DAVID HOTEL, DEAD SEA, Israel – At 6:30AM on October 7, Miri Gad Mesica, her husband and their five children awoke early to the sound of thunder.
The residents of kibbutz Be’eri, established in 1946, are familiar with the noise that rockets fired from the Gaza Strip make, they live just a few kilometres from the security fence that surrounds the coastal enclave and rocket fire from Hamas and its allies are part of daily life.
Videos by VICE
Every house in Be’eri has a safe room, and every smartphone has a government app that warns of incoming rockets and mortar rounds and the amount of time available to get to the shelter before impact. Be’eri’s proximity means there’s about 15 seconds to get to safety.
“We know what rockets sound like and for a minute thought it had to be thunder,” said Gad Mesica, who works as a marketing consultant for a variety of businesses around Israel. “But we realised it was still summer and there was no rain, that’s when the alarms began to sound and we looked out the window.”
What the family had heard was the sound of 3,000 rockets being fired almost simultaneously by Hamas and other militant groups, mixed with the desperate attempts of the Israeli anti-rocket Iron Dome system to intercept each one. It was a noise like Gad Mesica had never heard in her decades of living in one of Israel’s most famous and prosperous collective communities, which is home to Israel’s largest paper printing factory. The family immediately ran to the shelter, which is also their oldest daughter’s bedroom.
By 6:58AM, a new alert sounded on the local community chat application, reporting that a “terrorist” had broken into the kibbutz. But within a minute the family knew this was not a normal rocket attack or a single intruder. Heavily armed Hamas fighters had stormed the security gate and were engaging the roughly ten community members that provided armed security with devastating fire. Within 10 minutes the security team had died attempting to do their designated role: to stall any attackers long enough for the army to respond. It would be another 12 hours before Gad Mesica saw an Israeli soldier and almost 36 hours before the dozens of Hamas attackers, who had used the cover of the massed rocket fire to break through the high security fence and entered Israel with an estimated 1,500 armed attackers, would be defeated.
With no one to stop them, the Hamas gunmen began to methodically enter each home and hunt the 1,200 members of the kibbutz as they barricaded themselves into safe rooms, pushing furniture against steel doors as Hamas fighters fired weapons and threw grenades in an effort to get to the residents.
Many succeeded. Gad Mesica still has the community chats saved on her phone and they detail a moment-by-moment timeline of terror, despair at the lack of a rescue operation, and, heartbreakingly, people sending final messages as they were killed alongside their families.
“Entire families wiped out,” Gad Mesica said sitting at a hotel resort in the Dead Sea where other survivors have been moved, scrolling through on her phone what seemed like an endless series of pleas for help, and reports of murders followed by silence as the many senders themselves were eventually killed.
The society at Be’eri created by settlers two years before the founding of Israel isn’t just a group of close neighbours. It’s a communal culture where everyone turns their paychecks over to the group to be evenly distributed between all members, who do chores together, raise each other’s children, and share homes. And the sense of closeness goes back four generations: Be’eri only rarely accepts new families into the community.
“Maybe a new family every five years or so,” said Gad Mesica. “The result is that we see each other as a family that has lived and worked together for generations.”
Sitting in the lobby of the David Hotel where about 700 survivors have been housed since the attack destroyed the community, Gad Mesica literally knows each person that walks by as she tells her story: The nine-year-old boy playing on the scooter in the lobby hid in bushes with his 12-year-old brother for six hours after watching both their parents executed; a friend whose husband is missing and presumed held in Gaza by militants; and the neighbour who Gad Mesica said saved her and her family’s lives.
At first she lists the neighbours who died by calmly saying they were killed before finally flashing with anger and frustration.
“Not killed,” she said. “They were murdered. Not killed. Murdered. And not by animals, animals only kill to survive. They came to rape women before shooting them in front of their families, to beat and humiliate people for hours before finally killing them. This was not politics, this was not war, this was just cruelty and murder. These people – and I don’t mean Palestinians, most just want to survive and have lives and we are leftists who have always supported the end of the occupation – just want us dead. Gone. And people around the world think they’re heroes.”
Military forensic teams in Israel say that they identified multiple signs of torture, rape and other abuse among the 1,400 victims of the Hamas attack last week, by far the deadliest upon Israel in the country’s history. In response Israel launched hundreds of air-strikes against Gaza that have killed more than 2,800 people. A “total siege” of the thin, densely-populated coastal strip has seen fuel, electricity, food, water and other essential supplies from Israel cut, pushing the humanitarian situation to breaking point. Meanwhile, solidarity protests for Palestinians and Israel have taken place around the world.
For over a year, Israeli political life has been bitterly divided, generally over the performance and behaviour of criminally indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu, who has won a string of extremely narrow elections and pushed for judicial reforms that drove his opponents to the streets in widespread protests. And while the country has set aside many of their differences in the wake of the tragedy – Gad Mesica said she had been struck by the compassion and support from all sides of the political divide – the Netanayhu opponents remain furious about his role in failing to both prevent the attack and provide a political solution that would help the peace effort.
