Ten members of the same family, including three children aged three to 12, were said to have been kidnapped on Saturday from Kibbutz Be’eri near the Gaza border and are in the hands of the terrorist group Hamas.
Shaked Haran, a lawyer at the public advocacy nonprofit Lobby99, grew up on the kibbutz but recently moved to the southern city of Beersheba with her husband and two children and was spared.
Her brother Yuval and his wife Anna Lee are also residents of the kibbutz but were at an event on Saturday morning.
The rest of the family wasn’t so lucky – her parents, her sister, her sister’s husband, her two children Yahel, 3, and Naveh, 8, an aunt and uncle, and the uncle’s carer were all there at the time in Be’eri was stormed by terrorists and has now disappeared. Another aunt and her daughter Noam, 12, are also missing.
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On Saturday morning, after a massive rocket attack on the kibbutz, dozens of Hamas terrorists entered through the main gate, shot at the security forces there and went from house to house, murdering residents, blowing up the doors of security rooms to shoot those inside, and setting houses on fire set.
Rescue workers subsequently found 108 bodies of residents – a tenth of the kibbutz population.
Relatives of Shaked Haran from Kibbutz Be’eri near the border with the Gaza Strip are missing and are believed to have been in Hamas captivity since Saturday, October 7, 2023. (With kind approval)
By the time Israeli forces reached the family’s homes on Saturday, they had all burned to the ground, according to Shaked Haran’s colleague Rachel Gur, deputy director of Lobby99, which is helping publicize the tragedy.
Except for the grandmother, who is now with Haran in Beersheba, no one was to be found.
Remains of destruction at Kibbutz Be’eri, seen on October 11, 2023. (Lazar Berman / Times of Israel)
Shaked and her husband frantically called all the phones all Saturday night, Gur said.
A man came forward on Sunday. With an Arabic accent, he said in broken Hebrew: “Gilad Shalit, Gaza, kidnapped.” This referred to former IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped by Hamas on the Israeli side of the Gaza border in June 2006 and held for over five years was held captive for a long time until a prisoner exchange took place in October 2011.
Since then there has been no contact with the family.
Haran’s sister Adi and their three children have dual German citizenship.
According to Gur, Haran met with the German ambassador to Israel on Wednesday to at least put the Germans under pressure on Hamas to release the children.
Friends have made appeals to the international media.
So far, no one from the Israeli government has contacted her.