A father of twins who survived the Hamas attack on his Kibbutz Be’eri home helped raise almost £90k on Sunday evening to rebuild the community’s nursery garden.
At a north-London venue packed with Jewish Child’s Day supporters, forty-two year old Itay Shabi spoke about his experiences to help raise awareness for the grant-giving charity that funds projects for Jewish children facing physical, learning or emotional difficulties.
Miraculously, he emerged physically unscathed from the 7th October atrocities with his 40-year old wife Moran and their 2 young children, who lived at the community just over two miles from the Gaza border.
Thirty residents were taken hostage that day; 24 have returned. Six remain, murdered. Their bodies are held hostage by Hamas.
Nearly two years on from the Black Shabbat atrocities, Shabi, a former hairdresser who turned his hand to working at the kibbutz printing house on marrying Moran, described their former home as “a forest, big trees, a lot of green grass, quiet, without pressure. Paradise.”
As it was over-run with terrorists on the morning of 7 October and his dog shot dead at point-blank, he and his family hid in the safe room.
He said: “I heard them destroying all of our house. Glass broke and they came to the safe room after 20 to 30 minutes. Whilst they destroyed the house, they started to wrestle with me on the door handle. When they didn’t succeed, they stopped.”
Suddenly finding it hard to breathe, Shabi used the flash on his phone to light up the room, horrified to see “all the dark smoke coming inside”, because Hamas had set fire to a tyre in their air-conditioning unit, determined to either suffocate them or smoke them out.
He told Moran to raise her hands and prepare to surrender. “We thought that maybe they will have mercy on us; if they see two kids with us with raised hands, maybe they will kidnap us. So I tried to open the door, but I didn’t succeed. They broke the door from the other side.”
Jacalyn Sank De Costa (UJIA), Lucie Spungin, Charles Spungin (JCD’s Chairman), Itay Shabi ( Key Speaker from Kibbutz Be’eri) Anthea Jackson ( JCD’s Executive Director) and Mandie Winston (UJIA). Pic: Grainge Photography
The family were forced to flee through a window and spent five hours hidden in a palm tree in their garden.
During that time, he remembers “all our garden was full of terrorists and civilian terrorists. They started to steal stuff from our house. And I remember how they stole my guitar and then I started to hear the screaming of our neighbours being murdered. They screamed for their life, and it was helpless feeling that you cannot do anything. And we with two kids, twins, three and a half years old, and we are stuck. We cannot do anything. We cannot breathe, because there are dozens and dozens of terrorists around us.”
Artist’s impression of the new kindergarten area at Kibbutz Be’eri
To this day, the couple remain astonished at how their two children remained quiet during the ordeal. “They didn’t make a noise; they didn’t say anything. It was like God had put a hand on their mouths. I don’t know how my kids didn’t say a word. They saw people killing people. They saw their bodies. They saw terrorists. They saw monsters, and they kept quiet without food and without water. That’s the big miracle for that day.”
Eventually, Israeli forces arrived to help them, but by then, Moran’s parents had been murdered and a good friend had died from his wounds, bleeding out before help could reach him. Leaving the kibbutz, Itay and his family came upon the horrors of the bodies massacred at the nearby Nova music festival, abandoned and shot-at cars strewn across the road.
They are now staying in temporary accommodation. But it’s not the kibbutz they called home. “It’s like in the desert”, says Itay. “No trees, no forest, no green. But we are all together.”
Artist images of the new kindergarten at Kibbutz Be’eri. Pic: ODA Architecture
They await the return of the six murdered Be’eri residents. “We need them to come back, so that we can close the wound for us that’s still open. It’s still October 7, it’s still on every day.”
Whilst 150 members of the community have returned, the children have not. There is no life for them in the absence of schools, playgrounds and nurseries.
Seventeen months on, Moran is expecting their third child, a baby boy and Itay is in charge of the rebuild of the nursery garden at Be’eri.
It’s an essential first step in restoring the community and Itay calls it winning, “because they come, they destroyed and we are fixing it back now. We are here, not them. I can see my children marrying and building their lives here, and for me, that is the true meaning of winning.”
Jewish Child’s Day chairman Charles Spungin said: “Now is the time to support the Jewish Child’s Day mission to rebuild a new future. The privilege of hearing Itay’s incredible story really shows that Jewish Child’s Day support to rebuild the kindergarten garden will make a huge difference to the children of Kibbutz Be’eri and speed up their return to their home and the start of a brighter future.”
- To support the ongoing rebuild of Kibbutz Be’eri’s nursery gardens, click here.
