EVE BEFORE THE SLAUGHTER BY Fiamma Nirenstein
It was the morning of October 7, 2023. The sun shone gloriously on the yellow sand, the grass of the kibbutzim, the swing chairs beneath the veranda, the lopsided sculptures, the children’s bicycles, the’ grandparents’ electric cars, the shells threaded onto string swinging in the wind and tinkling in front of the houses. The sea nearby. Everyone was sleeping. It was six o’clock on Shabbat morning. Not far away, a crowd of thousands of young people was dancing to pounding rave music at a festival called Nova, lightheaded with youth and peace until collapsing into sleep. In the kibbutzim of southern Israel, among the Israeli families, this was the beginning of a holiday; nobody knew of the reality of roaring white pickup trucks breaking through the mesh fences and walls to invade.
Each Hamas team headed for a kibbutz, and in the kibbutzim, they searched house by house for the families and killed them in the most unthinkable ways, concentrating on the children. The terrorists had maps obtained from work they had done in the communities. They knew where they lived, how many they were, and where the children’s bedroom was. As filmed by the murderers’ own cameras affixed to their foreheads, I saw their house-by-house hunt, the pursuit of the children, and the discovery of desperate families huddled in their safe rooms. The monsters in the videos walked with machine guns drawn on the green lawns, searched in small groups for their next victims, threw a hand grenade, broke down a door, and found yet another one, two, three people stupefied by their encounter with death, killed the family. Ten against one, they encountered a desperate father coming out to defend his family or an unsuspecting and heroic cop who had rushed to answer the call.