Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: In Israel was Kfar Aza in kibbutz flagged by the Gaza stroke. Darzat Hadassah met her familiar in a bunker.
Lise van Harbroor Thal who our lewe sins die dach is verandert en over the vreiche wer Lewe Oitwehr Norman Hadas, welcome in our studio and thank you for coming here.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Thank you for having me.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: So two years ago, two years have passed since October 7, 2023. How do you feel when you look back on these past two years?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Actually, I don't feel that it's been two years.
I'm still on October 7th.
Hostages haven't come back.
Kharaza is still almost empty.
My family lives all around in other places.
My brother is gone and we are really trying to recover.
Some, you know, will say people back to work and normal life. But nothing is normal.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Nothing is normal.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Nothing is normal.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: So how has your life changed since then? Because you grew up in Kvar Aza, but it was not a place where you lived.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Yeah, so we used to come and visit Kvaraza every month, about every month, every three weeks, every month and a half, like it's changing.
And on October 6th, we came for Simchatoa.
I'm living in Jezreel Valley, which is.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: A bit more in the north of Israel.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Yeah, in the northern part of Israel.
And for me, coming to Kharaza on this date, being part of this thing with my family, actually, you know, people ask me, oh, you found the date to go there? And I say, I had to be.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: There.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: So I was there with my family.
And it's a very crucial point in my life because I feel that I had to be there.
But, you know, thinking about it, you know, if I was at home and experiencing it from outside, for me, I think the feeling was different and maybe even heavier because it's more difficult to bear then. Yeah, more difficult to bear.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Is there a hadas before 7th of October and after 7th of October?
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Well, it's the same adas, just with a broken heart.
I believe in peace, I believe in people. I believe that in all around the world, people want to live quietly and safely.
And for me, experiencing this thing that is unhuman and not even religious based or just, you know, cruelty, pure cruelty broke my heart.
And so it's not exactly a dust before and a dust after, but it really did break my heart.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: Yeah. So you were a survivor of this Hamas attack. How did it impact your life after October 7th? Because I can imagine, you know, you Describe all the things that happened, and we're going to talk about that later.
But what changes came into your life?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Actually, the biggest change is change with my priorities.
I understood a lot about the importance of, first of all, being with my family.
Secondly, doing things that are meaningful in our life.
Acting for goodness, for peace, making a difference.
I used to work at Microsoft, which is a global Corp.
And since then, I wasn't really able to get back to work. It took me a lot of time just to get back to the offices and start functioning. But also when I started functioning and doing my job, I was less happy about it, I was less enthusiastic about it. I really felt that I had to do something different.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Other things are more important.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: A lot of other things are more important. Yeah. And I wanted to do meaningful things to make a difference and to help people, to emphasize the importance of the community and to be more with my family, to see my daughters, to be with them.
It's a really change of perspective.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Okay, so I want to take you back to that day, October 7, 2023.
How did you wake up in the morning?
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Well, we slept at my mom's house because we were guests. I grew up in the kibbutz and I left about 25 years ago.
I did the regular course of Tel Aviv University, first of all army, then Tel Aviv University, and then I got married and then my daughters were born. So I used to live in the center and then up north, and we used to visit. My daughters kind of, you know, grew up in the summers in the kibbutz at their grandmother and my brothers lived there.
And when my brother got back to the kibbutz, a few years after him, my brother Deco got back to the kibbutz.
So I had a big family in the kibbutz.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: So enough people to visit there.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of people to visit. And we used to come there every once in a while.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Very.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: No fear.
When I grew up in Kfaraza, you know, our guard of the kibbutz, of the gate of the kibbutz was Ahmed. He was from Gaza. And him and his family were invited to all the, you know, the holidays in Kfaraza. And we used to live very, you know, very nice with our neighbors.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. But then you woke up on this day, 7th of October. So what happened there?
[00:06:42] Speaker B: So we woke up on October 7th and we heard, you know, the red alarm, the red color, red alarm. And then we ran straight to the safe room. And very soon we understood that it's something different because we heard beside all the Bombings and the alarm. We also heard shootings and we started receiving messages.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: Just to sketch it a bit, you know, Akfar Aza is very close to the Gaza border, so the old people living there or staying there, they were used to regular rocket shooting.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is kind of also weird and very crazy to live in a daily danger of having, you know, running to the Safe room for 10 minutes and then getting, you know, going back to work and living like this.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: Yeah, but this was different. You say, but this was different.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Yeah, because we also started here shootings. And also the bombings were very, very, very frequent.
