'He wrote me: My parents are dead, I need help'

Brouria Carni Hadass lives in the tiny Kibbutz of Kerem Shalom on the Israel-Gaza border. On Saturday, October 7th, she went into the fortified safe room in her house when the first alarm sounded, quickly realizing this attack was "unlike anything we went through before. It felt like something else."

On this week's episode of the Harretz Weekly podcast, Carni Hadass spoke to host Allison Kaplan Sommer from the hotel in the southern city of Eilat, where the members of her community are staying since they were evacuated from their homes following the Hamas attack on Israel's Gaza border communities, which killed over 1,300 people.

"Every simple thing is complicated now," she says, though she acknowledges that compared to so many other people affected by the massacres, she and her family are "spoiled refugees," trying to maintain some sense of normalcy while living in a hotel.

In the conversation, she describes how shortly after the attack began, a friend from a nearby Kibbutz – Holit – contacted Brouria to see how she was doing. The friend, Shahar Debbie Mathias, said her son Rotem was worried about his friend, Brouria's son. But their next conversation was the last. Hamas gunmen were already inside Debbie's house, and she was hiding with her husband Shlomi and their son in the safe room. The gunmen managed to shoot into the room and get in.

When Debbie stopped replying to Brouria's messages, she asked her son to text his Rotem, who texted back: "My parents are dead, I need help."

"We were lucky. We're alive, but we are devastated," Carni Hadass says now.

In the second part of this week's episode, Haaretz columnist Alon Pinkas explains why U.S. President Joe Biden has proved to be a true friend of Israel this week, why the current Israel-Hamas War is the last thing that Washington wanted to deal with at the moment and how he "doesn't see Netanyahu surviving this, nor should he."

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