'The Hand of God': Israeli Village Near Gaza Somehow Emerged from Hamas Terror Rampage Completely Unscathed
One small Israeli kibbutz was left unscathed as waves of death-dealing Hamas terrorists flooded through southern Israel on Saturday.
None of the 210 people living in Kibbutz Urim were killed Saturday, although one person visiting nearby Kibbutz Be’eri is missing and presumed taken as a hostage.
“It’s really a miracle … It really feels like the hand of God was covering our kibbutz,” U.S.-born Yehudit Pelish, 59, told Fox News.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the slaughter of more than 1,300 Israelis “the most horrible day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” according to the Times of Israel.
Urim is not far from Be’eri, where the slaughter of 100 of the kibbutz’s 1,000 residents led Maj. Doron Spielman of the Israel Defense Forces to say, “In the same way that Auschwitz is the symbol of the Holocaust, Be’eri is going to become the symbol of the massacre. The level of inhumanity of Hamas fighters surprised even us, Israelis who had no illusions about what Hamas is,” according to the Times of Israel.
“Walking through here is like Eisenhower walking through Bergen-Belsen and seeing the destruction and carnage. The world needs to witness this firsthand,” Spielman said.
But in Urim, amid fear, everyone who was there survived.
“We had a few close calls,” Pelish said. “A number of terrorists were killed on the road leading to our kibbutz, and four more were captured right outside our back gate. We just got lucky.”
Minnesota expatriate Sophie Stillman, 28, who came to Israel in 2017 and lived in Kibbutz Urim before later moving to Tel Aviv, had come back last weekend for a visit.
At first, she said, “We just crouched in the living room, and then we ran to a nearby above-ground shelter as the rockets kept on coming.”
“When we realized it would be a longer ordeal, we ran across the grass to the underground shelter and joined everyone else who was in there. I messaged my parents in the U.S. and told them not to worry and that we were safe,” Stillman said.
Then messages came, telling them of the horror enveloping southern Israel.
“I heard so much shooting outside. I only realized after the fact that it was not two-sided, it was only one-sided,” she said.
The 24 hours in the shelter were “a total roller coaster. The story was unfolding around us throughout the day,” she said.
One defining moment came when she saw a video of a young Israeli woman being taken hostage.
“We were sitting in the shelter, and I saw that video, and I didn’t know if that could soon be us,” Stillman said.
“For the first time in my life, I started writing a farewell message to my family [in America]. In a situation like that, you start thinking about what you need to do if something happens to you … It was psychological warfare, and what happened is totally incomprehensible,” she said, adding, “The terrorists literally skipped over us, they went to Kibbutz Re’im, they went to Ofakim, it’s a complete miracle they missed us out.”
Pelsih said seeing the damage to nearby communities was “heartbreaking.”
“On Kibbutz Be’eri, they lost 10 percent of their population, and that is only the numbers that have been confirmed until now – I don’t know how they rebuild physically and emotionally,” she said.
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