My mom, because she lives in a kibbutz, she used to eat and she wanted to make coffee. And my daughter and her cousin, my niece, who was sleeping in our house as well, in my mom's house as well.
They told her, no, get in with us to the safe room. It's very scary. We hear shootings and not only bombings.
So we got into the safe room.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Yeah, so did you, at that moment, what time was it in the morning?
[00:08:12] Speaker B: 6:29.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Did you have any idea what was happening outside?
[00:08:15] Speaker B: Nothing. Nothing. And it took hours, even days to understand what was going on. In the beginning, we thought, you know, there was few terrorists, you know, invading the kibbutz and attacking the kibbutz.
And apparently after that, we found out that at the same time, my brother Tal, in his house, he told his family.
He told his family, it's not time to be heroes. You have to get in the safe room. And he went and took weapon and just ran towards the terrorists, and he got murdered in the same morning. We didn't even know that.
So we sat in the safe room and just started hearing, you know, on WhatsApp groups, people seeing terrorists coming, you know, from the window. They saw terrorists coming towards their houses.
They were writing. We hear shootings. We hear.
We see people with green ribbons. With green.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Not ribbons, just the bandanas.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Bandanas? Yeah, the green bandanas. We see them running towards us.
And then we heard about our consul, Ophel Lipstein. He was killed first. And it was all over the media.
We don't have a television at the safe room, but we heard this on the WhatsApp group.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: It was all coming in on the.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Phones, all coming in on the WhatsApp group.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: So what did you think? Because you were there with your mother and your daughters, what did you think then?
[00:09:44] Speaker B: I was there with my mother and one of my daughters and my niece, Tal's kid, Tal's girl, and also my younger brother.
We didn't know what to think, I thought maybe, you know, there was one small group that invaded the kibbutz and they're killing.
And in a minute the army will come, our, you know, first responders civilian group will kill them, we'll catch them. I don't know.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: But in a minute it will be rescued. Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: In a minute it will all be over. A few minutes, one hour, I don't know.
We didn't know the extent of it. We didn't know what's happening because it didn't happen. Never, never. And in our worst dreams, our worst nightmare, nightmares, we never thought it could be something that big.
Even running forward to a day after when we got rescued, when we still thought it's our kibbutz only, and only a day after we started to understand there was all the Gaza envelope, all the kibbutzes around us about Nova. We just heard, you know, a day or a few days. I don't even remember when we heard about the festival.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: Yeah, but it was only later that you heard about the other kibbutzes and Nova Festival, etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then you're there, you're stuck in the safe room with your daughter, with your mother, with your niece. What do you do?
[00:11:27] Speaker B: So actually, when people ask me, you know, it was so many hours, what did you talk about?
We didn't talk a lot. We were very silent.
We were listening because Saturday morning at about 10:30, we started hearing Allah au au akbar. Shoutings and the shootings got very close to us. Voices outside, voices outside our safe room. We got very scared. We jumped on the door, we held the door. Somebody tried to open it.
We fought them, we don't know who it is. And a few minutes later, we started hearing talking in Hebrew in our house, in my mom's house.
We listened very carefully and then we understood.
The words are in Hebrew.
Somebody shot my back. Somebody shot my leg. And then we understood there are soldiers in our house.
And we opened the door and there was a wounded soldier in the house. In the house? Yeah. His name is Jona Yona Brief.
He was taken to emergency room and he was there for 417 days. And then he died. He didn't make it, but he was more than a year on emergency room.
And we saw him, he was wounded and we saw some soldiers around him trying to treat him.
Two soldiers, they told us, close the door, don't get out. We asked for water, we didn't have any water.
So we asked water to go out to the toilets and they let us go. One by one to the toilets. They said, we'll bring you water. Water. You don't go out because it was.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: Still too dangerous outside.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it was very dangerous. All our house was surrounded by terrorists.
And two of the soldiers, you know, they opened the window of the kitchen. They stood one side, you know, they opened both sides and they stood on the kitchen and they, you know, aiming there. They're protecting the house, actually.
