David Sheen, Ali Abuminah – The Electronic Intifada March 12, 2024

An Israeli woman taken captive by Palestinian fighters on 7 October 2023 is grateful to the helicopter pilot who shot at the vehicle she was riding in, killing another Israeli as well as all of their abductors, Israel’s Channel 12 reported last month.

Shani Goren, a 29-year-old resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz, was taken from her home at gunpoint by Palestinian fighters and transported to the Gaza Strip, where she was held for 55 days. She was released on 30 November.

Before she reached Gaza, however, a vehicle carrying Goren away came under heavy fire from an Israeli combat helicopter.

When the gunfire ceased, Goren realized that the helicopter’s high-caliber bullets had killed all of her abductors, as well as one Israeli woman, fellow Nir Oz resident Efrat Katz.

“My pants are all ripped and covered in blood. I raise my head and see dominoes,” Goren recalled to Ilana Dayan, host of Channel 12’s prestigious investigative program Uvda – and by coincidence also her cousin. “All the terrorists – dead.”

You can watch part of Goren’s account with English subtitles in the video above or on Youtube. A transcript is (linked) below.

Goren and the other Israeli captives who survived the volley of helicopter gunfire were abducted again minutes later by other Palestinians returning from Nir Oz on one of the tractors of the kibbutz.

Only one woman, 63-year-old Neomit Dekel-Chen, avoided their fate by pretending to be mortally wounded from the helicopter gunfire.

On 7 October, the Israeli army implemented its controversial Hannibal directive, which amounts to an order to assassinate Israeli captives to avoid having to barter for their lives by freeing Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

At Kibbutz Be’eri, another Israeli colonial settlement near the Gaza boundary fence, the Israeli army attacked a home containing 14 civilian captives and several dozen Hamas fighters.

All but one of the Qassam fighters and all but two of the captives were killed in the intense crossfire. At least three of the civilians, including 12-year-old Liel Hatsroni, were incinerated by Israeli tank shells fired at the house.

As The Electronic Intifada previously reported, Barak Hiram, the Israeli general who gave the order to fire at the house, told a fabricated story in an attempt to cover up this incident, when Channel 12’s Ilana Dayan interviewed him in October.

The families of the Israeli civilians killed by Israeli army fire at Kibbutz Be’eri have demanded that the military immediately investigate the incident and the decision to use overwhelming firepower at the cost of the lives of their loved ones.

Israeli military sources have revealed that on 7 October attack helicopters, along with armed drones, swarmed the skies above southern Israel and around Gaza.

Israeli news outlet Ynet reported in November how “28 fighter helicopters shot over the course of the day all of the ammunition in their bellies, in renewed runs to rearm.”

Ynet mentions in particular Lieutenant Colonel A., the commander of Squadron 190, who around mid-morning of 7 October “instructed the other fighters in the air to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence.”

“If he shoots again, it’s me who dies”

At least one survivor of the same Israeli helicopter attack that killed Nir Oz resident Efrat Katz has blasted Israel’s repeated readiness to sacrifice the lives of its citizens – on the day she was taken, while she was held in Gaza, and ever since her return home on 27 November.

In a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet the week after her release, Sharon Cunio assailed the Israeli leaders over their sanctioning of the Hannibal directive and pleaded with them to take no more risks with the life of her husband David Cunio, still held in Gaza.

“The feeling we had there is that no one is doing anything for us. The fact is that I was in a hiding place that was bombed, and we were forced to be smuggled out of there, wounded. Not counting the helicopter that shot at us on the way to Gaza. You claim there is intelligence, but the fact is we were bombed,” Cunio told them, according to Israeli news outlet Ynet, which obtained recordings of the contentious meeting.

“My husband was separated from us three days before we returned to Israel and was taken to the tunnels,” Cunio told the members of the war cabinet. “And you are talking about flooding the tunnels with seawater? You are bombing the route of the tunnels in the area they are being held in.”

