Friends and relatives say Hamas killed a grandmother, parents protecting their children, and an entire family during raids
A little after 11pm on Sunday, the Israeli government posted a photograph of a family on one of its social media accounts. There were five people in the selfie: a mother, a father and their three young children, all of them smiling.
“Tamar, Yonatan and their children Shachar, Arbel, Omer,” the caption read. “An entire family wiped out by Hamas terrorists. There are no words. May their memory be a blessing.”
Moments later, the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett reposted the photo.
“An entire family murdered in cold blood,” he wrote. “Look at their happy faces. Their love. All of them murdered by Palestinian terrorists at Nir Oz kibbutz. Just because they’re Jews.”
Although it remains unclear exactly what happened to the Kedem family on their kibbutz, which lies a mile and a half from the border with Gaza, their picture – and the story of their murders – has been widely shared to illustrate the utter pitilessness and ferocity of Hamas’s attack on Israel.
According to friends in Australia, the family rushed to their safe room when the assaults began, from where they sent a WhatsApp message.
“Hi guys, we got into the shelter in our house, we’re all going okay,” the text read.
An hour later, however, Tamar had stopped responding to messages from Yishai and Mor Lacob, her friends in Sydney.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Although it remains unclear exactly what happened to the Kedem family on their kibbutz, which lies a mile and a half from the border with Gaza, their picture – and the story of their murders – has been widely shared to illustrate the utter pitilessness and ferocity of Hamas’s attack on Israel.
Mor Lacob said her friend Tamar, a women’s rights activist and community leader, would be remembered for her kindness and sense of social justice.
On Sunday morning, a volunteer at Nir Oz, a community of about 400 people, said residents had woken to “a kibbutz in flames” and were “still passing around checking damages and trying to figure out who is where”.
Relatives of an as-yet-unnamed woman said their grandmother had been murdered by the militants, who then filmed her dying moments and posted them on her Facebook page.
Another of the woman’s grandchildren, Yoav Shimoni, who had visited her on the kibbutz two weeks earlier to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, said the family believed she had been targeted because of her house’s proximity to the border fence.
“Itay and Hadar were brutally murdered after fighting bravely against the terrorists,” according to Gali Dagan, Israel’s ambassador to Colombia.
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