https://www.uncaptured.media/p/fresh-te ... how-israelFresh testimony reveals how Israel killed captives in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7
Hadas Dagan is the sole survivor of Israeli shelling of a house in Be’eri where 14 hostages were killed.. She has withheld her testimony, until now.
Dagan describes how she and her husband woke up to red alerts as the Hamas attack began. Soon after, Yasmin Porat and her partner, Tal Katz, knocked on their door, seeking shelter.
As the grave situation became apparent, the two couples huddled in the Dagan’s’ safe room. After a struggle to prevent their entry, al-Qassam fighters eventually broke the door down, taking the two couples captives and bringing them into the house of their neighbor, Pessi Cohen, where they joined several other residents of the kibbutz.
The Al-Qassam militants then used Suheib Abu Amer, a Palestinian bus driver from occupied East Jerusalem who they also took by force from the Nova rave, to translate between them and their hostages, and informed them that they intended to bring them as captives to Gaza, but that they would be taken to the Erez checkpoint between Israel and Gaza, and would be returned home by the following evening.
Porat suggested to the Al-Qassam unit commander, identified only as “Hasan”, that she speak by phone with Israeli police to negotiate. Once on the phone with a police woman, Hasan insisted on speaking via translator with her, informing her that they have 50 hostages that they intend to take into Gaza, and unless guaranteed safe passage, they would be killed.
‘I’ll never forget the children’s screams”
At 4pm, Porat says, Israeli military jeeps arrived on the scene. Within minutes, they opened fire on the house full of both captives and their captors, all of whom were still alive at the time.
“Bullets enter the house in every possible way. And suddenly something heavy, perhaps a mortar, made a big boom in all of the house,” Porat recalled.
Among those killed by Israeli military fire were the Hetzroni twins. Dagan describes the horrors of hearing their final moments of sheer terror.
“I’ll never forget the children’s screams, how they scream for help,” she recalled.
“The girl did not stop screaming all those hours. She didn’t stop screaming,” Porat said in a previous interview, as reported by the Electronic Intifada. “Yasmin, when those two shells hit, she stopped screaming. There was silence then.”
After a thirty-minute gun battle between Israeli soldiers and Hamas militants inside the house, the al-Qassam commander Hasan, using Suheib Abu Amer to translate, managed to negotiate his surrender, stripping to his socks and underwear and taking Porat as a human shield.
As he walked outside, carrying Porat, he was forced to strip completely naked.
After police seized him and Porat, Hasan was blindfolded, left naked, and had his hands tied behind his back. Israeli soldiers instructed the humiliated commander to tell the remaining militants inside the house to surrender, which they did not agree to.
With the rest of the militants unwilling to follow the captive commander’s orders, Israeli soldiers resumed shooting and firing more LAU missiles at the house. At that point, Hadas and Adi Dagan noticed that two neighbors, Ze’ev Hacker and Pessi Cohen, had been killed.
‘If you fire shells, won’t they hit hostages?’As the sun began to set and light disappeared, an Israeli tank rumbled onto the scene.
Porat was alarmed by the thought of such firepower being applied to a hostage situation.
“If you fire shells, won’t they hit hostages?” she asked a soldier.
“No, we’re just hitting the sides to take down walls”, she recalls him responding.
However, Porat describes a fierce and deadly battle that would kill everyone inside the house.
“Insane exchanges of fire that I don’t know how someone can possibly survive such a thing,” she commented.
‘A disgrace’
At 7pm, the battle reached its peak.
One of the soldiers commented to Brigadier General Barak Hiram, the commander leading the operation, that what was happening was a “disgrace.”
“I know,” Hiram concurred.
Minutes later, the tank fired two shells at the house, one at the floor and one at the roof.
While it’s unclear what the soldier and brigadier general thought was a disgrace – whether being forced to negotiate with Hamas or opening fire on a house full of captives – the fact that they shelled the house with a tank afterwards suggests the former.
Israeli shelling kills Adi Dagan
As tank shells continued to hit the house, Dagan found herself covered in blood, and saw that her husband, Adi, had been fatally wounded by the shelling, and her attempts to stop the bleeding were futile.
“There is no point in trying to block the blood flow anymore, and I simply hug him again with my face, my hair, all inside a huge pool of blood,” she recalled. “I remember hearing one more shot from inside the house, and I don’t hear anything anymore.”
At that point, Israeli soldiers entered the house, finding Dagan wounded from tank shrapnel and covered with blood. As she begged them to tend to her dying husband, they put her in a truck, where Porat found her. Dagan told her that her own husband, Adi, was dead, but declined to inform her that her own husband, Tal, was among the dead too.
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by Grizzly » Tue Nov 14, 2023 4:31 pm 