Cunio’s anger over Israel’s repeated implementation of the Hannibal directive is not shared by Goren, however, who was taken to Gaza on the same tuk tuk – a small motorized utility vehicle.

Asked what words she has for the helicopter pilot that sprayed them with gunfire, Goren replied with appreciation – and regret that he did not resume his fire at the second group of Palestinians that carried them off to Gaza.

“Thank you – and why didn’t you stay?” Goren told Channel 12. “Also, why weren’t you there, here, to take down everyone here? If one helicopter had fired, everything would be okay. We would never have gotten to Gaza.”

Goren’s appreciation is all the more striking since she appears to understand that she could have been killed just like Efrat Katz if the helicopter had returned.

“I was also trying to hide, to get inside as much as possible,” Goren explains to Ilana Dayan as they watch footage of the second vehicle laden with people that would eventually make it to Gaza. “At that moment my fear was if the helicopter shot at us again. And this time my back is exposed. If he shoots again, it’s me who dies.”

Goren also described how on 23 October she and other Israelis held in Gaza were hurriedly evacuated by their Palestinian captors from the home they were being kept in amid a warning of imminent bombing, presumably by the Israeli air force.

“Immense” amount of friendly fire

Doron Katz-Asher and her two little girls Raz and Aviv were in the first vehicle with Efrat Katz, Doron’s mother, and Shani Goren when the helicopter attacked.

 

Katz-Asher told Channel 12 in a December interview what went through her head the moment after the Israeli helicopter opened fire, killing her mother and injuring Katz-Asher and her 2-year-old Aviv.

“It sounds far-fetched, but I was in a war movie with shooting and terrorists and I wanted so badly to reach Gaza, for them to take me to a safe place, in quotes, where I won’t be under fire,” Katz-Asher said. “And where they’ll maybe even treat my wounds.”

“It was even a kind of relief when we finally arrived [in Gaza] alive,” Katz-Asher added.

Katz-Asher and her two girls would return home on 24 November, as part of the temporary ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal that month.

While she was in Gaza, Katz-Asher said she couldn’t help feeling that “we are being abandoned” by Israeli leaders and “that maybe they are only occupied with vengeance.”

The Israeli military has admitted to an “immense and complex quantity” of so-called friendly fire incidents on 7 October, in which Israeli forces fired on their own citizens.

According to Ynet, however, the military is of the view that “it would not be morally sound to investigate” them.

Regarding Efrat Katz, the army has said, “From an examination of the incident described, no reply can be made with certainty in response to the claims of the family at this stage.”

As of yet, there is no exact or official figure for how many of the roughly 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals Israel says died on that day were actually killed by Israeli forces.

It may be that Katz, as a kibbutz resident, was seen as a leftist – at least in Israeli terms – and therefore considered even more disposable.

Living on stolen land

Although Zionists marketed the kibbutzim to the world as idealistic, socialist collective farms, the reality is that they were Jewish-only colonial settlements often built on land brutally conquered from ethnically cleansed Palestinians.

Nir Oz and several other nearby Zionist colonies were built on land that belonged to the Abu Sitta family, in a community called al-Main, until they were expelled by the Zionist colonists to Gaza during the Nakba.

Most of these settlements were established as colonial outposts or military garrisons to consolidate the conquests of the new Zionist settler-colonial state.

Al-Main was attacked by Zionist militias on 14 May 1948. The Haganah, the Zionist armed group that later became the Israeli army, “destroyed and burned homes, demolished the school that was built in 1920, blew up the motorized well and the flour mill,” wrote Salman Abu Sitta, the renowned Palestinian geographer and a survivor of the ethnic cleansing.

“They were resisted bravely for several hours by 15 Palestinian defenders armed by old rifles,” Abu Sitta recounts. “As a child, I witnessed the smoldering remains of my village while I was huddled with other children and women in a nearby ravine. I never saw a Jew before and did not know who the attackers were or why they came to destroy our life.”

So began Abu Sitta’s life as a refugee.

