In the space of 24 hours, Ayelet Svatitzky, 46, found out that her brother had been murdered by Hamas, and that her mother and older brother had almost certainly been kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
“The cruelty, the atrocities are inhumane,” the author tells me from her home near Haifa, in the north of Israel, where she lives with her husband and three children. Our interview comes after Svatitzky's home region — an area that was already engulfed in the biggest regional conflict in decades — has been thrown into further chaosfollowing a blast at a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday night.
At first, Palestinian officials reported the destruction of the al-Ahli Arab hospital to have been caused by an Israeli airstrike, killing more than 500 people. It now appears to have been the result of an errant Palestinian missile, with a much lower death toll. Still, even before the details had been released, the events had already sunk a peace summit set to be attended by US President Joe Biden in the Jordanian capital of Amman yesterday.
Biden flew into Israel yesterday morning as a show of solidarity, but gave cautious backing to Israel’s version of events, saying in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that based on what he had seen, "it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you. But there’s a lot of people out there notsure”.
While he expressed support for Israel, meeting with families of victims and emergency services first responders (irrespective of the hospital incident, the death toll in Gaza is already at more than 3,000), he also urged restraint. Reminding them of America’s foreign policy debacles after 9/11, he said: “After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” His British counterpart Rishi Sunak has since followed suit, landing in Israel last night and set to hold talks with its leaders today.
It's been 12 days now, since this latest crisis in the Middle East began on the morning of Saturday, the 7th of October. At home in Haifa, Svatitzky was woken by her husband, warning her that terrible things were happening in the south of Israel near the borders with Gaza. We all know the realities of that now: a massive military assault by Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip and is designated a terrorist group by the UK, was taking place.
“My mum [Channah Peri] and brothers live on a Kibbutz [a collective community] called Nirim, and I opened my phone and saw on a WhatsApp group with my childhood friends that there was a missile attack and a terrorist attack, and there were missiles in Nirim," she recalls.
"I immediately called my mother who is 79, and told her to go in the saferoom and lock it. I didn’t realize there wasn't a lock… I said don't let anyone in there is a terroristattack, within a minute I heard voices speaking to her in English with an Arabic accent. So, I hung up the phone and rang my brother. He lives next door. I rang and he picked him up. I said, 'Don't open the door, no matter what', then I heard the same voices and realised they'd gotten to him too. I hung up the phone and called someone in the Kibbutz community. I told them there were terrorists at my mum's and my brother's.”
She soon received the message she had been fearing: a photo, sent from her mother's WhatsApp account, showing her mother and brother [Nadav Popplewell] in her mother's living room, alongside a message simply saying "HAMAS".
The cruelty, the atrocities are inhumane... For the first hours of the Hamas attack, I didn't think my mum and brother were alive
Svatitzky was terrified. A few hours later, her mother's Facebook page was used to upload another photo, this time of her with a Hamas terrorist dressed in camouflage and holding a gun. Her other brother Roi Popplewell was confirmed dead the next day, his body having been discovered behind his house. "For the first hours, I didn’t think my mum and my brother were alive. It was only when I started hearing on the news about the hostage situation that maybe they did take them, they did after allsend me a proof of life," she says.
Almost two weeks on, she has become one of almost 200 relatives desperately waiting for updates on their family member, praying for a rescue operation as Israel unleashes hell on the very place their loved ones are being held.
Commentators have predicted the war could last months, years even, depending on how fiercely Hamas militants resist Israeli forces if they assault into Gaza, or if other forces in the region join the war. But it has already been called the biggest mass murder of Jewish people since the Holocaust. Over 1,400 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in a series of massacres at Kibbutzes like Nirim, as well as the Nova music festival in Re’im.
These killings were accompanied by, Hamas claim, 5,000 missiles fired from Gaza as cover for the militant fighters who crossed the border by sea, land and air. The Israeli army estimate it was 2,200 rockets. “I don’t think anyone realised that anything like this could or would happen,” says Svatitzky. "This was an ISIS-style attack."
The scale and extremity of the attack so far has shocked Israel not just because of its brutality, but because of the huge failings it has exposed in the Israeli Defense Forces and security agencies, who failed to detect preparation for the attacks, and suffered heavy casualties as they were overwhelmed by Hamas fighters. According to a report in the Washington Post, Hamas itself was surprised by how the success of its operation and the lack of initial resistance offered by Israel’s Army, previously believed to be the most powerful in the Middle East.
