Yotam Kipnis hasn’t heard from his parents since 8.30am on Saturday, when he rang his mother and she told him they were hiding inside the shelter of their home on the Be’eri kibbutz and could hear gunfire outside.
“I tried to call her again at 10 o’clock and she didn’t answer,” said Kipnis, 29, a human rights worker who grew up on the kibbutz in southern Israel, four miles (6.5km) from the Gaza border.
“But I’ve heard from other relatives and friends of the family that they spoke to her around 9.30am and she told them that someone was entering the shelter. They heard shouting down the phone. I haven’t been able to contact my parents since then.”
Although more than 100 bodies have been recovered from the kibbutz in the aftermath of the murderous attack by Hamas gunmen, Yotam said his mother and father, Lilach, 60, and Eviatar, 65, had yet to be found.
Eight other members of the family are also missing from the kibbutz: Lilach’s sister Shoshan Haran; her husband, Avshalom Haran; their daughter Adi Shoham; her partner, Tal Shoham; their two children, Naveh and Yahel Shoham, who are eight and three; Avshalom’s sister Sharon Avigdori; and her daughter Noam Avigdori. Paul Vincent Castelvi, a carer who looks after Eviatar, who has an auto-immune condition, has also disappeared.
“I fear the worst, but they may still be alive and may be being held hostage,” said Kipnis. “I don’t know where anyone is or whether my father has been separated from his carer. I want people to know about the situation of the hostages in Gaza and I want the situation to end as quickly as possible with the lowest number of casualties and the least damage.”
Kipnis has contacted the Red Cross and human rights groups but has yet to receive any news about his loved ones.
Adding to his uncertainty and worry are comments made over the weekend by Israel’s influential far-right finance minister, the settler leader Bezalel Smotrich. At a cabinet meeting late on Saturday, Smotrich – who has previously said “there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation” – urged the Israeli army to “hit Hamas brutally and not take the matter of the captives into significant consideration”.
Kipnis said Smotrich did not speak for all Israelis. “The finance minister said that he didn’t really care about the hostages as far as the war efforts go,” he said. “But I want the Israeli public and the international public to know that we do care about the hostages. They are families and our friends. They are human beings and we have to do what we can to get them released and to cease the bloodshed as quickly as we can.”
Things were bad enough as they were, Kipnis said. “I’ve already lost many of my friends and loved ones in this war.”
He said he wanted to see an end to the “fundamentalist” Hamas and to the current Israeli government, which he described as a “dysfunctional, far-right [administration] that doesn’t represent its citizens in any way … It feels like we’ve been abandoned by our government in order for them to fulfil some messianic urges.”
Kipnis also said those on the Be’eri kibbutz had long feared an atrocity on Saturday’s scale. “A friend of mine used to say that our lives on the kibbutzim are 95% heaven and 5% hell,” he said. “That was because of the wars and the operations over the years.”
Missile attacks from Gaza had become “a sort of once-a-year situation” that had led the kibbutz’s 1,000 residents to evacuate, he said. And then there was the threat of the tunnels that would allow Hamas to launch cross-border raids.
He said the nagging fear that something big and terrible was on its way had only increased in recent years.
“We felt that this would blow up eventually, especially in the past few years and specifically in the past year, when the army was focused on protecting settlers rather than protecting our part of the state, the Negev, even though defence is actually the mission of the Israeli defence forces.”
