Known for the unity among residents, kibbutz in southern Israel was the scene of massacre

The people of Be’eri sometimes said that the reason the Israeli kibbutz was so close to the Gaza Strip was because otherwise it would be too perfect.

“It was a joke, something we used to say because Be’eri is so beautiful. It’s the place where you want your children to grow up. The sunset is beautiful, the fields are green, it has everything you want from a vacation spot,” Lotan Pinyan told CNN on Wednesday (11).

Be’eri’s proximity to Gaza, which is just a few kilometers away, means that the liberal community has been a frequent target of Hamas rockets fired from the enclave – usually intercepted by Israeli defenses. The rockets were the only drawback of that idyllic location, Pinyan and his friends would say. “It’s not a joke now,” he said.

On Saturday morning (7), Hamas militants attacked Be’eri and left behind devastation on an unimaginable scale. They murdered more than 120 of its residents, including children, and kidnapped others. They set people’s homes on fire and then killed them as they tried to escape the heat and smoke. They looted, stole and destroyed what they could.

It all started with the sirens.

The community of about 1,100 people was woken up at 6:30 a.m. when the siren indicating an imminent rocket attack went off.

“But it wasn’t normal. We are used to bombings, we know what it sounds like: ‘tat – tat – tat’ But this was different. Did not stop. Tat – tat – tat – tat – tat – tat – tat,” said Michal Pinyan, Lotan’s wife, to CNN . “And then, about 45 minutes later, we started getting messages that there were terrorists in the kibbutz,” Lotan added.

The family’s WhatsApp group was flooded with anxious messages between Michal’s parents, Amir and Mati Weiss, and his three brothers.

9:25 am – Mati: shots on the balcony
9:26 am – Ran: Also here, there are shots outside the shelter window
9:30 am – Mati: I hear voices in Arabic outside my house
9:31 am – Dalit: Do you also listen to the security forces?
9:43 am – Amir: father is injured, they are inside the house
9:43 am – Ran: what do you mean?
9:44 am – Dalit: they entered?
9:44 am – Lotan: what? contact us
9:47 am – Ran: Limor spoke to Racheli, they are sending you something
9:49 am – Michal: Mom keep writing all the time
9:52 am – Eddie: When????
9:57 am – Limor: When, what’s happening to you?
10:01 – Michal: mother
10:01 – Michal: response
10:03 – Mati: save us
10:04 – Mati: save us
10:04 – Michal: Are you at the shelter?
10:04 – Mati: Daddy got shot and they’re throwing grenades
10:04 – Mati: They blew up the safe room
10:04 – Michal: inside the house?
10:04 – Mati: Yes

This message was the last that came from Mati, Michal’s mother. After that, silence.

“We knew they were probably dead. But there was still a small hope that maybe they weren’t, that they had been kidnapped,” said Lotan.

“It was already too late”

On the other side of the kibbutz, Tom Hand was receiving the same terrifying messages about terrorists invading his neighbors’ homes. All he could think about was his 8-year-old daughter Emily — one of the tallest in her class at school, with honey-blond hair and fair skin that tanned in the sun, a talented dancer and singer, a fun and smart girl, he said. .

Hand came to Be’eri 30 years ago as a volunteer, planning to stay for a few months, and never left. After his wife, Emily’s mother, died of cancer a few years ago, he and Emily lived here alone.

The community is very united; residents told CNN who eat meals together and share everything, including salaries, which go to a community treasury and are redistributed equally among all families.

Politically, the kibbutz leans to the left. Many see Gazans as their neighbors, Michal told CNN .

“There were people from Gaza who worked in the kibbutz and were part of the community, they took their children to the kibbutz’s kindergarten. When they could no longer come to work there, we started raising money from the community and now there is a fund that keeps them alive,” she said, adding that she is determined to continue sending money to the families.

On Friday night, Emily went to her friend’s house for a sleepover. “They were having a girls’ night out,” Hand said.

When the sirens went off at 6:30 a.m. Saturday, Hand wasn’t particularly worried; alarms are not uncommon in the kibbutz. Emily was sleeping at a friend’s house and he was sure both children would be safe.

