Inbal Reich Alon fled to safety after being locked in a shelter for 15 hours when Hamas militants invaded her Gaza border community, killing and kidnapping dozens of Israelis. “We don’t know if we can go back anywhere,” she said at a hotel on the Dead Sea, where she is staying with about 150 residents of Beeri, a kibbutz in southern Israel.
Reich Alon, 58, said he heard explosions when Beeri was targeted by an offensive by Palestinian militants on Saturday. “I thought to myself that I hadn’t seen a weather forecast that said it was going to rain. We thought it was thunder,” he recalls. But within moments he realized that his small, close-knit community had been attacked. While the family sheltered in a safe room – intended to keep residents safe during rocket bombardments – their home was set on fire. “
We had no idea what was going on, but we could hear shouting in Arabic,” Reich Alon said. For hours, the man and the children “didn’t let go of the door handle”, which normally does not close in this door. shelters.
Residents estimate that dozens of the approximately 1,200 members of the farming community were killed or taken hostage in the attack. “We were lucky, that’s all,” said Reich Alon at the David hotel, located between the Dead Sea and the Judean Hills, about 60 kilometers south of Jerusalem, where Beeri residents were housed. “We are a big kibbutz,” he said, before correcting: “At least we were.” As fighting continued in the country, the fate of many others remained uncertain. On Monday, the army spokesman told media that “about 70 terrorists infiltrated Kibbutz Beeri overnight” and that “the majority were killed after gun battles.”
“We are at the safest place, the lowest point on Earth, but also the lowest point for us as a nation,” said historian Alon Pauker, looking out over the Dead Sea. “This is a September 11-type tragedy. The place where I live will never be the same again. We must understand that we no longer have the kibbutz we had and we no longer have the land we had. This is a tectonic shift,” he said Pauker, 57 years old.
The historian says the blame lies with the Hamas militants who carried out the attack, but that much of the responsibility for the escalation lies with Israeli leaders and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who “abandoned the country.” after he also said the military was “busy doing other things” in the occupied West Bank, due to the far-right government’s pro-settlement policies.
The Israeli kibbutz movement, before the establishment of the state in 1948 and with its roots in socialist ideology, has traditionally been linked to the left. But now Beeri residents say they have reevaluated their ideas about peace with the Palestinians. For some, unthinkable just a few days ago, they support an all-out war on Gaza to rid the country of Hamas. “The extremists, both in Israel and Gaza, feed off each other and do not care about lives,” Pauker noted. “We have always strived and continue to strive to live in peace with our neighbors. We don’t want these wars. This is something I never thought I would say: After bringing back the 100 hostages, I don’t care what’s left there,” Reich Alon said.
Source: DN