And we went to the bathroom one by one to the toilet and they brought us water and closed the door. And then two of them got in and they told us, they asked us to open the Google map and just to explain them, you know, where is the swimming pool, where's the dining room? Just to map the kibbutz for them.
So my niece and my mom did it for them.
And then my niece entered one of them to the Kibbutz WhatsApp group.
So he can be in touch with all the people that are asking for help. People just start to scream for help, to see, you know, my son is wounded. He's in this building. He's in that environment. Just save him, go and take him like very crazy. I think every second there were 10 messages.
It was endless. It was very scary, of course.
So after they came to our safe room, they went out. They were a little bit. They stayed in our house. We felt a little bit safer. But after that they were evacuated. They had cars take them to other places to fight and on.
And they're wounded outside. Yeah.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: So you were alone again?
[00:14:57] Speaker B: And we were alone again, yeah. We asked them if there are any casualties and they wouldn't answer. But apparently two. They lost two soldiers already by then. They lost two soldiers and they have some wounded.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: How long did this continue?
[00:15:12] Speaker B: This was Saturday, noon, about.
They left around afternoon or so.
And then we were alone again. Our electricity fell. We didn't have electricity. We didn't have any connection, any network.
The only network that was working was my niece's phone. So we had a little bit of connection from outside.
Her phone was started, you know, to run low of battery.
And then in the evening, my daughter, she reminded her that she had a cable that can charge her from our phones. So we just gave her our phones to use it as a battery. And this was.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: This was the only phone actually working?
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Our phones weren't working. Was useless, just like, you know, a charger.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: So it was lucky that she had this cable. So. So we can keep on being in contact with the external world. Otherwise we were contactless. We were like, you know, my Friends tell me you were last seen on WhatsApp on 1233 noon. And then they thought they lost me.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: So then next. Because then the evening comes.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: Yeah, the evening comes. And again we were very, you know, we were very quiet. We were very stressed and we already all the time listening. We wanted to hear if, you know, somebody's running towards our house.
And then at 10:30pm we heard some voices and somebody knocked our door. We were again listening. They said, it's the army.
They had a password because also, you know, terrorists were saying it's the army open.
So they said the code that we open. And then they said they came to clear the house from terrorists and after them there's going to be a rescue unit that will come to take us out.
It was very weird because they closed the door and went. So, you know, we didn't know terrorists can come between them and the rescue team. So we didn't understand the.
But they gave us also they gave us two more bottles of water and we went to the toilet again like it was on break.
But then night came and nobody came to rescue us.
They probably skipped our house because towards the night, towards the morning, some families around us were already rescued. And we were still there.
We were on darkness. And my daughter found a kind of a lead, lead lights she had in her bag, so it wasn't battery. So it was like purple light in our safe room. But we started to run out of air because we didn't have air conditioner.
We were five people in a very small room. We didn't have enough water. We just drank very, very little. Each one of us to, you know, to give, you know, to leave some for the others.
My daughter was most of the time under the bed, very, very frightened. Gali was some of the time with her. My niece was some of the time with her, some of the time outside with her phone.
She also, she was sending messages to the soldiers and trying to, you know, to connect between people that are crying for help in the, in the groups to. To the soldiers that were entered our house and she took their number.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: What do you say to your daughter if she's being so afraid? You cannot say things are going to be all right because you don't know. But what do you say?
[00:19:07] Speaker B: Actually, I don't remember.
I really don't remember. I think we were all, you know, I can remember we were trying to hug more, you know, but speaking, you know, I don't know words. I don't think there were words in these situations. There's no Words, no words, just hug and try to, you know, to feel the breathing and to feel the heartbeat and to, you know, breathe more deeply and try to relax. But you know, I cannot say everything will be all right. Although I did said it once, you know, my niece said she's worried about her dad because we didn't hear from him.
And I told her, your dad is a hero, he'll be okay. And I really believed in it at that stage.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: So tell me about the moment that you and your family were rescued on Saturday.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: It started in the first that on Saturday we still weren't rescued and my other brother Dekel was already rescued at night.
So he tried to send forces to us. He knew that we are still there.
And actually they didn't even write to Gali's phone. They just looked and they saw that she's connected and it was enough for them to see that we're still alive because they didn't want to use her body battery or, you know, they wanted us to be still able to contact.
So he tried externally and also other people tried, my friends tried, but.