Be’eri is the home of a 19-year-old woman who went viral on social media this week for her impassioned testimony about the attack, after the massacre at the Nova music festival where 260 people were killed and many taken hostage, one of the bloodiest and most horrific attacks by Hamas fighters on a day of bloody rampages.
“How am I supposed to get up in the morning, knowing that 4.5km from kibbutz Be’eri in Gaza there are people for whom this event has not ended. For me, it was over after 12 hours because there was a place to be evacuated to,” she says in the video. “Those speaking of revenge, should be ashamed. I myself, after everything that I have been through, keep losing so much energy every time I hear the word ‘revenge.’”
After nearly six hours locked in a single secure bedroom without water, food or a toilet, the Gad Mesica family had already listened to their downstairs neighbour pleading with the gunmen to take anything, but show mercy on him. His appeal was followed by gunshots.
“No body has been recovered or identified yet,” she said. “Maybe he’s held in Gaza.” On Monday, Israel said that it believed 199 people were being held in Gaza after being kidnapped by Hamas.
Last Saturday, Hamas fighters attempted to break down the safe room door in Gad Mesica’s daughter’s room, as her husband kept the door locked by holding the handle down with his belt for six hours. The door stood firm, despite the attackers shooting round after round at it. Then a grenade shook the house – which held four families, two on each floor – followed by another grenade that appeared to hold tear gas.
“We were choking and our eyes were burning but there was no water, just a mist bottle of water my daughter used for her hair,” she said. “I would spray a little bit on our mouths and on shirts we used as masks. But then we realised the house was burning, they’d set it on fire.”
As the room filled with smoke through the air conditioning unit, the family had to make a decision: Gunmen were on rooftops setting fires and waiting for residents to try to escape before cutting them down with assault rifles and grenades. But after six hours when the steel door became hot to the touch, they decided they had no other choice but to leap from the second storey window into the street where dozens of gunmen continued their hunt for survivors.
“We decided the terrorists were not on the roof so first my husband jumped,” Gad Mesica recounted. “Then the youngest children, then my oldest son, then me.”
Her husband, a veterinarian, has spent the last week combing the scenes of the various attacks for lost pets and other animals to treat and rescue. But at about midday on October 7, he was trying to catch his small children as they jumped from their burning home while militants massacred their neighbours just a block away.
Their 15-year-old son landed hard, shattering his foot. The family of seven was now totally exposed.“Our neighbours saw us and came out of their home to save us by taking us into their home,” Gad Mesica said. “They saved our lives and risked their own, I can never properly thank or repay them so now I tell them they are my family forever.”
The neighbour who saved them is a middle aged woman who did not introduce herself at the hotel, only giving a forced smile and a handshake before whispering a few words to Gad Mesica and slowly walking away. In the days after the attack, the neighbour found out her brother and his wife were murdered in front of their children as they hid in the bushes. One of them is the nine-year-old boy playing on a scooter in the lobby of the hotel.
But for six more hours they sat together during the attack last week, repeatedly calling police, ambulances, firefighters and the army, only to be told to stay in place and that someone would rescue them eventually.
“Some of the terrorists were dressed in IDF uniforms so we were afraid to open the door but finally we were sent a code phrase on WhatsApp that would be used to show they were really Israeli,” Gad Mesica said. “But even when we heard the phrase we were afraid, so only the men went out to check but it was real. We’d been saved.”
Other survivors had to wait for more than a day as the battle raged around them and most of the kibbutz buildings burned to the ground.
One woman with intellectual disabilities was found a day later wandering on a road several kilometres away, Gad Mesica said. “An 80-year-old woman, barefoot and dehydrated and starving was found 36 hours later walking down another road.”
Of the 1,200 members of the kibbutz, only around 700 are said to be at the Dead Sea hotel. More than 100 people were killed, many are missing and believed taken captive, or being treated in hospital for wounds sustained in the attack.
Miraculously, Gad Mesica’s immediate family escaped intact. Her son was due to undergo foot surgery, meaning her husband will have to leave saving the animals for one day to spend a day in a Tel Aviv hospital, Gad Mesica joked affectionately.
She’s unsure if she can ever return to the community that was a home to her family for four generations. Every member of the community tightly bound together by decades of communal living would decide as individuals whether to return.
“It’s minute by minute for me,” she said, admitting that it’s been impossible to properly process her emotions. “Others will have to make their own decisions based on how they feel.”
“But we survived and we are living, look around the lobby,” Gad Mesica said, pointing to children playing loudly, people reserved but smiling, and others even joking with a visiting reporter that he’d make a terrible Israeli for being so polite.
“This is how you survive,” she said, “by living and caring for each other.”