Five years ago, De-Colonizer, a project which aims to educate about the Nakba, set up an exhibit in the last house that is still standing in al-Main and invited Israeli residents of the surrounding kibbutzim to view it.

“The angriest comments and indeed threats, came from an old kibbutznik, over 80, who witnessed and participated in the attack on al-Main,” Abu Sitta observed.

Other settlers similarly expressed anger, denial and defiance at being confronted with the reality of their presence on land forcibly taken from people living as refugees, caged in a ghetto just a few miles away.

But several people who visited the exhibit were more thoughtful, one of them none other than Nir Oz resident Efrat Katz.

“What I’ve seen here today was very moving and even painful. In spite of living here more than 35 years, I feel the need and the hope to return to the land and revive it with the past emotions, to revive it with the culture and habits of you, the residents,” Katz said in a handwritten note.

“A land is not a brick. A land is value, it is roots, it is a love for a place. There’s no room for deportation. My heart is with you.”

On 7 October 2023, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Palestinians expelled in 1948 came back to their land, executing a devastating assault against the Israeli military bases and colonial settlements that had forcibly usurped their place and the lives they might have lived.

“I could have been one of those who broke through the fence had I been much younger and was still living in the concentration camp called the Gaza Strip,” Salman Abu Sitta, now in his 80s, wrote in January.

Efrat Katz died on that day at the hands of those who were supposedly charged with protecting her.

Opportunity for a crime that didn’t happen

Shani Goren’s recollections of her capture on 7 October seem to be incongruous with the Israeli government’s allegations that Palestinian fighters were ordered by their commanders to rape Israeli women during the attack.

When the kibbutz came under attack early on Saturday morning, Goren followed phone advice from her brother Amit and barricaded herself in her bedroom. When five Palestinian fighters arrived and entered her bedroom, they found her wearing next to no clothes. “I was wearing underwear, no bra, and a crop top, what I usually wear to bed,” Goren told Dayan.

One of the fighters rifled through her wardrobe, pulled out leg coverings and passed them to her. “He threw tights at me,” Goren recalled. “He told me: ‘Get dressed.’”

At the time, Palestinian fighters had complete control of Kibbutz Nir Oz. “I look to either side – there are millions of them,” Goren remembers. “No one else. I say: ‘Where is the army?’”

If the Palestinian fighters had really been instructed to commit sex crimes on that day, they could have violated Goren with alarming ease. Instead, they led her on a walk around the village, seemingly to celebrate their conquest of the kibbutz.

Channel 12’s Dayan characterized it as “a kind of victory lap through the paths of Nir Oz.”

Hoping to calm her nerves, Goren asked the leader of the Palestinians who had abducted her for a cigarette. He then approached another fighter, secured a cigarette for her, and allowed her to smoke it. After a short time, another fighter yelled at her and she was forced to put it out.

The fact that a scantily clad 29-year-old Israeli woman was not sexually assaulted when her captors had ample opportunity to do so, or during her nearly two months of captivity in Gaza, cannot by itself prove that no sex crime occurred anywhere else on the battlefield that day.

But it does provide additional context against which to evaluate the Israeli claims – made on the basis of debunked and discredited accounts and thus far presented without any forensic evidence or first-person testimony – that such crimes were systematic, pre-planned and were perpetrated on the order of Hamas commanders “as a weapon of war.”

In this respect, Goren’s recollections of her experience can be added to those of Yasmin Porat, one of the only two Israelis to survive the shelling of the home ordered by General Barak Hiram at Kibbutz Be’eri.

In an interview with Israeli state radio in October, Porat recounted how the dozens of Palestinian fighters had treated her and the other civilians they were holding  “humanely.”

She insisted that the fighters intended to “kidnap us to Gaza. Not to murder us.”

“It was very frightening but no one treated us violently,” Porat said. “Luckily nothing happened to me like what I heard in the media.”

David Sheen is the author of Kahanism and American Politics: The Democratic Party’s Decades-Long Courtship of Racist Fanatics.

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