‘I was alone with 15 terrorists... I knew they might kill me at any second’
One survivor recalls the terrifying day when Hamas attacked her kibbutz – and life changed forever
For Adi Efrat, 51, life will for evermore be split in two – before and after Oct 7, the day Hamas terrorists took her from her home on Kibbutz Be’eri, the day her house was scorched to the ground, the day dozens of her friends and neighbours were murdered. Over 12 hours she was held captive by Hamas and ended up alone with 15 terrorists, until a gun battle with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) forced them to retreat.
By a “miracle” and the fortitude of those soldiers, Ms Efrat survived, as did her husband Avishai, her daughter Dvir, 21, and an adopted son David, 34, who were all trapped in their houses nearby. They are among the lucky ones. More than 100 on Kibbutz Be’eri didn’t make it and at least 10 are still missing.
Before Oct 7, Ms Efrat was a manager of a resilience centre in Sderot, helping people who experienced trauma to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using animal therapy. Sderot has since been evacuated and Ms Efrat and the survivors of Kibbutz Be’eri have been relocated to the Dead Sea, but her connection with animals endures. Every other day she’s been making the six-hour, perilous return journey to Be’eri to feed the farm animals and stray cats on the kibbutz – entering the zone accompanied by two armed guards. ‘‘It feels good to deal with life, to deal with innocent creatures,’’ she says.
This week she is in London to share her story. ‘‘First-hand testimony is powerful,’’ says Rabbi Naftali Schiff, who runs Jewish Futures, the charity that has brought her to the UK. ‘‘It took 50 years for the Holocaust denial to begin. For this massacre it has taken five minutes,’’ he says of the whitewashing on social media and the recent denial by the Hamas chief.
For Ms Efrat, what should feel like respite is still proving stressful. ‘‘To see all these demonstrations… it’s too hurtful,’’ she says.
Wearing silk trousers and a smart white top – ‘‘everything is donated, all I own are the pyjamas and robe I had on my back’’ – kibbutz life feels a world away. ‘‘It’s a socialist way of life – a collective community,’’ she says of the kibbutz. Finances are pooled, they have a shared dining room, a fleet of kibbutz cars, and make shared decisions on the future of the kibbutz. She sees herself as a ‘‘humanist’’, believing in equality across race and religion. The thesis for her masters degree, in fact, was on the relationships between Arabs and Israelis. ‘‘For me, people are people. I believe in mankind. I believe in goodness. And in goodwill,’’ she says.
But that belief was tested to its limits five weeks ago, when she was woken on the Saturday by the sound of bombing. ‘‘It was louder than usual,’’ she remembers. ‘‘There are often rocket attacks from Gaza. Usually you hear a siren and you go into the safe room. You close the door and you wait for 10 minutes and then you go back to life. This is the way we have lived for almost 20 years – since shortly after we withdraw from Gaza.’’
At that moment in 2005, when Israel withdrew in return for ‘‘peaceful coexistence,’’ she was full of hope – for Israel and for the Palestinian people. ‘‘I thought it would be like it is with Egypt or Jordan,’’ she says. ‘‘I thought we’d go to the beaches in Gaza. I thought we’d go to buy falafel in their markets…’’ she says, trailing off. But then, ‘‘the bombs started. At first they were like fireworks, but they grew stronger. Soon every house had to have a safe room.’’
But on that fateful morning, with an estimated 3,000 rockets raining down and similar numbers of terrorists breaking through the fence, Israel’s Iron Dome defence system could not protect them. She checked her phone and had hundreds of messages – there was panic. ‘‘I saw people in the neighbourhood where my husband lives were messaging that they hear Arabic outside their window, that terrorists are trying to come into their houses. My heart just sank.’’
She had been living apart from her husband for several months, but they had spent the previous two days ‘‘trying to be back together. We decided to do something special. So we went to Tel Aviv, trying to celebrate life and resolve our feelings towards each other. We went to restaurants and to the beach and toured the markets. It was wonderful. It was peaceful.’’
Does it feel possible she’ll feel like that again? Her stoicism breaks and she pauses, that blissful memory from a previous life now painful.
“I know it’s possible. But I don’t yet feel it’s possible. There’s a difference,’’ she says, back in control, in trauma therapist mode.
