Former Johnson County family endures Hamas attack on home, community. ‘No time to grieve’
When Adi Maoz was 14, her family moved from their home in southern Israel to Overland Park to escape the ever-present threat of rockets.
In Johnson County, they found community; but in Israel, they had a home. As she was coming of age to join the Israeli Defense Force, they moved back to Maoz’s hometown, Kibbutz Nahal Oz, just a few miles from the border with Gaza.
“This place is 99% heaven and 1% hell,” Maoz, now 30, said of her kibbutz situated in the Negev desert. A kibbutz is typically a small, politically progressive village rooted in socialist and Marxist ideas.
On Saturday, Maoz experienced the terror of that 1% as she hid in her home for 18 hours, waiting out a horrific attack by Hamas militants from Gaza who killed and kidnapped hundreds of civilians at a music festival and across several Israeli communities, including Maoz’s own.
“We were always so united and strong. It’s been years of rockets shooting at us and terror attacks, and it’s always been tough on us. We are the front line. But no one was expecting this,” Maoz said in a phone interview with The Star on Thursday from Israel.
In the days since, Israel has declared war on Hamas, sending a barrage of rockets into the densely populated Palestinian territory and cutting off access to water and electricity, causing the United Nations to warn of a humanitarian crisis. So far, more than 1,300 Israelis and more than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed. Many are civilians. Hundreds are children.
‘We were just praying’
Maoz and members of her family went to sleep in their homes on opposite ends of the kibbutz Friday night, content from a big family dinner celebrating the final night of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
The next day they planned to celebrate the 70th anniversary of their kibbutz.
Instead, Maoz awoke to sirens blaring at 6:30 a.m. Before she, her brother, Amir Maoz, 26, and his wife, Einav Maoz, 26, could reach the bomb shelter in their home, she said there were already hundreds, if not thousands, of rockets streaking across the sky.
Their phone pinged with a text from their father, Itay Maoz, on the other side of the kibbutz with his partner: Lock the doors and windows. Shut off the lights. They’d spent their lives living with the idea of war. But as they pulled the shelter door shut this time, Maoz felt something was different. Worse.
“It means there are terrorists trying to come in.” Maoz said.
They hunkered down in the shelter for what wound up being about 18 hours. They took turns holding the door closed. Her brother gripped a small knife he found in the small room.
At one point, they received a text saying the gunmen were in their neighborhood.
A few hours after taking refuge in the shelter, they started to hear familiar explosions: the sound of Israeli weapons. Not long after, they heard Hebrew voices in their home. They spoke with the Israeli soldiers through the door.
“At that moment we just started crying,” Maoz said. “We thought we were being saved.”
But then the shots began. They listened through the door to what sounded like several minutes of gunfire. Then several more hours of silence.
A text came through from their father, saying that he, his partner and her daughter had been evacuated and were safe. But Maoz and her brother could not get a reply through to him to let him know they were still alive.
“We were just praying, praying, praying. Still on the floor, hugging each other,” she said. “Just praying.”
‘Complete chaos’
Around 12:30 a.m., Israeli soldiers finally rescued them from their home.
With the soldiers was Maoz’s father, who had spent the past three hours with the military insisting they take him to rescue his son and daughter.
“He fought for our lives,” she said. “After he had been evacuated, he just insisted and insisted and did everything he could to come and get us.”
They fled their home in darkness. She took little time to look around, but what Maoz did see was terrifying. The house had been “broken open” and ransacked, she said. There were bullet holes in the kitchen.
They were evacuated to a community gathering point where Maoz found “complete chaos.”
“No one knew where people were. No one knew who had made it out alive and who didn’t,” she said. “We see people just in shock, saying, ‘We are not many left in the community now.’”
But they had not yet grasped the full magnitude of the horror.
Maoz and her brother were not part of the kibbutz’s WhatsApp messaging group, so they did not know until later what had unfolded in those terrifying hours for their community. The Guardian reported messages poured into the Nahal Oz chat, including: “Please save us,” “Please send the army,” “They are killing us,” and “They are in my house.”
Before Saturday, Maoz said her kibbutz was a community of about 300 adults and 150 children. As of Thursday, it was believed 10 people had been killed and 15 were still missing from Nahal Oz.
“Our house is one of the closest to the Gaza border, and many people in my neighborhood didn’t make it out alive.”
‘Fighting for peace’
On Thursday, Maoz recounted her story from the home of an extended family member in northern Israel, where the threat of an attack still looms, but not like before.
Crickets, rather than bullets, chirped in the background. She expresses relief that her mother was abroad at the time of the attack and her sister, Noam Maoz Cohen, 31, and her children were not at the kibbutz when the violence began.
“Because there’s still such a chaos, everyone is out at work, the country is fighting. There is no time to grieve,” she said.
Maoz’s father and mother, Anat Maoz, moved to the United States in 2007 — the same year Hamas seized control of Gaza and Israel began maintaining a blockade over Gaza — in part to avoid an attack like this.
Adi Maoz was barely a teenager when the fighting intensified again. She remembers missiles from Gaza literally falling in her yard. They could not go to school because their classrooms were not sheltered.
Her mother was offered a job in the Kansas City metro. Adi Maoz enrolled at Blue Valley North High School. They made a home in Kansas for three years, becoming heavily involved in the metro’s Jewish community.
Now her family’s friends who remain in Kansas City are reaching out, offering prayers and support.
But Israel is their home. Nahal Oz, Maoz said, was her parents’ dream. Maoz said her parents created a home near Gaza with the hopes of creating programs for Israeli and Palestinian children to come together.
“It seemed like an idea that could work at the time,” she said.
It’s the same reason Maoz decided to stay, intent until Saturday on building her own home and family there. Now she doesn’t know where she will live next. Perhaps back to Nahal Oz; perhaps somewhere else.
“We have always been a left-wing community just fighting for peace,” she said of Nahal Oz.
“I hope people see how the people who have been murdered and the people who had their lives destroyed are exactly the people fighting for peace, who are there for peace. Our families were there with the hope for a better future, with the hope of one day sending our kids to school with the kids from Gaza, sending them to the beach and having hummus in the streets of Gaza. Our families didn’t move there because they were thinking of how to take over something that is not ours.”
Maoz works for an international non-governmental organization, or NGO, dropping into places disrupted by war, trying to help them rebuild. She had returned from Tigray, Ethiopia, shortly before the attack.
“I think a lot about how to bring back communities and innovate together with communities to build a better future,” she said. “I guess I never imagined I would have to do that through my own community.”
The members of Kibbutz Nahal Oz created a fundraiser to help the families of those killed, those kidnapped and those whose homes were destroyed. Donations can be made at https://bit.ly/Give_NahalOz.