So somebody from Air Force called us and suddenly around noon time he said, your house is surrounded, we know that you're there. We're going to send rescue team the minute we will be able to. And please, please hold the door and don't let anyone in. And it's a horrible thing to hear because you know, it's something you say for people that are going to die. Like if the army haven't come. No, no, until now. And they said they cannot come.
I don't know, but I really didn't feel that we're going to die. I don't know why, but it was scary. It was very, very scary. And then he said, there's another soldier that's going to call you. So another soldier called and she talked with Gali and she said, we're going to send force to you in a few minutes, please hold with me on the line. And she said to her, we have no battery, so please call later, call me when they're here so we can know to prepare. And then an hour and a half passed into the end call.
So we called back to her and she answered and she said, oh, I'm off shift, I'm not in the office anymore. And we're like, what are the people that you know going off shift in this situation? We are surrounded by terrorists. And you said that they're going to rescue us and then you're going home. Like I don't know it was very weird.
So then what happened was.
Didn't have anything to do with our rescue trials because forces have arrived to the kibbutz and they started to bomb with tanks. They started to bomb houses around us that had terrorist headquarters inside them.
And one of the houses next to us was bombed, and. And the soldiers that bombed it, they saw two terrorists running towards our house.
And they entered the house and we heard the bomb, the big bomb. And then we heard steps running towards our house and smashed glasses.
And we held the handle very tight. Again, we jumped on the handle.
Every time we jumped on the handle. I had a knife there. My mom gave my brother knife for the holiday.
She got one as a present. So I just held it. And I knew that I, you know, I knew that I need a plan, because if I didn't have a plan, I'll freeze.
So I just planned, you know, in my head, like a very veteran commando warrior.
And I, you know, I. That had helmets and shields, and then I'd go on the neck because it's bare. And I really planned it because it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that it is not realistic that I kill somebody, but I just needed a plan to not freeze.
So they ran to terrorists.
They ran into our house. We held handle and I held a knife, and they wouldn't. They were on.
So they didn't try, probably very hard.
We were lucky. But then they went to another room, and the soldiers, because they saw them, they came after them and they knocked our door, and they asked us, how many civilians are you? And we said, we're five. Everybody's here. None of you went out? We said, yeah, we're all here.
And they closed the door, they said, stay inside, don't go out. And. Okay. We didn't understand. Did you come to rescue us? We didn't know at that minute that terrorists are in the house. We just heard the footsteps. We didn't know who tried to open the door. We just.
And then we heard, after they closed the door, we heard a lot of shootings and smashed glasses and very, you know, a lot of Balagan. We said a lot of mess.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Mess, yeah.
So there was fighting going on inside.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Our house, and while we are in the safe room, and they opened it again another time.
They wanted to make sure that everyone is there, that, you know, that they didn't. The terrorists that came didn't take a hostage to the next room, or they wanted to make sure that no other civilians are in the house, because they shot a room which was Closed. And somebody was there.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:14] Speaker B: So the fight is going on. And the third time they came to our safe room, they just opened a very, very narrow gap. Gap? Yeah. And they told us when we open the door wide, you are going to take nothing with you and just run shallow, run, run low, one by one through the balcony.
And soldiers are waiting for you there. They'll take you to a safe place, do it fast. And they opened the door wide, all the house was full of smoke and a group of five or six soldiers were standing just like wall between us and the back of the house.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Protecting you?
[00:25:59] Speaker B: Protecting us from the. There was a battle there and we were running one by one and they took us to another house, like, I don't know, 50 meters from there.
And after a few minutes, all the soldiers evacuated the house and the tanks, you know, just shot a bullet inside the house.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: They destroyed it with the terrorists.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Destroyed the house internally with the terrorists.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: And this was how you got out? This was on Sunday.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: What time on Sunday?
[00:26:30] Speaker A: At 3pm 3pm so you had been like one and a half day as a prisoner in the house of your mother?
[00:26:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: So then.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: Then they took us to another house and they. We were waiting for a car to take us outside the kibbutz. In the other house there was already air conditioner and light and I remember bowl with grapes. We didn't eat for 35 hours and I was starving, pretty, but I had no appetite. I couldn't eat anything, but I was starving. It's like the first time I understood the difference between appetites and hunger.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it's something different.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: Yeah. So I remember taking a grape and drinking some water and feeling the coolness of the air conditioner. But it took an hour to take us out of this house, to bring an armed car that could take us out of the kibbutz.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: So after living through such a horror, you also told us that your brother Tal, who was head of the security of Kar Aza, he was killed. How can you pick up normal life again after such a traumatic experience for you, for your family, for everyone, but especially for yourself?
