This is the heartbreaking moment an Israeli mother learns her husband’s body has been found after he disappeared in the Kfar Aza massacre.
Shaylee Atary and her daughter Shaya escaped after more than 24 hours in hiding while Hamas terrorists tried to break into their home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza – where gunmen massacred families, including 40 children, sparking global outrage.
The Israeli singer decided to speak to Sky News about her husband Yahav Winner, who has been missing since the kibbutz, popular with young parents, was attacked by around 70 Hamas terrorists at dawn on Saturday.
The footage – which the family authorized to be broadcast to highlight the horrors of the war that has claimed more than 2,200 lives – shows Ms Atary clutching her month-old newborn while saying that her filmmaker husband, ” “could be injured somewhere” or “kidnapped”.
During the interview, Ms. Atary then appears to speak to her mother, who fell to the floor in the hallway with her head in her hands after receiving a sickening message in a phone call from the Israeli Defense Forces.
This is the heartbreaking moment an Israeli mother learns her husband’s body was found during a television interview after he disappeared in the Kfar Aza massacre
Shaylee Atary is pictured with her husband Yahav Winner and their newborn child. Yahav’s body was found
This graphic (above) shows how the horrific Hamas massacre took place at Kibbutz Kfar Aza
Ms. Atary learned the disgusting news through her mother, who had received a call from the IDF. Here she is pictured with her husband
The young woman repeatedly calls out “Ma, Ma” while her mother remains silent – but other family members take the newborn from her hands so that she can find out what happened.
She then begins to wail uncontrollably as her relatives gather around her in mourning. A narrator in the video reveals that Ms. Atary has just received the dreaded news that her husband has been killed.
Sky chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay, who conducted the interview, said: “This is the horror of war.” “The family have allowed us to show this so everyone understands what it is like.”
In a separate interview earlier this week, Ms Atary revealed how she had to hide in a warehouse with her baby for 27 hours without food or water while Hamas militants carried out the horrific massacre.
Ms Atary said she ran into a storage room before covering herself and her baby with bags of dirt. When she heard the gunmen approaching again, she ran across the lawn as the terrorists shot at her.
She was taken in by a family who let her hide in their safe room where she waited until she was rescued. “I really don’t know where our state was,” she said. “They left us. They were on Twitter. That’s where they were.’
The mother and daughter suffered smoke inhalation but were eventually rescued by the IDF and taken to a hospital.
According to ScreenDaily.com, Mr. Winner won the best cinematography award at this year’s Tel Aviv International Students Film Festival for his short film The Boy.
The terror in Kfar Aza began shortly after sunrise, when most of the 400 residents living there were sleeping or enjoying breakfast with coffee.
The first wave of 70 terrorists had raced toward the quiet kibbutz on motorcycles after breaching the border fence a mile away, while others paraglided over Israel’s unsuspecting defenses outside Gaza.
In a separate interview earlier this week, Ms Atary (along with her husband) revealed how she had to hide in a warehouse with her baby for 27 hours without food or water while Hamas militants carried out a horrific massacre
Ms. Atary (R) is an Israeli singer while Yahav Winner (L) was a filmmaker. According to ScreenDaily.com, it is said to have won the Best Cinematography award at this year’s Tel Aviv International Students Film Festival
Israeli soldiers walk next to the bodies of a Hamas fighter killed at Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Tuesday
Troops remove the bodies of victims killed in an attack by Hamas terrorists in Kfar Aza on Tuesday
Once they arrived, the heavily armed fighters attacked the compound from four directions – starting with the “baby district” on the west side, where all the young families lived.
The terrorists were met by a desperate kibbutz guard, a small group of residents with military experience who were patrolling the perimeter when they saw the swarm of black figures approaching them.
They, like the Israeli military and government, were unprepared for the wave of terrorists who fired shots at them. The small security team tried in vain to protect their neighbors, but was unable to stop the terrorists and died in the fighting.
The ruthless Hamas gunmen moved quickly through the kibbutz, first killing a 90-year-old grandmother who had been sitting on her porch when the terrorists arrived. They dragged the frightened pensioner into her living room and shot her twice in the head.
