Save the article
NORTH OF TEL AVIV. There is a birthday cake in the fridge at Avihai Brodutch’s house.
His daughter Ofri, 10, never got to taste it before Hamas kidnapped the girl along with her two brothers and mother.
The father was left, with no choice but to fight for every breath.
– Children must be with their parents. A wife should be with her husband. It’s not more complicated than that. I think everyone can understand that, everywhere on earth, right into the depths of the Amazon jungle, says Avihai Brodutch, 42.
The father is collected, sometimes tries to joke and laugh. But it is precisely the simple idea that the children’s place is at home with their parents that he wants to spread to the whole world. If they are between four and ten years old, their place is definitely not in a tunnel somewhere in Gaza or as human shields in the adults’ war.
For agronomist Avihai, everything began and ended on the morning of October 7, when Hamas stormed the Kfar Aza kibbutz where his family has lived for the past nine years.
For a few hours, he had the course of events told to him by his wife, who had hidden in the house’s bullet-proof room. He himself was away that day and would come home later, just in time for his daughter Ofri’s birthday. The little guitar and the other gifts were already ready when the call from wife Hagar reached him.
One last message
That morning, the shells were falling, much more than usual, when someone knocked on the door.
– There stood the four-year-old neighbor girl Avigail Idan in front of the door. She had blood everywhere, but it wasn’t her blood, Avihai explains.
His wife took the girl into the bomb-proof room with the other children. The room could not be locked.
After four and a half hours, at eleven o’clock in the morning, Avihai receives a final message: “They are coming in”. “They” were the people sent by Hamas from the Gaza Strip a few kilometers away. Those who in the meantime had murdered around fifty inhabitants of the small community of around a thousand people.
– I was sure they were dead, says the father.
The bloody girl Avigail’s parents were murdered. The blood was surely from her father, who was also close to Avihai.
– We usually drink coffee together, Yes, so that’s over now, he corrects himself.
Present and past have merged in terrifying chaos. It is not easy for the brain to accept that so many friends from everyday life have been murdered within the space of a few hours.
No formal requirements
In the evening of the following day, word comes that someone has seen the girl and Avihai’s family being taken away – alive.
– It felt as if I got my family back. I was all alone in this world and got them back. It was the best feeling I ever had, says Avihai, describing it as coming to the surface from a room deep underground.
– If there is anyone who will manage this, it is my wife. She will watch over the children like no one else, says Avihai who has lived for 22 years with his wife, Hagar.
Now Hagar and the couple’s three children are considered; two boys, Yria and Yuval, aged four and eight, and the girl, Ofri, 10, as four of perhaps 199 hostages taken to the Gaza Strip, with citizenships from some forty countries.
No formal demands have been made – or made public in any case – for their release.
Or rather: A cascade of different demands has been made public over the past week from different Hamas sources. One warning was to kill a hostage for each Israeli bombing without warning. Another demand that came up was for the release of 6,000 Palestinian prisoners, a statement that was later retracted, followed by a statement that none would be released because there was war. A few hours later, another source said that all would be released if Israel stopped bombing the Gaza Strip.
Calls every day
Hamas is also supported by Iran, which has its own state kidnapping policy towards the outside world with, among other things, Swedish citizens as hostages in its prisons. What role Iran will play in these negotiations remains to be seen.
In order for Avihai to stay mentally afloat, he has decided to let the authorities handle any possible negotiations.
– Someone from the authorities calls me once or twice a day. There they were again, he explains after a short conversation.
Avihai considers himself lucky. He points to the party tents further away that are now mourning tents where people, many of his former neighbors, gather to mourn. On a whiteboard, the day’s funeral ceremonies are recorded every day.
Immediately after the attack that turned their kibbutz into a corpse-smelling battlefield, the survivors were relegated to a holiday and conference hotel in the north of Israel. There they are cared for by volunteers, psychologists and everything they may need – except to get their loved ones back.
– Yesterday I needed a charger for my phone. I didn’t have time to say the whole word charger before someone stuck one in my hand, says Avihai. A friend and former neighbor who is also there with his family sleeps with him every night in the double bed.
– He is my suicide watchman, but it feels safe, says Avihai, not entirely joking.
Life before feels distant
The entire hotel area is filled with victims of the worst horrors imaginable, and yet it seethes with life and love. There is a hug basically every ten meters when Avihai shows us around.
He points out the friend Roy in the gray t-shirt who lost his parents, another who lost his wife and child, the old couple who lost their children. At the same time, children play or ride bikes and play soccer, adults drink coffee and joke with each other. Everything the children do reminds the father of his own children.
Blue plastic chairs in circles are scattered across the lawn like little lifebuoys on a green sea where survivors keep each other afloat.
After all, the life from before feels distant, he says and tells about how the door to his house and garden was always open, for a beer by the fridge in the garden. The music was always on – much to the annoyance of some neighbours. The father shows a picture of his three children, happy and dressed as superheroes.
His bedroom porch faced the fence where the sun set over Gaza City, a city that has always been another planet compared to Israeli life in the kibbutz. A few kilometers away, there is poverty, unemployment and dark future prospects. On the Israeli side, there was a quality of life with music, career and vacations that many had begun to take for granted.
Until the morning of October 7.
“Always believed in peace”
Now Avihai is wondering if he should dare to return to what for nine years was the family’s home in Kfar Aza. The hesitation is not so much about the rockets or new assassin commandos in the area as how he will react when he gets home. A friend has already been there and picked up the guitar that his daughter was going to get for her birthday.
– He said the cake was still in the fridge, says the father.
Inside the room, he takes out the guitar and plays one of his favorite songs.
– I want to believe that the people in Gaza who support my family are quite religious. They will take care of them, I try to tell myself. I know nothing about Islam myself, but they must also understand that children and a wife should be at home with their husband, he says and leaves the answer hanging in the air.
– I have always believed in humanity and in peace, but then this happened. Maybe it was me who had it all wrong, he says.