--:-- Georgia Howe: Welcome to this special episode of Morning Wire, I'm Georgia Howe.
--:-- John Bickley: And I'm John Bickley, Daily Wire editor-in-chief. Today, we're bringing you powerful accounts of resilience, hope, and human spirit in the face of immense tragedy. We're speaking directly to individuals who lived through some of the most brutal attacks in Israel.
--:-- Georgia Howe: I want to warn you that the content of this episode could be disturbing for some listeners. We're going to share the tragic and heartbreaking stories of several Israelis whose families endured the brutal Hamas attacks on Israel last Saturday.
--:-- John Bickley: Our reporter, Natalie Mann, who lives near Tel Aviv, traveled the country to bring you some of these firsthand accounts. The first person we're going to hear from is an ambulance driver named Avi.
--:-- Avi: So we're here in Ashkelon, which is one of the cities that have been most hard hit by the war that we're in right now. And this is an ambulance that usually fulfills dreams for children who are suffering from cancer, and right now it's become the ambulance of nightmares because they're volunteered to help Zaka, which collect the bodies and body parts. Something very important to Jews is to make sure you have every single piece of a dead body.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Can you tell us, you were one of the first people to arrive at the scene of the party, after the party, and can you tell us what kinds of things you saw? Where did you find the bodies? What situation?
--:-- Avi: A lot of blood, a lot of shooting. And then you were telling us that you were driving around to look for more bodies. Like, where did you find the bodies? On the floor? Where I'm not going, I see bodies. I'm going here, I see. I'm going here, I see. In cars? In cars, inside, no matter where. Where you see, you see bodies, bodies, bodies, bodies.
--:-- John Bickley: Do you know how many bodies you've collected since you started? Because, I mean...
--:-- Avi: Yeah, just you personally or all the friends. May I? One hundred? A hundred? This is in four hours. Something like this. Four hours. Four hours we go out. All the bodies, we take them.
--:-- Georgia Howe: What do you think about the Hamas now? Did this change anything for you?
--:-- Avi: You know, I think before, I think, you know, We're not like us. Okay. But now, Nazis. I see stuff. And only in Shoah we see this. Why? I'm not believing. This is the first time I speak with it. And I'm not speaking with my family. My family calls all the time. I don't know what we do more. What we do after this is... What next?
--:-- John Bickley: We had to cut the interview short because they've been called to go and collect more bodies now in the south. It's just not ending.
--:-- Georgia Howe: One of the hardest hit areas was Kibbutz Kvar Aza. Kvar Aza is just one kilometer and a half from the fence with Gaza. Natalie spoke to Doron Admoni, age 67, who lost his wife, Mikal, and his 25-year-old son.
--:-- Doron Admoni: Terrible. We have a difficult situation now. My name is Doron Admoni. I am 67 years old, living in Kibbutz Kfaraza. My wife was Michal. She was 66 years old. I have four kids, and that's all. Now the terrorist killed my wife, Michal, and my son, Guy. They were at home on Saturday morning. Michal is 100% disability, and Guy came to the weekend to be with her, because me and my older daughter, we've been in the U.S. to visit our new granddaughter. She was born three months ago.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And when it happened, we've been in the U.S. Six o'clock in the morning, Israel time, on Saturday morning, my wife, Michal, sent me an SMS. The terrible situation now at home. The dog has run away from home. She's worried about him, our dog. And after five minutes, there's no contact with her anymore by phone. And after, when I will get SMS from the kibbutz, our friend, we start to understand the situation now in the kibbutz. And after 15 minutes, I felt I was in California. I felt that at that moment that Michal and Guy killed. They are not with us anymore. This was my feeling. No chance for them. And now we know exactly that Guy and Michal killed at home. They found them.
--:-- John Bickley: And I know that Guy supported his mom. And he never leave him. And they kill them when they are together. This is, first of all, it's helped me. It's made me, yesterday, they told me about it. I was happy for Michal and Guy and Guy all the life when he was young in his classroom. Teacher, ask the kids what you think everyone will be another 20 years. He said, every kid said I will be doctor, he said I will be a prime minister or I will die for my country. And he died, he killed for his country. It was dream to be a soldier to protect his country, to do the best that he can do for his country. If to die, to die for the country. This was the way that he died. He disappeared from our world. He was a light for the world. And he was, this year, was very happy. Last month, he was with his girlfriend in Paris one week. He was very high. He died with his mom, his love. And now we have to see how we continue the life, our life. That's all. I must be strong and rebuild the family from the beginning now. Thank you.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thank you.
--:-- John Bickley: We were able to tell you what happened. Thank you.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Here's an account from a woman named Eleanor who fled with her husband and children into a safe room when terrorists invaded their home in Kibbutz Kvar Aza.
--:-- Eleanor: My name is Eleanor, and I live in Kibbutz Kvar Aza for the last 15 years. So Saturday morning, October 7, was the day of Sukkot holiday. And so 6.30 in the morning, the siren went on. And it's a drill that we know. We know what we do when we get the siren. We get into the shelter, into the safety room, and we lock the door. And I think it took at least seven minutes when the siren kept going on and on and on and on and on. And my husband looked at me, and he whispered and says, something's different. He says, I smell something else.
