An Israeli woman and her daughter survived Hamas\u2019 12-hour siege of their kibbutz by barricading themselves into a safe room using a vacuum cleaner and a rolling pin. <\/p>\n
But she soon realized the room, used previously as a bomb shelter, was ill-equipped to keep out the advancing militants \u2013 because it didn\u2019t even have a lock. <\/p>\n
All Israeli buildings erected after 1993 are required to have bomb shelters \u2013 reinforced rooms with concrete walls and heavy steel doors. <\/p>\n
But these safe rooms are designed to withstand a rocket attack, not an armed incursion. The doors are heavy, but they don\u2019t have locks \u2013 they are not supposed to be lockable, for safety reasons. <\/p>\n
As fighting erupted around her, Lahav feverishly reached out to her family and other residents of the kibbutz for advice. <\/p>\n
\u201cEverywhere endless, endless, endless shooting and grenades. So I\u2019m trying to figure out what to do. Are they going to maybe break into our door? How can I make sure it\u2019s locked? And I started texting and calling people from the kibbutz how to lock the door, and nobody knew,\u201d Lahav said. <\/p>\n
Salvation came from an unlikely place \u2013 when her brother sent her a picture of how he had locked his door \u201cwith two broomsticks.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cI thought, I don\u2019t have any brooms. How would I do that? But then I remembered I had a rolling stick and I took that and then I took my Dyson vacuum,\u201d Lahav said. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine how, you know that you\u2019re just going to die if they break in. And I was just tying these things to the door,\u201d Lahav said. \u201cIt\u2019s just fear, fear, fear.\u201d <\/p>\n
As she was assembling the makeshift barricade, Lahav said she could hear men\u2019s voices screaming and \u201cbanging everything.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThere was nothing we could do except we were hugging, my daughter and I, under the table, hiding in the dark,\u201d Lahav said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe started saying to each other, \u2018I love you\u2019. My daughter says \u2018Mom, I love you, I really appreciate everything you did for me.\u2019 And I told her how much I love her. We thought we were just going to die and they kept banging the door trying to open. And I was sure that whatever I did, the vacuum cleaner and the rolling stick wouldn\u2019t hold, but it did.\u201d <\/p>\n
Lahav said she and her daughter felt lucky when after \u201ceight or 10 minutes of trying and screaming and shooting everything\u201d the attackers left their house. But the relief was short-lived, as more fighters returned approximately an hour later, \u201ctrying to break into the door\u201d once more, she said. <\/p>\n
Lahav estimates that 30% of those living in the kibbutz either died or were kidnapped during Saturday\u2019s surprise attacks. <\/p>\n
Nir Oz kibbutz was one of several kibbutzim, or small farming enclaves, that bore the brunt of Hamas\u2019 ground assault. <\/p>\n
Kibbutzim predate the founding of Israel, when small groups of people set up communities based on the idea of communal living. About 125,000 people live across approximately 250 kibbutzim in Israel, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel. <\/p>\n
Hamas fighters also gunned down and took hostage revelers at the Nova music festival in a rural farmland area near the Gaza-Israel border. <\/p>\n
Among the audience that day was Rafael Zimerman, who survived by hiding in a bunker and covering himself with bodies to avoid detection. <\/p>\n
He was near the back of the bunker as he was one of the first of the 50 or so people to get there, but could hear police fighting the attackers at the entrance. <\/p>\n
Zimerman said that at one point gas was thrown into the bunker. <\/p>\n
\u201cWith the gas, you cannot breathe,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to breathe after 30 seconds.\u201d <\/p>\n
Following the gas, the attackers entered the bunker and began shooting and throwing flash-bang grenades. <\/p>\n
\u201cI just covered myself with dead people, a lot of dead people,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I stayed there inside like for hours, like just waiting to die, you know? I just wanted to die in peace because I suffered so much from the gas.\u201d <\/p>\n
Zimerman, who has shrapnel wounds from the attack, said he was one of six people to get out of the bunker alive. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a miracle. I\u2019m a survivor and I have to be glad,\u201d Zimerman added. <\/p>\n
Amir Ben Natan, another festival goer, survived by hiding in a bush. <\/p>\n
\u201cI saw a bush on my left side and I thought that maybe I could hide there, and I decided it is the best option, so I went inside of this bush,\u201d Natan said. <\/p>\n
\u201cAbout after one hour, two policemen arrived and I was there with a few other people and the policemen told us to move from there,\u201d Natan added. <\/p>\n
\u201cI did not feel safe, so shortly (after) I decided to hide again in another bush. While I was in the second bush, I heard like war outside. I knew that at any time a bullet or a grenade or something can fall on me. And then after a while, it was silence and I heard the terrorists talking right nearby and I just prayed that they would not discover us.\u201d <\/p>\n
Israeli rescuers counted about 260 bodies near the site of the Nova festival following the slaughter. <\/p>\n\n
An Israeli woman and her daughter survived Hamas\u2019 12-hour siege of their kibbutz by barricading themselves into a safe room using a vacuum cleaner and a rolling pin. But she soon realized the room, used previously as a bomb shelter, was ill-equipped to keep out the advancing militants \u2013 because it didn\u2019t even have a <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9948,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9947","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}