Families were awakened by the terrible sound of gunshots and voices outside their homes. Horrified parents ran to their sleeping children, dragging them from their beds and cots before putting them in safe rooms or closets.
Among those parents were Itay and Hadar Berichevsky, both 30, who heard the gunmen trying to break down their front door.
The frightened parents desperately took their 10-month-old twins to a hidden shelter just before Hamas terrorists stormed into their home and shot the couple dead.
Ms Atary (along with her husband, who was found dead) said she ran into a storage room before covering herself and her baby with bags of dirt. When she heard the gunmen approaching again, she ran across the lawn as the terrorists shot at her
Itay and Hadar Berdichevsky (pictured with babies), both 30, had only seconds to react when they heard the gunmen trying to break down their front door
The frightened parents desperately took their two babies to a hidden shelter shortly before Hamas terrorists shot the couple dead
The terrorists then systematically moved from house to house, blowing open front doors with their rocket grenades and unleashing a hail of bullets on the men, women and children living there. Entire families were handcuffed before being shot one by one at close range, soldiers said.
It later emerged that up to 40 babies and toddlers were massacred and some of them beheaded on that kibbutz, according to Israeli soldiers who spoke to news channel i24. Shocking images from the crime scene show a baby’s car seat covered in blood, with her little bloody dress lying next to it.
The Hamas gunmen set fire to several houses in the kibbutz in a nefarious attempt to force the families out so they could shoot them as soon as they reached their yard.
“Many preferred to die in the fires rather than be killed by the terrorists,” Omar Barak, a 24-year-old Israeli army officer, told the Times of Israel.
Some had tried to escape from the terrorists, but many were mercilessly gunned down – their bodies lying on the grass in front of their homes.
One survivor told EuroNews: “The terrorists came into every house, every house, every place.” They would burn down their house so they would die in it.
“They shot children, babies, old people, everyone. Nobody was safe from this. The first victim was a 90-year-old woman sitting on her porch. She saw them coming and was shot.’
Israeli soldiers say Hamas terrorists beheaded babies and shot entire families in their homes on a small kibbutz in Israel
An IDF soldier covers his face before removing the body of a civilian killed days earlier in an attack by Hamas terrorists on Tuesday
Israeli soldiers search for the bodies of killed Israelis in Kibbutz Kfar Aza near the border with Gaza on Tuesday
A soldier is overcome with emotion as he searches for bodies on the kibbutz
The attack was so quick and coordinated that one family’s home still had coffee on the table from breakfast on Saturday morning. Blood and broken cups covered the kitchen floor.
It took the Israeli army 12 hours to reach the kibbutz, said officer Davidi Ben Zion, deputy commander of the Unit 71 paratrooper team.
But the carnage didn’t end there. The terrorists fought hard for control of the kibbutz, killing civilians and firing bullets at the soldiers.
Soldiers told the BBC that as soon as they arrived at the kibbutz there was “chaos, terrorists everywhere”. “You can’t imagine how difficult the fighting was,” said one.
It took Israeli soldiers three days to recapture the kibbutz and shoot the Hamas terrorists.
Israeli soldiers went from house to house hoping to find survivors.
Amazingly, the 10-month-old twin babies that Itay and Hadar Berdichevsky had placed in a hidden shelter were rescued by Israeli soldiers and taken to their grandmother.
After the Hamas attack, Israeli soldiers patrol burned and destroyed houses
A charred house after an attack by Palestinian terrorists on the kibbutz on Tuesday
A house in ruins after an attack by Hamas militants on this kibbutz days earlier killed dozens of civilians near the Gaza border on Tuesday
A dead civilian lies under a blanket in front of a house in a kibbutz near the border with Gaza on Tuesday
What remains of the utter carnage unleashed on this small community by Hamas terrorists are the bullet-riddled bodies of parents and their children and the charred remains of their homes.
Across the city, walls and torched cars are pockmarked with bullet holes, tracing a path of violence that continues inside to bedrooms with blood-spattered mattresses, safe spaces that could not withstand the onslaught
There were so many casualties, estimated at around 150, that soldiers and mortuary teams spent hours collecting all the bodies. They wrapped the small bodies of small children slaughtered by the terrorists before putting them in oversized body bags.