On that October morning, with her husband in another neighbourhood within Be’eri, her daughter a few houses away and her adopted son on Kibbutz Cholit nearby, they made a pact on their family WhatsApp group: stay quiet. Stay on the floor to avoid gunshots. And check in every few minutes to let everyone know you’re all right.
‘‘All the time I was hearing gunshots outside my house and my daughter’s house. And I can see messages on all my groups. They say: ‘They’re inside my house’, ‘They’re trying to get into the safe room’. People are saying ‘goodbye’ and ‘I love you’ and then they’re not active in the group anymore. So I’m asking myself, ‘What does it mean?’ And I don’t know. Or I don’t want to know.’’ Then her husband messages: terrorists are in his house. They’ve set it on fire. ‘‘So I’m trying to find out if the door to his safe room is fireproof. I’m asking my brothers and sisters via another WhatsApp group. And then they tell me it is. So we’re begging my husband: ‘please, please stay in the room. They’ll shoot you if you go out of the window. The army will be coming. Maybe breathing smoke is not so dangerous. It takes a while before you die from that’.’’
And then she hears Arabic in her own house. Two men. They are laughing. ‘‘My heart is beating like crazy. I feel like my chest is about to burst.’’ She prays they can’t open the door to her safe room, but in seconds they are in and ‘‘I am looking right at them’’. Two armed men in flip-flops and civilian clothes. And she is begging them to leave her alone. They tell her if she gives them her car, they won’t kill her. ‘‘I explain that I don’t have a car but that the kibbutz has many cars. And I say in Arabic ‘100 cars’ and they tell me to find them the keys. I am shaking. When I go to the kitchen I see they have rifled through my bag, which gives me hope that they really mean what they say. I show them the immobiliser and I tell them to go to the dining room where the keys are kept and the kibbutz cars are parked. They tell me to show them. I’ve lived in the kibbutz for 30 years, but I’m so stressed, I lose my sense of direction. Eventually, I manage to point the way, but they say: ‘No, you need to come with us’.
‘‘We start walking and they ask me where I’m from. I tell them my parents are from Morocco. They ask if I am an Arab – a ‘Jew Arab’. So I tell them, yes. It’s a surreal moment, walking through the empty streets of the kibbutz – the sun is shining, the grass is green. It’s very confusing. Then I see someone who looks like an Israeli soldier. He’s waving me towards him and I’m trying to show him that I have terrorists with me. One of the terrorists is holding my hand, the other has a rifle on his shoulder. And then there are gunshots and the terrorists drag me by the hand and start running. But I realise we’re running west. And I think: ‘West is not good. West is towards Gaza’. I don’t want to let go of the hope that if they have the cars they will go away. So I’m trying to tell them that this is not the right way to the cars. But they say to me in Arabic: Run, run.’”
The terrorists speak to their commander and take her to a house where a 97-year-old woman and her caregiver are held captive. Ms Efrat’s hands are bound tightly behind her back. ‘‘They tell us not to talk among ourselves.’’ Then she hears a cry. ‘‘It’s very loud, it’s piercing. Screaming: ‘Daddy! Daddy! I want my daddy. Where’s my daddy?’ And soon, I see a terrorist holding a little child dangling by one arm, and he throws him on the porch beside us.
“The boy is terrified so the second he feels his legs on the floor, he’s trying to run away. I don’t have my hands to hold him. So I’m trying to lean towards him and to tell him that it’s not safe to go. I’m afraid that if he runs they will shoot him. He’s crying all the time, screaming ‘Daddy,’ so I want to deflect and am trying to talk to him. I say : ‘You want Daddy? Who’s your daddy? Tell me his name. Where does your Daddy work?’ I try to ground him. And then she sees another terrorist coming with a woman she knows from the kibbutz, with another boy, both of them wounded, their faces full of smoke.
‘‘The boy has a gash on his head, there’s blood running down his face. He’s asking questions all the time, agitated and afraid. And the mother is having trouble walking. She collapses near me. The second she sees me, she tells me: ‘They shot my husband and Mila’. I say: ‘I’m so sorry to hear that. Who’s Mila?’ She says: ‘She’s my baby.’ I say to her that maybe she’s not dead. Maybe she’s only wounded. She says: ‘No. They shot her in the head.’
