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My mother, and many of her friends on Kibbutz Nir Oz who were massacred, were people of peace, people who believe that there are human beings with rights also on the other side of the border fence

by Neta Heiman for Haaretz
Oct 12, 2023

Saturday morning I wake up, like everyone, into the horror. Immediately I call my mother. She has locked herself in her safe room.

At 10:00 A.M., when I call again, there’s no answer. I check with my siblings; they can’t reach her either.

We start to climb the walls; even though we convince ourselves that it’s a reception problem, we are worried. Hours go by and there’s still no word from her.

At 4 P.M., my sister calls, weeping. “I called Ima’s phone and someone with an Arabic accent answered, saying [in English] ‘It’s Hamas, it’s Hamas.’” There’s no way to describe what we feel, our overwhelming fear and helplessness.

A few more hours pass and we receive information that one of my mother’s neighbors heard her shouting: “Help me.” He went outside with his gun to shoot the terrorists, but then saw that there were many. They started shooting back at him, so he ran back into his security room to save himself.


The days pass, and no one from any official body contacts us, no one.

On Tuesday morning I talk for the first time with my mother’s neighbor; as he too has been through a terrible trauma, I felt I couldn’t call him at once. He tells me that he saw them leading her away, that she appeared to be unharmed. Tuesday evening my nephew calls, crying: “There’s a video of Savta on the Hamas Facebook page.” The clip confirms what the neighbor had told us; she looks in it unharmed as they haul her into a pickup truck.

At 9 P.M., finally, an army representative calls. Later, they come to sit with us but tell us nothing we don’t already know. “She’s been abducted,” they say. We know that from the video, thank you very much. But at least we now know that the army knows about her – though that that doesn’t help us in our overwhelming concern for her welfare.

And this morning, Wednesday? This morning, I’m angry.

At whom am I angry?

There’s the obvious: I’m angry at the despicable people who kidnapped my mother and slaughtered dozens of civilians, perpetrating a pogrom on her kibbutz.

I’m furious, of course, at Hamas and at Palestinian Islamic Jihad and at Iran, all those who sent these people to kill and ransack and take hostages.

I’m furious at the Israeli government, and the accursed members of the government who, because of them, the army was patrolling in the West Bank village of Hawara over the Sukkot holiday, instead of guarding and protecting my mother. I’m furious at this government, that has for almost a year been doing everything they can to escalate the situation in the Gaza border area. This colossal failure, this chaos, is on their shoulders, is their fault – as is the fact that even now, four days later, a government representative has still not visited most of the families of the hostages.

I can’t say if I’m angry at the army and the intelligence communities, that’s more than I can think about right now.

But beyond all of the above, I’m angry at all of the Israeli governments since 2000 that have done absolutely nothing to try to end this terrible conflict.

Of course I’m angry at Yitzhak Rabin’s murderer Yigal Amir and his cheerleader from the balcony, all those who managed to block the only government that understood that something here must change.

My mother, and many of her friends on Kibbutz Nir Oz who were massacred, were people of peace, people who believe that there are human beings with rights also on the other side of the border fence. All that my mother and her friends wanted was to live in peace in the small Eden they had built there in the desert. One of the hostages I remember from my childhood years as a prominent activist in Peace Now. On Saturday morning he was brutally abducted from his home, in front of his wife’s eyes.

So, from this terrifying place we are now in, I call out to the government that will rise after the nightmare is over and I say: Do not destroy the Gaza Strip; that won’t help anyone and will only bring an even more ferocious round of violence the next time. And when the moment for negotiations on a cease-fire arrives, take advantage of that moment to also bring about an agreement between the two sides – not an “arrangement,” but a true peace agreement. History has proved that it’s possible. The cease-fire agreements after the 1973 Yom Kippur War led to Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel and peace with Egypt, a peace that has endured for 45 years. It’s not an ideal peace, but it is peace nonetheless.

Proof of that: A friend of my mother’s returned just Tuesday from a trip to Egypt. Her son and her husband are missing.

We in the Women Wage Peace organization say: Yes, peace is possible.

Neta Heiman is a daughter of Ditza Heiman, who was abducted from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz Saturday morning and taken to the Gaza Strip.