Brother feels ‘helpless’ after sister’s family vanish in Hamas attack | UK News

A British-Israeli man is anxiously waiting for news of his younger sister’s family after they were apparently kidnapped by Hamas terrorists at a kibbutz in southern Israel.

Ahal Besorai spoke of feeling ‘helpless’ after Yonat Or, her husband Dror and two of their three teenage children were seen by another resident being abducted by heavily armed gunmen.  

The family is believed to have been seized from the Kibbutz Be’eri, where Ahal’s 89-year-old father and another sister were evacuated to safety after hiding in their homes’ safe rooms.  

A video clip shot at the kibbutz shows terrorists armed with machine guns searching buildings in the first hours of Hamas’s unprecedented attack across the border on Saturday.

The couple and their son Noam, 15, and daughter Alma, 13, had tried to hide from the gunmen in their home on the western edge of the community, which lies just three miles from Israel’s border with Gaza.

Ahal, a Cambridge law graduate, spoke to Metro.co.uk after Hamas claimed to have taken 130 Israelis hostage.

‘At 6.30am there was a Hamas missile attack from Gaza,’ he said of his sister’s family. ‘They woke up and went into a safe room in their house, called a mamad in Hebrew, and locked the door.

‘At first they thought it was a missile attack and then they heard shooting and realised it was much more sinister.

‘The terrorists arrived at the kibbutz on vehicles and motorcycles and forced them out of this safe room. Someone saw them being pulled out of the house and being transported to Gaza. 

‘The terrorists were going from house to house, indiscriminately slaughtering children, parents and the elderly. They were doing so for over five hours before the military arrived and engaged them.’  

Ahal, a lawyer who lives in Manila, the Philippines, last spoke with Dror, who said in a message that they couldn’t speak as they were surrounded by the gunmen. The Israeli military veteran told Metro.co.uk that his father hid in his mamad for 13 hours and his sister in her safe room for 24 hours before they were evacuated to safety.  

‘I just feel extremely sad and helpless,’ he said.

‘I try not to run scenarios in my head about where they are and what could happen to them. I just try to detach myself and to pray for a positive outcome. They have two kids with them, one is 15 and the daughter is 13, she just had her bar mitzvah in June.

‘They have another son who is only 17 who was not with them.

‘He is effectively an orphan now until they find his parents.

‘It’s a really horrific situation.’ 

Ahal, 60, who has dual nationality, is a former soldier in the elite Shayetet 13 commando unit of the Israeli Navy, which is similar to the US Navy Seals.  

Speaking of the Hamas-led attack on Israel, he said: ‘There was an intelligence failure of enormous magnitude.

‘I think this happened for two reasons, the first being that Israel was under the conception that Hamas was not bent on destroying Israel but on maintaining its power in Gaza.

‘Hamas used this as a cloak, if you like, for what it might consider as an attempt to destroy the state of Israel.

‘Another conception that Israel had was that the fence it had built around the Gaza Strip with infra-red sensors and cameras was impregnable.

‘Hamas proved in half an hour that this was wrong.’

Ahal told Metro.co.uk that he and his family are waiting for news from the kibbutz of the identities of the community’s dead and missing, a process which he expects will take days.

Another video shot at the kibbutz, shared on a Hamas-affiliated Telegram channel, showed gunmen in front of burned cars and a bulldozer, with four bodies visible on the ground towards the end of the footage.

Located close to the border with Gaza, Be’eri was among the first towns and settlements to be targeted by Hamas fighters after they crossed into southern Israel in the early hours of Saturday.  

A British man is also anxiously waiting for news after his aunt and uncle were apparently shot at another kibbutz in the region.

The couple, aged in their 70s, were walking near the Kibbutz Nir Oz, which lies close to Be’eri, in the first hours of the attack.

Harrowing stories have emerged of the terrorists setting the community’s buildings on fire in order to flush out hiding families before shooting or kidnapping them. The 54-year-old relative, who did not want to be named, told Metro.co.uk that his aunt and uncle had not been heard from since they sent a final WhatsApp message saying they were hiding.  

The man, from Essex, said: ‘My uncle and his wife have been missing since Saturday, when they went for an early morning walk.

‘The last message they sent was to their kids on WhatsApp, saying they had been shot and they had tried to hide because someone was shooting at them. It was 7am Israeli time. We are not sure if they are dead, wounded or have been abducted. There are some rumours but we are not sure if they are right or wrong, we have had no official news as yet. We only know that they have been shot and have disappeared.’  

Around 1,000 gunmen affiliated to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad infiltrated southern Israeli communities after dawn on Saturday in the carefully-planned attack. The death toll continues to rise, with 800 people reportedly killed in Israel and 560 in Gaza.

Another relative of a Kibbutz Nir Oz resident told how her grandmother had been brutally murdered by one of the terrorists. 

Mor Bayder said that she found out about the atrocity after the killer took her dead grandmother’s phone and posted a picture of the horrific scene in the elderly resident’s home on Facebook.  

The relative who spoke to Metro.co.uk gave a similar picture of defenceless people at the community being brutally murdered.

‘The whole kibbutz was basically burnt to the ground and people have been executed, it’s like the Holocaust, a pogrom,’ he said.

‘I feel helplessness, anger and most of all we can’t understand the barbarity, it’s just like the stories we used to hear from our grandparents.

‘You just don’t want to hear the stories, it’s terrible. People have been shot, burned, whatever you can imagine.’

The nephew said he wanted to remain anonymous as work continues to ascertain what happened to his aunt and uncle.

Another relative of a Nir Oz resident said that his wife and two daughters, aged three and five, were seized by Hamas as they visited his mother-in-law at the community. Yoni Asher told ynetnews.com that he has tracked his wife’s phone to Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.

He said yesterday that he had not been able to contact his relatives for five hours following their visit to the kibbutz in the north-western Negev desert. Yoni, who lives in the Sharon coastal region of Israel, later spotted his wife and daughters in videos which Hamas has distributed from Gaza.  

Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior official at the UK-proscribed terror group, claimed today that it was holding 130 Israelis hostage.

Israeli forces were fighting Hamas militants close to the border with the Gaza Strip this morning, with the Israeli Defence Force saying it had ‘more or less gained control of the communities’ on the border. 

Air strikes have been launched by Jerusalem on Gaza with the aim of eliminating the ‘military and governing capabilities’ of Hamas.

A blockade involving cutting off electricity and supplies of food and fuel into the strip is being undertaken by Israel.

MORE : Israel-Gaza war live: Hamas says hostages killed in airstrikes as IDF orders ‘complete siege’ of Gaza Strip

Do you have a story you would like to share? Contact josh.layton@metro.co.uk

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