Israeli soldiers were seen comforting each other after witnessing such horrors, including the bodies of entire families shot dead in their beds.
“You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers in their bedrooms and how the terrorists killed.” It’s not a battlefield. “It’s a massacre,” said Israeli Major General Itai Veruv as he stood at the entrance to the kibbutz.
Rockets fired from the Gaza Strip toward the Israeli city of Ashkelon were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, October 10, 2023
The remains of a supermarket hit by Hamas rocket attacks this afternoon
A survivor, surrounded by broken glass and burned-out cars, inspects the rubble
Smoke rises from a burning building following rocket attacks on several cities across Israel
“I served as a combat soldier and officer for 39 years,” Veruv continued. “I’ve never seen anything close to this.” It’s not even something our parents knew. This is something from the world of our grandfathers in Europe, from the world of pogroms and the Holocaust.
Veruv had arrived in Kfar Aza on Saturday to join the fighting, but on Tuesday he gathered the world press to show them what was happening there.
“When I found out what had happened here, I remembered how, when the American army liberated the concentration camps in Germany, General Eisenhower immediately turned on the media so that the world would know about it,” Veruv said, his eyes red.
The stench of the corpses hung heavily in the air as the soldiers showed journalists the kibbutz, which is popular with families. The small soccer nets in which children would have played soccer could be seen on a grassy area – but in the background the bodies of families lay on the ground.
Major David Ben Zion, 37, a reservist who was called up to try to rescue survivors, told The Independent: “We saw dead babies, girls.” We managed to save some of them, but most of them we found dead in their houses. They came with only one mission – to kill more and more of our people.”
In front of one of the kibbutz’s small houses. One resident’s body was covered with a purple sheet with a bare foot sticking out of it. A pillow and other items from the house were scattered.
Elsewhere, the bodies of the gunmen lay face down on the ground. A destroyed gate on the edge of the kibbutz showed where the gunmen had entered.
Military spokesman Maj Doron Spielman compared the toll in Kfar Aza and the surrounding villages he visited to scenes he witnessed as a New Yorker after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
An Israeli army self-propelled howitzer fires shots near the Gaza border in southern Israel on October 11
“I remember experiencing 9/11 and waking up the next day, the next week, and everything had changed,” he said. “It’s the same thing again.” But even worse because we’re such a small country.”
The threat did not end with the shooting of the Hamas terrorists. Due to the many unexploded shells scattered on the ground, it took soldiers 30 to 40 minutes to search each house.
And soldiers were still securing the paths of the kibbutz, which consisted of one-story houses with porches, palm trees and banana trees, when gunfire and explosions were heard in the distance.
In a part of the kibbutz where residents had kept the lawns in front of their modest homes tidy, lay the ruins of a motorized glider that the militants used to fly across the border. Next to it, a crumpled Hamas flag lay in the dirt.
Kfar Aza, surrounded by farms and just minutes down a country road from the heavily fortified fence Israel has erected around Gaza, was one of more than 20 towns and villages attacked by Palestinian militants early Saturday.
The younger soldiers who had fought their way through the kibbutz could not talk about what they saw.
“We have a long war ahead of us now,” said one soldier. “It will be time to deal with what we saw here after the war.”
Today, Gazans faced increasing insecurity after the territory’s only power plant ran out of fuel and shut down.
Israeli airstrikes destroyed even more entire neighborhoods, forcing people to flee to safety. And hospitals in the Gaza Strip are struggling to treat the injured as medical supplies become increasingly scarce.
The war, which has claimed more than 2,200 lives on both sides, is expected to escalate.
The weekend attack, which Hamas said was retaliation for worsening conditions for Palestinians under Israeli occupation, has strengthened Israel’s resolve to dismantle the group’s influence in Gaza.
According to the Israeli military, more than 1,200 people, including 155 soldiers, have died in Israel since Saturday’s attack.
In Gaza, more than 1,050 people were killed and more than 5,100 injured, according to the Health Ministry. According to the United Nations Palestinian Refugee Agency, 250,000 people have been displaced in Gaza.