army.
The relatives of the hostages, including many foreigners, are desperately fighting for their release and for their fate not to be forgotten. There are constant protests in front of the military headquarters. Beds stand in front of the National Theater as a symbol of their absence. In the square in front of the Tel Aviv Art Museum there is a very long table set for the hostages. Protest tents where family members are staying overnight have been set up nearby.
One of them is Rubi Chen, father of a 19-year-old kidnapped soldier. Both are also American citizens. “He was positioned on the border with the Gaza Strip, for defense,” he explains. Neither the Red Cross nor the organization Doctors Without Borders have been able to see the hostages in the Gaza Strip, he criticizes. There is also no help from the United Nations. His message to the international community and also the Israeli government: “The repatriation of all hostages is the most important issue of all. We don’t care about the price.”
Sympathy for Israel has fallen again since the Gaza attacks
According to politics professor Jonathan Rynhold, there was initially an increase in sympathy for Israel after the massacre in countries such as the USA, Great Britain and Germany. This fell again under the impact of the massive counterattacks in the Gaza Strip with almost 10,000 deaths. During their lifetime, most people in these countries would never have had to deal with radical leaders and ideologies that took massive losses within their own population, such as Hamas.
“People see the destruction in Gaza and tragic incidents and think it is easy to prevent them,” says the head of the political studies department at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. “They don’t see the complexity of fighting an enemy that puts its own civilians in harm’s way and hides behind them.” There is also no view of the larger context, “namely what it would mean for the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis if Hamas remained in power.”
Disappointment with the state and the army
For Omri Schifroni, looking back, October 7th was a stark turning point in his life and in the history of the country. “It’s all broken,” he says. The disappointment with the army, which only arrived hours later, was particularly bad. He also sees great responsibility on the right-wing religious government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has caused a deep rift in Israeli society with its controversial judicial reform. A big question remains as to how the secret service, military and political leadership could have been so surprised.
He only sees the Beeri residents returning to the kibbutz as a possibility if Hamas is completely destroyed. “I have the same sympathy for a child in Gaza as I do for a child in Sderot,” says Schifroni. He lives in the town of Givat Chaviva, which has long advocated for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. “But Hamas is a murderous organization, like (the terrorist network) Islamic State, and it must be destroyed.”