‘We hid in our safe room when Hamas killers came knocking pretending to be Israeli soldiers’
Israeli Yogev Gamari, a 43-year-old bridal hairdresser who lives in the village of Yesha, near the border with Gaza, with his wife, his mother-in-law and three young children, talked to The Telegraph from the safe room in his house as he described a murderous day
I still don’t understand what has happened today; all I know is that at least three of my friends have been murdered by terrorists and many, many others are missing. This is a terrible day. I don’t want to cry in front of my children but I can’t stop myself.
We did not expect this when we woke up this morning. The first we heard was the bomb siren and then what felt like thousands of rockets overhead. We rushed into our shelter and locked ourselves in. Sadly, we are used to rocket attacks and know we have 15 seconds to get into our safe room but quite quickly it became clear that this time it was a different sort of attack.
Within 20 minutes we heard terrorists were in the village. We have a village WhatsApp and people saw them in armoured vehicles shooting at anything that moved. The shooting came closer and closer. There was screaming, there was crying.
The terrorists were moving from one house to another trying to kill us. They knocked on our doors and pretended to be Israeli soldiers. We locked our house. We stayed in our safe room. It has a steel door and very thick bullet-proof walls – it is only this that has kept us safe from death.
A few of my friends were together – I don’t even know where they were. I was on the phone to one of them and then I could hear shooting and the cry of “help”. And then nothing.
A lot of confusion
One of my friends was with them. He had a gun and he managed to escape and join other men who were trying to defend our village. He wrote on WhatsApp that they were dead but now I don’t know what has happened to him. There is a lot of confusion.
I can’t tell you my friends’ names because I don’t even know if their family knows that they are dead yet. The only way we know what is happening is via our village WhatsApp and by talking to friends from nearby villages.
There was a party at a kibbutz and many of the younger people from the village were there – it is about a six-minute drive away. There would have been several hundred there and it was one of the first places attacked by the terrorists. I knew a lot of people who were there and I don’t know what has happened to any of them.
We are a small village, everyone knows everyone. There are about 160 people here. Now I don’t know who is left.
The nearest village to us was taken over by the terrorists. We have just been told that the Israel Defense Forces has won it back. I don’t like to think about what has happened there. Apparently, some of the terrorists are hiding in the area. Until they are caught, we don’t know when we can leave our hiding place.
There will be time, soon, when we as a country examine what went wrong and how this was allowed to happen. Many of our citizens have been killed or taken hostage and this is going to escalate.
But, for now, my children are crying – the twins are just two years old and their brother is four. They have been in the safe room for more than 12 hours and it is impossible to explain to them what is happening. How can I explain it? All we can do is wait. And worry. And cry.
As told to Nicole Lampert