“Until I heard the shots. And it was already too late. If I had known… maybe I could have run, picked her up, picked up her friend, picked up her mother and brought them back to my house. But by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late,” he said.

He was unable to contact them and could not leave because the kibbutz was already overrun by swarms of heavily armed militants.

“I had to think about Emily. She already lost her mother, I couldn’t risk her losing her father too,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Pinyans, shocked by what they understood to be happening in their parents’ house, prepared themselves for the possibility that their house could be the terrorists’ next target.

They were inside their safe room, but they faced a problem. His door could not be locked from the inside. Although all Israeli homes built after 1993 must have a shelter, these safe rooms are designed to withstand an explosion, not an armed incursion.

“We knew we had to keep the door closed, so we took everything we found in the safe room, wrapped it around the doorknob, tied it to the window and then put a chair inside and held it tight with a baseball bat,” Lotan said.

He spent the next few hours sitting by the door, holding the bat against it, waiting for the Israeli military to come and rescue them.

The kibbutz has its own volunteer emergency squad, with around 15 people who are supposed to protect the community from danger until the army arrives. With a military base just minutes away, everyone thought the Israel Defense Forces would arrive at any moment. But that didn’t happen.

“We waited for around 20 hours, with no food, no water, no bathroom,” said Lotan. “And the kids didn’t ask for anything. Not once,” Michal added.

The Israel Defense Forces told CNN which took days of intense battle to gain control of the kibbutz. To rescue the Pinyans, 15 soldiers broke into the house, formed a tight circle around the family and took them to safety — while the battle was still raging in the kibbutz, the family said.

As they left, Lotan said, he covered the children’s eyes so they wouldn’t see the corpses.

“We saw them, all of them, soldiers, kibbutz members and terrorists. They were scattered all over the kibbutz, everywhere we went there were bodies,” said Lotan.

Waiting at the Dead Sea

Many of those rescued from Be’eri by the military were evacuated to a hotel on the shores of the Dead Sea. Among them was Tom Hand, who spent the next few days waiting to hear anything about Emily.

Then the news came.

“Two people from the kibbutz, a team of doctors, psychiatrists, social workers… and they tell you. Gently but quickly because they have a lot of people to deal with,” he said, adding that he felt relieved.

Of all the horrible possibilities, death seemed the least painful.

“She was dead. I knew she wasn’t alone, she wasn’t in Gaza, she wasn’t in a dark room full of God knows how many people, pushed from one side to the other… terrified every minute of every day, possibly for years to come. So death was a blessing,” he told CNN with her voice breaking and tears streaming down her tired, pale face.

“In this crazy world, here I am hoping that my daughter is dead,” he said.

Many of the people rescued from Be’eri are staying in the same hotel as Hand, which means he is surrounded by love – but also by constant memories of Emily. Many of her friends who survived the massacre are at the hotel.

“Emily’s friends know she’s not here with me. Then they ask me what happened to her… they look at me and I say I still don’t know,” he said. “But then they see their parents hugging me, crying… children aren’t stupid, even at that age, so just seeing that I’m sure they understand.”

The community is holding on, trying to move forward, Michal Pinyan said. Every few minutes someone stops by to give you a hug, chat, share a memory of your parents.

She told CNN who knows that his parents died because their bodies were identified by people who knew them personally. However, she was asked to provide a DNA sample for official identification, which could take some time.

She has no idea what will happen next. “No one talks about funerals. We have nowhere to go. The kibbutz is now a closed military space,” she said.

Still, she believes Be’eri will be rebuilt somehow. “We are going to need a lot, a lot of strength, physical and emotional, to come back. But let’s go back, it’s not a question,” she said.

When their children ask about returning to a place where such horrors happened, the Pinyans say yes.

“We explained to them that we didn’t let the ship sink. We need to go and fix the place, fix the community. And after that, we can decide, as a family, what we do next,” said Lotan.

*With information from CNN’s Clarissa Ward, Brent Swails and Clayton Nage.