[00:27:43] Speaker B: What is normal?
First of all, the life in Israel are not normal.
But. But for me, normal is understanding the priorities in life and having the strength to get up every morning and hugging my daughters and smiling again, which took me a while.
And we didn't know what's with my brother. So it took us like two and a half days.
We called every possible hospital to see if there is an. An anonymous soldier or something that he might be evacuated we knew that he was wounded because he sent a message to his group, his soldiers, saying that he was wounded and that they are terrorists, they're wearing army uniforms and they have M16 with them.
And he said, first kill them and then we'll take care of the wounded.
And then he got shot again. Now we knew it just afterwards.
So it took about three days for somebody from the kibbutz to identify his body. But then we had to wait seven more days to the official identification, confirmation of it. Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: So you have been through a horrific time. The whole country also of Israel has been through a horrific time. Two years now of war. Do you think in your opinion, Israel at some time will be the country again as it was on October 6, 2023?
[00:29:20] Speaker B: I hope it will be much better than October 6, 2023. I hope these events, it's not even one event, it's events.
I really hope it will be a wake up call for the good people to get into the leadership of Israel and take it to a moral place again and to a place that is good for the civilians, all the civilians, and not only for themselves.
I hope politics will be clean and honest and. And again, representing the people and not themselves.
I believe it can happen.
I'm waiting for it to happen.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: So you're optimistic about the future?
[00:30:13] Speaker B: I cannot be not optimistic because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to live. I need to believe that some people will change.
And, you know, after we were evacuated from the kibbutz, they took us to Shefaim and all the kibbutz was there for more than a year.
I got a room with my daughter and my other daughter joined us a day after, which, you know, it's a whole different story.
She passed all this from outside, losing her mom and her sister like three times at that day and a half.
So she joined us and we were. Actually, I couldn't go home because I couldn't, you know, get back to normal life, which I'm a mom in it and, you know, cooking and laundry and working and I just couldn't. I just had to understand how to breathe again and realize that we're alive.
So I stayed with all the people of Kvaraza, which some of them I grew up with.
[00:31:21] Speaker A: It helped also.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: It was life saving for me, just getting up in the morning, going to the dining room, having someone cook me the meals, and then getting into the dining room and seeing all these faces, which is, you know, you don't have to speak. They know what you've been through because.
[00:31:39] Speaker A: They'Ve been through the same.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And every face is a different story, a different safe room, another horrible story.
And just sitting with them in the evenings and hearing these stories, it's like kind of normalizing your own story and understanding that they understand you. Yeah. And then be with my brother's friends and hearing stories about him and then funeral and Shiva inch frame, not in his house. And it's, you know, it was a very, like, I don't know, an external reality that, you know, we were like in a. In a.
We were in a. Like a communal Shiva.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: Together with all these people with Greek. Yeah.
[00:32:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:28] Speaker A: Now thousands of Christians worldwide are praying for Israel, are praying for families like yourself.
They stand with Israel already for the past two years. How can we support you? How can we support the people of Israel?
[00:32:43] Speaker B: First of all, knowing that Christians support Israel is heartwarming. Very heartwarming.
Because I'm a peace person. I believe that, you know, every person on earth should live with his belief and his religion and his tradition and whatever he chooses to live, however he chooses to live.
And, you know, and respect other people that would like to, you know, to live their own lives. So it's heartwarming, and I appreciate it very much.
[00:33:23] Speaker A: And what can we do more, according to you?
[00:33:27] Speaker B: According to me, I think good.
How I forgot the word for hasbara, you know, for petite. It's like for speaking out for Israel. Speaking out for Israel. Yeah. Mentioning facts and not phrases. Or, you know, like, free Palestine, which I agree with the Free Palestine, but you have to free Palestine from Hamas because they are a terror group.
Israel has been a country under war. It makes things that I don't fully agree with, but they protect us most of the time.
So it's very complicated.
[00:34:14] Speaker A: Your message is very clear to the audience to speak out about Israel and to help in any way that we can. Thank you very much, Hadas, for coming to our studio and sharing your story.
The gear.