Now, Israel lives on a knife-edge as it prepares for a ground war in the south as well as a potential expansion of the war on other fronts. In Tel-Aviv, considered by most countries to be Israel’s capital, the normally flowering nightlife and café scene has given way to empty streets and closed establishments. It is an eerie feeling, with groups of machine gun-toting soldiers, some in uniform and other in plain clothes, making up the majority of people on the streets.
Music and café chatter have been replaced by air raid sirens and the explosions of rockets, both those fired by Hamas from Gaza and Israeli rockets from its ‘Iron Dome’ air defense system. As a war reporter who has spent the last 18 months reporting from Ukraine, the empty streets of Tel Aviv are in many ways reminiscent of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in the first days of the Russian invasion back in February 2022. As they did in Ukraine, people have been volunteering to support the armed forced in their masses, and taking people into their homes who have fled areas close to the frontlines.
The city's recurring domestic political crises — a soaring cost of living and controversial judicial reforms — have been completely put on hold. War is the only topic of conversation.
Julia van Weelde, 28, a Dutch-Israeli community organiser living on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, describes this new normal. “It's still so unreal," she says. "Even though weare in a relatively safe area, I do not feel safe. Fighter jets and helicopters are flying over all day… the war is everywhere.”
The empty streets of Tel Aviv are reminiscent of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in the first days of the Russian invasion
Like many Israelis, van Weelde lost a close friend in the attacks, a soldier who was killed fighting against Hamas in the Gaza border regions. “Woke up today to the terrible news that my friend who went missing has passed away, together with his little brother," she wrote on Facebook. "His parents lost two sons in one stroke. But unfortunately, most Israelis have known this for a long time; losing family members and friends due to war is something most families know.”
It is not only the assault from Gaza that has Israelis scared. Now, many in the military and political establishment are deeply worried about the prospect of the war expanding on other fronts. A major concern is an attack from the Iranian proxy militia Hezbollah, who control major parts of Lebanon on Israel's northern border. LikeHamas, it is also dedicated to Israel’s destruction.
“Hezbollah has a bigger missile arsenal than all of Europe combined, about 200,000 missiles,” a former defense advisor to the Israeli government, Raphael Jerusalmy, tells me. “Many of them are guided missiles that can hit army bases, airports, or other sensitive targets in Israel. And they have 100,000 men trained in the civil war in Syria.They come with experience with urban warfare that Hamas doesn’t have.”
“Lebanon could get the worst of that," he continues. "Lebanon could pay the price for Hezbollah’s presence. [A war between Hezbollah and Israel] could open the gates of hell.”
The left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz believes the situation in Gaza is already the equivalent of the gates of hell being thrown open; "wide open". Israel's militaryhas sworn to eradicate Hamas and has been conducting a massive bombing campaign in preparation for aground invasion, with an already immense civilian toll.
Local authorities claim roughly 3,000 people have been killed in Gaza as of the time of writing, many of them children. Aid workers and reporters on the ground have warned of a severe shortage of food, water and medical supplies, with hospitals expected to run out of generator fuel within days. The Israeli government has warned at least a million people living in Gaza City to move to the south of the territory, yet in at least one case the government also appears likely to have bombed a designated safe route being used for evacuations.
Human rights organisations, including the United Nations, believe that the bombing campaign and evacuation instructions are severe enough to constitute collective punishment, a potential war crime. They have also raised severe concerns for the fate of civilian people such as the elderly or disabled, who are unable to leave their homes.
A group of some of the UK’s most respected Jewish lawyers, including a former Supreme Court President, this week wrote a letter to the Financial Times raising concerns about Israel’s operation in Gaza, saying “collective punishment is prohibited by the laws of war. Equally, international law requires combatants to ensure minimum destruction to civilian life and infrastructure”.
Most Israelis I have met so far believe that this destruction is a necessary evil in an existential war to remove Hamas for good. But some who have suffered the greatest amounts believe the violence has gone too far.
Noy Katsman, whose brother was killed in an attack on a Kibbutz, said in a eulogy, "Even in the face of Hamas, people who murdered them, and in the face of their extreme rightwing beliefs, [my brother] would call out against killing innocent people... Do not use the death and our pain to bring the death and pain of other people. Stop the cycle of pain."
Many people, both Israeli and Palestinian, agree with him. But with so much blood already shed, and both sides geared up for a major land war, the prospect of peace in the region currently seems further away than it ever has done.
