Re the link to the Haaretz 20 October article that didn’t work for you,
I have found an archive ph of it and put it through Google translate.
(This particular article was in Hebrew.)
WARNING there are some DISTRESSING written descriptions of the Oct 7 Hamas raid/massacre.
I have put bold on the paragraph which was relevant to a previous discussion in this thread.
<a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/2023.10.22-092119/www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2023-10-20/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000018b-499a-dc3c-a5df-ddbaab290000?fbclid=IwAR1bObZUau2KRdEvOvGqskFyVLkVxknDg7dHm9dfgsbUbi8ECFJQZYri0As" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://archive.md/2023.10.22-092119/www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2023-10-20/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000018b-499a-dc3c-a5df-ddbaab290000?fbclid=IwAR1bObZUau2KRdEvOvGqskFyVLkVxknDg7dHm9dfgsbUbi8ECFJQZYri0As
Car search at the party complex near Reim, this week Photo: Olivier Pitosi
Nir Hasson
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October 20, 2023
In the last week, a new and strange routine took shape in the Gaza Strip. The entire area has become a closed military area surrounded by barriers within which large military forces move. Among them are citizens who live in the kibbutzim and volunteers who try to retrieve objects and memories from the ruins and locate and bring human remains for burial. From time to time a small convoy passes by on its way to the funeral. In most of the surrounding kibbutzim, the army only allows a handful of attendants to enter the cemetery.
We meet Tovel Escapa and Roy Meisner as they are removing items from a burned-out MMD in Kibbutz Bari. Inside, under the youth's bed in the room, is still the body of the dog of the six members of the family that escaped through the window. They hid under a bush outside, and there four of them were murdered. The two children The young men survived, when their parents protected them with their bodies, and managed to escape to the neighbors' house.
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Searching a destroyed house in Kibbutz Bari, this week Photo: Olivier Pitosi
Escapa and Meisner fill a box with toys and clothes they take out of the room: dolls, plastic dinosaurs, a toy gun—and also the Iranian flag that the murderous terrorists left behind. Then the two continue to the home of a missing person from the kibbutz.The members of her family asked for an object from which DNA could be extracted, as well as objects and items of clothing with a smell, such as perfumes and creams. The house was not burned, but the blood stains and chaos indicate that it had taken place. Even before the objects reached the family members, they received a message that the mother's body had been identified.
Escapa is the caretaker of the garden ("Noynik") and a member of Barry's standby squad. Luckily for him, on the day of the October 7th massacre, he was outside the kibbutz, on the occasion of his bachelor party. He and other friends set up a HML to coordinate between the residents and the army forces. The recordings received from the besieged residents reminded him of those released from the Yom Kippur War: "Panic, shouting 'Where is the army?' And in the background you hear the clutches and the RPG."
His voice broke when he remembered his partner, who was besieged in MMD at the time. According to him, only on Monday night and only after the commanders in the field made difficult decisions - including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages - did the IDF complete the takeover of the kibbutz The price was terrible: at least 112 Bari people were killed. Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.
Since Tuesday Escapa and the team of the re-established emergency squad - after most of its members died in the battle - have taken on the task of rescuing the objects from the houses. "There are normal assignments and there are sensitive assignments," he says.The first type includes items such as hearing aids, shoes, clothes, ID cards and passports, toys or pots. The second type includes, for example, "a family for whom someone has disappeared, and they are looking for DNA or a shirt from the laundry basket with the smell of their mother."
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According to him, "We are still missing many pieces of the puzzle. My friend saved his two children, he hid them under the bed and opened the emergency room and stood up for them to take him. They murdered him but I wanted to know if they shot him in the face? Did the children hear it? Luckily for me - luckily for them - it probably didn't happen to them. It's a little comforting. "Perhaps comforting is not the right word."
He adds that there were families who said there was no chance he would find anything in their homes, but he is still looking. "Even small things, even a pot or object of some child, some toy. I was in contact with a classmate of mine whose mother is missing. I found two albums, now she received a message that her mother was murdered.I see scenes that are still bleeding, you see where they were dragged and where they were shot. Nobody wants to see it. We are a group of people with a strong soul. I don't think I'm different from everyone else, but for now it's about me."
The other day, MK Simcha Rothman came to visit the kibbutz. Escapa shouted at him and almost physically drove him out of the place. "I took off my sunglasses and said to him, 'Look me in the eyes, how dare you come here.' fly off! You have blood on your hands, it's on you and all your friends.' He came to put his hand on my shoulder, I screamed at him: 'You have murdered too many people here.' I don't remember myself like that, I was sure I would beat him. Let them not come on a political tour, where were they when they massacred us for six hours. He didn't dare look up at me."
