“Mum and Dad are dead. Sorry. Call help,” Rotem messaged his family at 8.01 last Saturday morning. He lay under a quilt soaked in his mother’s blood as he typed.
Shachar Matias had used her body as a shield, a last great act of love towards her 16-year-old son, when Hamas gunmen broke into their home in Holit kibbutz.
Inside their safe room, with shooting just outside the door, she ordered her youngest child to get under a thick layer of fabric, then lay on top of him.
So he heard, but didn’t see, the attack that followed, an explosion he thinks was a grenade breaking open the door, another explosion and gunshots when the men were inside.
For a brief eternity, his father screamed in pain, he felt his mother’s body twitch above him, and then came a horrific silence, broken only by the gunmen laughing.
“They laughed at their murders. They killed my parents and laughed,” he said between tears, in an interview arranged and supervised by his uncle.
The bullets aimed at his mother also hit Rotem. “I felt a warm sensation in my stomach and my leg, I felt under my clothes, it was blood.”
His own blood mixed with his mother’s as he sent the rest of their family the brief message, that seemed too painful to be real. “It’s not funny,” his sister Shir wrote back in the family WhatsApp group. Rotem just responded with “Please”.
He begged his family to call for help, but it took more than seven hours for rescuers to come. So he spent most of last Saturday injured, terrified and alone, in a house with the bodies of his beloved parents.
Shachar was one of six children, a singer, poet and songwriter “with music in her soul”, said her brother Aron Troen. Born Deborah, she never liked the name and instead went by the Hebrew Shachar – which means dawn or rebirth.
She met her husband Shlomi at a prestigious music school, and they built a life as parents, educators and peace activists, filled with music.
They were founders of a bilingual school that taught children in Hebrew and Arabic, under the slogan: “Jewish Arab Education for Equality”. When Hamas sent incendiary balloons into Israel, they organised a “peace festival”, releasing balloons with messages of peace.
“Their core compass was one of a fundamental belief in human good and in human dignity,” Troen said. He is struggling to reconcile the principles by which his sister and Shlomi lived their lives with the horror of their deaths.
Shachar’s sacrifice had echoes of family trauma that has amplified their pain, Troen said. In 1919, in what is now Ukraine, their great-grandmother also used her body to shield her child from killers. “She pushed my grandmother under the bed and hid her as she was murdered.”
He never would have believed that in Israel, their family’s safe haven, his sister would be killed in an almost identical way – using her body to hide and protect her son from a mob hunting Jewish families.
If the attack on the Nova music festival, which killed at least 260 people, had echoes of the suicide killings at a concert at the Bataclan theatre in Paris, the assaults on kibbutzim recalled this older pattern of slaughter.
“This is the largest pogrom since the Holocaust. We said never again, never again never again. And we just can’t allow this to happen again,” Troen said. He wants a fierce campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
“We will defend ourselves by any means possible. And that includes using force,” he said. “We don’t want anyone else harmed, but God you have to defend yourself. You can’t let this go.”
After Shachar died, Rotem spent almost an hour lying under his mother, struggling to breathe in a room slowly filling with smoke, as a fire started during the attack smouldered in the living room.
“I love you all just in case. Mum’s body is on me,” he wrote to family members, about 15 minutes after his first bleak message. Then a few minutes later. “I am going to pass out, no air, bombs.”
Relatives offered medical advice on text messages, trying to help him treat his wounds and calm his breathing. Almost an hour after his mother died protecting him, he decided he had to leave, pushed her body away and crept to a laundry room.
Hamas were still stalking the kibbutz, and he could hear gunshots. His sisters Shir, 21, and Shakked, 19, had their own homes on the kibbutz, and were also hiding alone in safe rooms. Their mobile coverage dropped in and out, and at one point Rotem assumed they too had been murdered.
“They are not answering I think they died,” he messaged. The militants would return to the house again before Israeli forces reached him, and he hid again under a cover soaked with blood.
At half past four he was finally rescued and taken to hospital where he was operated on, then reunited with his sisters who got out – physically untouched but mentally devastated – a few hours later.
They face a long, hard journey to recovery from an attack that not only claimed their parents but ripped apart their community. Many of their school friends and neighbours have been killed or taken hostage.
Rotem is living in torment, haunted by fear of Hamas sleeper cells inside Israel. Loud noises sound like gunshots or explosions to him. He has tinnitus, sometimes struggles to speak and is in constant pain from his injuries.
His family are finding a therapist to help him see the way to some kind of future after the whole fabric of his life was so brutally torn apart. For now, he is holding on to the idea of returning to the kibbutz and honouring his parents with his life.
“For a while I wanted to die, I was thinking of suicide,” he said. “I decided it wasn’t the greatest idea because my parents sacrificed their lives for me.”
