Raya Passi was still in bed when the alert sounded at 6:30 a.m. Saturday, announcing the arrival of the rockets. Without hesitation, she got up and ran towards the safe room of her house.
The 69-year-old woman, who lives four kilometers from the Gaza Strip in Israel’s Yad Mordechai kibbutz, is used to rocket fire. But this time it was different. “I noticed that the shooting and the number of rockets were unusual. There were too many. Too much. And it’s never like that,” she confides to The Press.
The lady, who is part of her village’s emergency volunteer team, rushed to join her colleagues in their shelter, used as a meeting room. “We met there and started watching TV,” she says. Through television news, she understood that the situation was critical, even before the army officially announced it. “I was very scared,” she said.
In the hours that followed, Hamas soldiers attempted to enter his village. “They wanted to enter, but the army killed them. So we were very lucky not to find ourselves in the situation of a terrorist inside the kibbutz,” she says.
Exposed and vulnerable
Residents were trapped in their homes, unable to leave the area because of Hamas soldiers.
The instructions were to stay at home, close the doors and not go out. So people were panicking. Everyone wanted to leave and get away from this dangerous area. But we couldn’t.
Raya Passi
Even in his secure room, Mme Passi felt “so exposed, so vulnerable,” since she couldn’t barricade herself from the inside. “In other kibbutzim, people held the door handle with their hands so that terrorists could not enter. People who did not have enough strength to hold the handle were killed or kidnapped,” she says.
It was not until Saturday afternoon that the kibbutz residents were allowed to leave. Most of them fled the area, including Raya Passi who went to join her family in Rosh HaAyin, a town near Tel Aviv. On Sunday, residents who were still there were ordered to leave.
The peace
Raya Passi simply aspires to peace. “I know that many women and children are also suffering on the other side. They don’t have secure rooms. And when Israeli planes drop bombs, they have no place to hide. And I know that ordinary people like me suffer a lot,” she says. She hopes leaders on both sides will end this shared suffering.
Before the bombings in 2000, there were no rigid borders, she recalls. Exchanges were frequent between Israel and Gaza. “We went to do our shopping in Gaza, and they came to work in neighboring communities.
“I can’t say we didn’t have suspicions at times, but it was open. It was different. Today it’s so scary. You never know what will happen. And that’s no way to raise children. This is no way to live. Neither for us nor for them. »