My niece, Yarden,
My niece, Yarden, lives on Kibbutz Beeri with her husband, Alon, and her three-year-old daughter, Geffen. The kibbutz, founded in 1946 on land purchased by the Jewish National Fund, is four kilometers east of the Gaza Strip.
Beeri is one of the prime targets for rocket and mortar attacks from the Gaza Strip. Not that missile and mortar attacks from Gaza are unknown in other parts of the country, but in the area around the Gaza Strip, the time to get to a shelter once the siren sounds is just 15 seconds.
It wasn’t easy for my niece to move to the kibbutz where her husband was born. For a free-spirited independent woman, kibbutz life needs getting used to, in addition to the sporadic rocket and mortar attacks. However, it was a price Yarden was willing to pay – made even more evident after she gave birth to her daughter Geffen.
Yarden, a trained physiotherapist, was soon busy taking care of the kibbutz elderly. Twice a week, she also worked in the Barzilay Hospital in Ashkelon, a prime target for Hamas rockets. Driving to work twice a week had to be done with care. Time and again, she had to take shelter along the way in the reinforced bus stops or postpone coming back home to her young daughter.
On Saturday morning, October 7, kibbutz Beeri was overrun by terrorists from the Gaza Strip. Massacring anyone found outside, the attackers began to search for people huddling in their home bomb shelters, shooting them or taking them back to Gaza as hostages. Yarden, Alon, and Geffen were dragged from their home and forcefully pushed into a car with four armed terrorists—two in the front and two in the back, one on each side of them.
Taking the small secondary road that led to the Gaza Strip, the terrorists reached a small gully that bisects the road. Two of them got out of the car to check the crossing. Yarden and Alon seized the opportunity to jump out of the car and run. With Geffen on her hands, Yarden and Alon raced up the gully to get away. The four surprised terrorists chased after them, shooting their machine guns along the way.
After a 300-meter dash, Yarden handed Geffen to Alon, and they decided to split. Alon ran another hundred meters up the gully and found a place to hide in the brush. The kidnappers searched and fired in all directions but could not find him. Alon slowly scrambled with Geffen to a further away place to hide. They stayed there for the next 24 hours. Returning to the kibbutz, he realized that it was still in the hands of Hamas. So, he continued toward the main road, where he met up with an army unit. All this time, Geffen was with him.
On the road, he contacted my nephew, Yarden’s brother, who drove to Beeri to fetch him. Geffen was taken to the safety of my brother’s home in Tel Aviv, and the two set out to search for Yarden around the area where Alon had last seen her. It was still unsafe to wander through this area (they even encountered terrorists along the way) and could not reach the exact spot.
Yesterday and again today, with some army trackers, they set out again to try and figure out what happened to Yarden.
The Gaza Strip is not, as the media portrays it, a closed-in enclave surrounded by Israel. Its southern border runs along Egypt. Once the Hamas took over and began terrorizing Israel, a fence was set up to control terrorist infiltration into Israel. However, for humanitarian reasons, Israel supplies Gaza with electricity, fuel, and food and allows over 20,000 workers to enter Israel every day (the number was much more until Hamas conducted a brutal attack on the Erez Crossing). I still remember twenty years ago when hundreds of merchants from Gaza would display their wares and produce in the “Gaza Market” on the outskirts of the Jaffa Flea Market in Tel Aviv.
The Hamas is a ruthless and inhuman Muslim fundamentalist organization. They set up military headquarters in schools and hospitals missile launchers in mosques and people’s houses. If the world needed a lesson as to who they are, the massacre of nearly two thousand people, from 85-year-old women to dozens of babies shot in the head is proof.
Yarden is still missing, maybe a prisoner in Gaza, and so are Alon's mother and sister who were dragged from their home on Saturday morning. We, in Israel, have put aside our differences, for the time, and are mobilizing to do the right thing, rid the world of this murderous organization.
Hoping for quieter days,
Yadin Roman
Yadin Roman
Publisher and Editor
ERETZ Magazine
+ 972 - 03 - 691-2211 | eretzstore.com | mailto:yadin.eretz@gmail.com
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