“I don’t have any words to comfort her. I don’t have my arms to put around her. I just lean my head on her shoulder. I don’t even have tears to cry.’’ The terrorists then single her out and take her with them. They say if she runs they will shoot her. By now the IDF have arrived so the terrorists use her as a human shield as they make their way further west to where there is a car waiting.
They tell her to take ‘‘their friends’’ out. She doesn’t know if they are terrorists or Israelis, dead or alive, but they have untied her so she lifts her hands above her head. She takes a few steps but then hears gunshots and drops to the ground. The terrorists are startled and one grabs her, dragging her with him.
‘‘Three weeks later, I learned that the shot was from an IDF soldier. The bullet passed over my shoulder and killed one of the terrorists. I spoke to that soldier on the phone, through a mutual friend, and it was very emotional.’’
By now, it was 2pm. ‘‘We start running through a field and they’re all heading to the same place. I know the house. The house is already burning. They want me to go in but it’s too hot. I see grenades on the floor… rifles. I smell gunpowder. I hear gunshots. I’m so scared. There are about 15 of them. And I know one of them can decide to just kill me at any moment. So I hide in the storage room. There’s heavy fighting for about half an hour. Gradually I see fewer and fewer terrorist fighters. They retreat. And after a while it’s quiet. I start to hear Hebrew. So I cry out and hear one of the soldiers say, ‘There’s a civilian here’. But then the shooting starts again – so I feel guilty that maybe one of the soldiers will get injured.’’
It goes quiet then she hears Hebrew again: “I hear there are two teams, two commanders, telling their teams what to do. In one second, one of the commanders finds me. And he says to me: ‘You’re with us now. You’re safe’.’’
For Ms Efrat, relief mixed with fear and guilt. ‘‘I know I’m not going to be captive but the danger is not over. And I worry I’m going to be a distraction. These soldiers are young, they are someone’s sons and they are risking their lives for me. So I tell them: ‘Leave me here. I don’t want to make it harder for you.’ But they say: ‘No way. This is what we trained for. This is what we came for. To free the civilians. We’re not leaving you. Not for one second’.” Over 90 minutes, the soldiers form a barrier around her and move through the kibbutz. ‘‘Those soldiers were like angels, but they fought like lions. Four were wounded in front of my eyes,’’ she says. Eventually Ms Efrat and the injured soldiers were taken from the kibbutz, where others had been evacuated.
As we pore over a map of her kibbutz, she traces the route the terrorists took, but her finger hovers over her neighbour’s house. ‘‘Lianne [Sharabi] and her teenage daughters, Noiya and Yahel. They were actually British,’’ she says. ‘‘I went to their funeral. The husband Eli is kidnapped.
“Another family, Bira, of five people. only one of them survived,’’ she says, shifting her finger along one. “Another family below here, Out of five people, one survived – and also his brother – murdered,” she says, taking a pause to maintain her composure. ‘‘So, so many families are gone.’’
It took until 10pm for her daughter to be evacuated – ‘‘I held her so hard and kissed her face and her hair and her eyes’’ – and many more tortuous hours until she was finally reunited with her husband at 2am on Sunday. ‘‘We all hug each other a lot now and feel like those that died are ordering us to be closer to one another.’’ She can’t count how many funerals she’s been to. Several each day, sometimes burying whole families at a time, but her community is there, strengthening each other.
With so much sadness all around her, can she still find hope? ‘‘If I lose hope then they’ve got the best of me, so I’m not losing hope,’’ she says, looking me straight in the eye.
There are many steps to that hope. Hope that one day she will be able to return and rebuild her beloved Kibbutz Be’eri. Hope that Israel will one day be safe again, although right now she ‘‘can’t imagine what safe feels like’’ any more. And that ever-elusive hope of peace. Ultimately, she says, that can only happen when all the Palestinian people and their leaders accept Israel’s existence.
‘‘Not all the people who live in the Gaza strip are Hamas terrorists. But those people who came to butcher us, they are sub-human. They are monsters. They must be destroyed.’’ And not only for the sake of Israel. ‘‘What the world needs to understand is that our lesson is not only our lesson. Hamas are actually a threat to the free world. Fundamentalism is dangerous for everybody.
“But, no, I have not lost all hope. A peaceful State of Israel – and real peace with our neighbours? I still believe it can happen.’’
‘I thought we’d go to the beaches in Gaza, I thought we’d go to buy falafel in their markets’
‘Those people who came to butcher us are sub-human, they are monsters’