--:-- John Bickley: So he started running around the house, closing all the doors and all the windows. Before we even understand and we understood something happened, I heard him grabbing things. So he brought this huge three kitchen knife.
--:-- Eleanor: Now I'm thinking it was so naive and so we could not even imagine that people can do whatever happened there. And I think it was less than 10 minutes, even before the official announcement from the kibbutz management arrived, that he looked at us. We all sat and he told the kids, please open your eyes. There's terrorists in the kibbutz. I need everybody to listen to me. And the look on his eyes was terrible. I mean, he looked at us, lots of pain, but also he had a lot of courage.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And he says, I will tell you what to do. We heard noises. We heard people running outside. We heard Allah-Wakbar. We heard noises that not in a normal neighborhood as we used to have. And suddenly we heard this huge bomb, and we were sure the terrorists in our house. We let the kids under my son's bed. We heard people walking. We heard them. We thought they were in their house. Where we heard them walking around the house for sure. We heard them on the roof. And every once in a while, they just shot. I don't know if they shot someone or just terrified us. They kept us in stress for so many hours. And they terrified us in every single way they could have done it.
--:-- John Bickley: And the stories keep going on. Who saw family? Did anyone talk to this? And we already knew that our friend who was the mayor of our council, Reginald, got murdered. He was in my kibbutz. And his mother-in-law, 83-year-old lady, surviving cancer, why would you shoot her? What, she could have do anything to you. And his son is missing, still missing. And his nephew jumped on a grenade. Grenade, thank you. And this is how he rescued and survived his girlfriend. And one family who lost five people for nothing. And in the whole community, we're still counting. We're still not sure. We lost 65 people in our community. Just unbelievable that we survived it.
--:-- Georgia Howe: I think emotionally, we will never forget it. Sorry, no words. We just actually celebrate our 15th anniversary in Kfaraza on Sunday. And when I told my kids that October 8th is the date, my oldest child, who's 19, looked at me and says, we got a present, we got our life. And of course, we immediately cried.
--:-- John Bickley: Is there any message you want the world to know?
--:-- Eleanor: They butchered us. He butchered us family after family, house after house, and it's horrible. It's just horrible. I don't think I have the words in English to describe how furious I am and how sad I am and how I just want my normal life I just want to be again.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's Eleanor from Kfaraza.
--:-- John Bickley: The next interview is with a man named Mark Jaffe. Mark and his wife immigrated from England about 20 years ago. Mark's adult son manages their thrift store WhatsApp group from his home in Tel Aviv. That text thread quickly became the main source of information and communication between the hundreds of members for the 23 hours that they were held captive in their safety rooms. The messages are now an accurate record of which house got attacked when. Here's Mark's story.
--:-- Mark Jaffe: We're very used to being woken up by warnings of rockets. We had such a warning at 6.30 in the morning, something of that sort. And we have 10 seconds basically between the warning and the rocket falling, so we're very used to not thinking and jumping out of bed and running for our safe area in the house, which is what we did. We're also close enough to the border to hear all the rockets leaving. The rockets are big enough to make a sound when they get fired off, the long-range ones.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So I began to realize that there was a very large rocket attack. And at that point I started hearing lots of shouting outside in the vicinity of the house. And I started getting dressed to go out and help, which is what I usually do under those circumstances. And I was just about to open the front door when this started being accompanied by long bursts of automatic fire, which is at the point I realized that I wasn't going to go out of the house.
--:-- John Bickley: So we went back in the safe room, must have been about 7 o'clock at that point. Closed the door and we were there until 2 o'clock the following morning when we were rescued. Luckily we had electricity all of that time, so we could follow what was going on outside and we could hear everything that happened in our area as well.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We had two main WhatsApp groups that were running at the time. People joined it from all over. It had about 450 members in it very quickly. And it became the main way of people reporting what was going on where. It was a very unofficial and a very disturbing sort of line of, they are here, they are coming in, they're on my roof, shots are being fired outside my house, come and help. This sort of thing.
--:-- John Bickley: They managed to force their way into two of the safe houses and murdered the people who were in it. And with that, you could tell from their last WhatsApp messages where they said they forced their way in or they're trying to force their way in and then they stopped sending messages. So we were basically sitting there waiting for it to be our turn and they didn't. So I guess at about two or three, I'm not really sure the time, we were evacuated from there to Nettivort, which is a town about 10 kilometers away.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So you and your wife are okay and your children are okay, thank God. Yes, and I don't know how. I mean, it's a complete Russian roulette as to who survived it okay and who didn't. I can't explain it. There's no explanation as to why they didn't even try and get in our house. I don't know. Just luck. I mean, and I don't know why people are still psychologically whole here. It's part of the Jewish way. Life goes on, keep moving. Yes. Yes.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Over a thousand lives were lost in the terror attacks on October 7th. These stories represent just a few of the human tragedies. Special thanks to our correspondent, Natalie Mann, for bringing us these interviews from Israel. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in this morning. This has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Thank you.
