The human voices of Israel’s worst day

Survivors of the Hamas massacre speak about their trauma, rescuers reveal what they found, and friends recall a family obliterated. 

‘I was like Anne Frank’

As Israelis begin to grapple with the enormity of the massacres that hundreds of Palestinian gunmen perpetrated on Saturday in communities near Gaza, one place is emerging as an epicentre of the tragedy: Kibbutz Be’eri.

With about 1200 residents before the assault, Be’eri is the largest of the 25 villages that make up the Eshkol Regional Council. At least 108 bodies have been located in the kibbutz, which used to be known mostly for its thriving printing shop and its art galleries.

Now, the kibbutz is searing itself into the Israeli consciousness as the scene of what is already called the “Be’eri Massacre” on Wikipedia, where the event received its own entry because it’s a symbol of the war launched by Hamas’s attacks.

“I was like Anne Frank,” said Uri Ben Tzvi, 71, who hid with his wife in a narrow and dark corridor in one of the kibbutz’s structures. They went there because the door to the corridor resembles that of a closet. “It was a pogrom. Like going back to the Kishinev Pogrom,” he said, referencing a 1903 series of massacres in what is now the capital city of Moldova that helped galvanize Zionist sentiment.

‘They killed them and cut some of their heads’

Davidi Ben Zion led the paratroopers who led the assault that rescued Kibbutz Kfar Aza from the terrorist attack.

"Thank God we saved many lives of many parents and children," he said. "Unfortunately, some were burned by Molotov [cocktails]. They are very aggressive, like animals."