The Devastation of Be’eri

Members of the kibbutz’s security team, which numbered a dozen people, were the first line of defense when the militants attacked. The wounded were brought into Be’eri’s small clinic, which was quickly overwhelmed. Amit Mann, a twenty-two-year-old paramedic, provided triage as best she could.

“They’re bleeding here in front of me,” she texted her sister at 11:28 A.M. “Where is the army?”

Shortly before 2 P.M., Mann sent her last messages home. “I hear them outside,” she wrote. “They’re here.”

With gunfire blaring, Mann answered a phone call from her sister. She had been shot in the legs, she cried. The militants were standing over her. Then the line went dead.

While Mann was at the clinic, Nira Herman Sharabi, a fifty-four-year-old nurse, felt helpless inside her safe room, where she was hiding with her husband, her three teen-age daughters, and her eldest daughter’s boyfriend. Friends and neighbors were calling her, asking in hushed voices how to treat gunshot wounds.

Herman Sharabi guided them with simple instructions. Her demeanor is kind and sensible, her eyes piercing; a deep line furrows her brows.

One caller was a little girl, the daughter of a friend of hers. “Mommy is breathing but not talking,” the girl whispered, as Herman Sharabi advised her on how to lay her mother down.

Another call came from a nephew, who had been at a rave in the desert when dozens of gunmen ringed the site. He asked if he could seek cover in the kibbutz.

“Don’t come,” Herman Sharabi told him. Militants had captured Be’eri, too, she said. (News later arrived that he had been killed.)

Suddenly, the door of the safe room burst open. Three men in black shouted in Arabic for the family to come out. They ransacked the house while the Sharabis stood in a corner, terrified and silent.

“Sayara, sayara,” the men said, and pantomimed holding car keys.

Herman Sharabi didn’t know how to respond. “How do I explain that there are no keys in the kibbutz, that we share everything?” she told me.

The family was led outside, barefoot and in pajamas, and told to sit. The eldest daughter, who is seventeen, wore only shorts and a sports bra, until one of the militants grabbed a t-shirt from a clothesline and handed it to her. Herman Sharabi was later told that the militants likely belonged to the group Islamic Jihad, whose interpretation of Islam is “more proper,” as she put it.

“It was a miracle in heaven that we fell on the faction we did,” she told me, aware that, elsewhere in the kibbutz, other groups of armed men had carried out acts of rape and torture.