Worse Than ISIS

I want to tell you about my friend, Dana.

Dana and I were born on the same year on a small kibbutz in northern Israel. We were essentially kibbutz-siblings in a class of 6 kids, a two-grade group (“Chevra”) of 12.

Together since daycare: transitioning to solid foods, learning to walk, potty training, losing baby teeth. Later on came preschool, kindergarten, elementary, middle school, high school and army service; all together, all on our small kibbutz in the north of Israel. Learning together, working together, playing together, partying together, traveling together, living together, growing up together.

Dana was always cheerful, always responsible, always way more grown-up than me.

When we were teenagers, Dana got together with Avida, who was a soldier that came to protect our kibbutz. They stayed together since then, through military service and travel in the US and life in Tel Aviv, eventually moving back to Avida’s kibbutz, Be’eri.

Dana’s sister, Einat, my little brother’s classmate, also joined Dana in marrying another Be’eri guy, Arik, and like her older sister, settled down in Be’eri and raised a family.

I last saw Dana last September during her father’s funeral on my kibbutz. I hugged her and Avida, and had a nice chat with her two older boys, Rotem and Nofar.

Last Saturday morning, over a hundred Hamas terrorists overran kibbutz Be’eri. Einat’s family miraculously escaped but not Dana’s.

Dana and Avida, together with their younger son, Carmel (15), and their daughter, Hadar (13), barricaded themselves in the house’s secure room. The terrorists that broke into their house tried to enter the safe room. Avida held the handle and didn’t let them in. They yelled at him in Arabic to open the door but he refused, yelling back in Arabic that there were children in the room. The first burst of AK-47 fire tore through the door and blew Carmel’s hand off. The second one took out Avida’s legs. He kept holding the door anyway, even when the terrorists started burning the house down, filling the secure room with smoke.

The terrorists then went around the outside of the house and blasted a hole through the room’s reinforced window with an RPG. Through the hole, they lobbed three hand grenades into the room. Two of them exploded. They then stuck the barrel of an AK-47 through it and sprayed the room, hitting Dana.

The only one who stayed conscious the entire time, yet wounded in her legs, was Hadar. This amazing 13 year-old girl played dead till the terrorists left. She called emergency rescue, then security authorities, both of them telling her they cannot enter the kibbutz.

She tried to save her mother, applying pressure to her wound till Avida told her that her mother was gone. Dana’s last words were that she can’t breathe. Hadar then tried to save her brother Carmel. Avida could hear his death rattle.

The family was stuck in that room for 12 hours till they were evacuated.Only Hadar and Avida survived. One of Avida’s legs had to be amputated.

If you are shocked by this story, sickened, outraged, horrified, you need to understand that this is just one of thousands of similar, or even worse, stories that took place last Saturday morning.

There was the Arava family from kibbutz Nir Oz. Hamas terrorists broke into their house, shot the father in his leg, and livestreamed it all on Dikla’s (the mother) Facebook. They then took 17-year-old Tomer from house to house at gun point, forced him to tell people to open the secure room door in Hebrew, and killed everyone who did. The bodies of Tomer and his Mother Dikla have since been recovered.

In multiple cases, entire families, like the Kotz family from kibbutz Kfar Aza, were massacred in their house, father mother and three children.

There was 90 year-old Gina Semiatichova from kibbutz Kisufim, who survived the holocaust, only to be executed, shot in the head in her own house by Hamas terrorists.

But perhaps the worst stories are told by multiple victim recovery personnel. After seeing many horrors over decades of work in Israel, they break down when recalling what they describe as the worst things they have ever seen. It's not just the sheer numbers of murdered people but the brutality and cruelty the victims suffered.

Yossi Landau, one of the older members of the victim recovery unit recalls in tears a family that was taken to their living room, the two parents were seated on one side of the room and the two children (a boy aged 7 and a girl aged maybe 5), seated on the other. They were then tortured in front of each other, fingers chopped off, an eye gouged out, before being executed. Between them stood a table where the terrorists ate as the torture was going on. He saw corpses of naked women who were raped before being murdered, some of them were also dismembered. Many body parts that had been chopped off had to be collected in bags. A pregnant woman had her belly slashed open and the fetus was pulled out and killed. Children and babies were beheaded. In kibbutz Be'eri, a group of twenty children were brought outside, hands bound, and tortured. They were then piled up in two piles of ten each and burned. Other people were found to have been burned alive, including the charred body of a mother, still clinging to her charred baby.

You can be sure that there are photos, documenting all of this, and in some cases, Go-Pro videos, taken by the terrorists themselves as they gleefully committed these horrific crimes (I chose not to share them here because I don't want to be reported of flagged). Even ISIS didn't reach that level of depraved, brutal, gleeful cruelty.

Yes, I know this is terrible. And I realize you probably didn't enjoy reading this, reading about the worst thing to have happened to the Jewish people since the holocaust. But the world has to know, and if I can shed even a sliver of light on this for someone who may have not realized the depth and magnitude of what just happened, then I am morally obligated to do so.

#HamasisISIS #HamasISIS #????_??_????