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Photo of a car in the party area, this week Photo: Olivier Fitosi
BMW in PardesNear the entrance to Kibbutz Reim, we meet Meir Barel and other volunteers from the 360 organization, which recently split from ZAKA and deals with disaster relief. The organization took on the morbid task of searching for human remains in the area where the "Nova" nature party was held on the morning of the Hamas attack. Its volunteers distributed the area into strips 20 meters wide that are scanned using jeeps and on foot.
Occasionally they locate body parts or whole bodies in the fields. When we accompanied them to one of the scans, they discovered a BMW in an orange grove. Bullets pierced the doors and the seat next to the driver was covered in a large bloodstain and shards of glass.A small children's guitar was placed behind. "According to the evidence and according to the investigations of the terrorists, the terrorists fled towards Moshav Petish," Barel explains. "We search in orchards, in rows of cauliflowers, we scan the area. We pick up every stone and check under every tree."
According to him, "There are all kinds of signs in the field. Smell is the first indication. Besides color, the ground changes its color. There is also the sound of maggots and flies, and you see signs of fighting: bullets, shooting." The volunteers distinguish between "an organ on which a soul depends" - meaning that its presence necessarily indicates that the person is dead - which is transferred to the Institute of Forensic Medicine; and blood remains and small parts that are brought for burial.
Yesterday they found another body of one of the terrorists. "He was wearing a shirt belonging to Az ad-Din al-Qassem (the military wing of Hamas), but he looked African," Barel says. "I was told that they found dozens of them near Nir Oz. I have a feeling that this is part of our falling asleep. There are mercenaries here from Africa who have gathered for this attack.Right now I'm on a very high adrenaline rush. I'm very busy, there's a phone every second. But it comes back to me at night, I can't close the day. Yesterday I was at a wedding in Bnei Brak and I couldn't understand why they were dancing. Why are they happy, how is it possible."
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A shoe found in the party area near Reim, this week Photo: Olivier Fitosi
A reservist who secured the party from the bad guys: "How can you fight the children who came to celebrate love?"
These days Barel is a rabbi in one of the moshavs in the lowlands, and also a chef and partner in a chain of restaurants. One of his accomplices is Ben Shimoni, who was at the party in Ra'i, managed to escape from the terrorists - but returned to rescue the wounded and was killed. In the party complex, the evidence of the massacre is becoming more and more blurred. The bodies were moved for identification and burial, the burned vehicles were evacuated. Here and there you can see the soil that has changed its color.
At the beginning of the week there was still a Yabil building that was used to sell tickets for the party. In it, during the massacre, five gang members hid for four hours, wounded and scared to death. At one point they were robbed by an armed man from Gaza who demanded their money. "Now he already knows for sure that we are here, and we have nowhere to run," wrote Tomer Mebracha, one of the five, on Facebook.
"In my head I was constantly waiting for him to come back with more friends and spray us, to finish the story. I had already accepted my fate and realized that it would end, that I was already going to die and nothing matters anymore because I am already dead," Mabaraka wrote. Fortunately, the terrorists skipped the room where the group was hiding and after four hours soldiers arrived and rescued them."How can you come and fight the children who came to celebrate love?" asked Miloamnik who was securing the place this week.
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There is another life"In all the many days we spoke with survivors and refugees from kibbutzim surrounding Gaza, Escapa Mbari was the first to talk about rehabilitation and return to the kibbutz. Not at the end of the war, not in months, but now. According to him, "I am a fanatic of the kibbutz. I love the place, the people, the being. We were hit by a blow that cannot be described. From Saturday to Tuesday we were in the market, but now there is something in the activity that brings people back into the groove, that strengthens the community. It is clear to me that not everyone will stay and that OK. No one will judge anyone. I can say thanks to God, who I don't believe in, that my family got out of it."
In the meantime, the commanders of the kibbutz, which has become a military base, do not allow him to return to sleep in his home. He and his classmates sleep in the rooms assigned to them next to the soldiers. The fear is that at night they will be mistakenly identified as terrorists. But Escapa is determined to return to the house and restore it."As a newbie, I have a license for a Bobcat (excavator, NL)," he adds. "I don't want to wait for the end of the war. I want to start rebuilding now, I can't stand feeling like a refugee. Next week we will start working. Let's start with the smallest thing, it will take years anyway. I will dig, I will cut the fallen trees. The goal in front of me is to return home. I don't want mercy, just let me go home."
Escapa adds: "I walk around the kibbutz as a youth worker and say to myself: 'God bless us, how much work we have.'