“But slowly, every day I’d find out about my children’s friends who had been killed or kidnapped. I began to understand what had happened. I know it was hell for so many people. There was violence and sexual abuse. We were lucky [there was no physical abuse] but not everyone was.”
Luis moved to Israel from Argentina in his early 20s and became an accountant, but he has since retired and would spend his days folk dancing and cooking for friends and family. On October 7, the final day of a week-long Sukkot holiday, Luis was with his girlfriend Clara, her brother, sister and niece at Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, a few kilometres from the border separating Israel from Gaza’s city of Khan Younis.
Luis lived in another kibbutz 20 minutes away: he and Clara have been together for 22 years, but have separate households. “This is how we’ve been able to stay together!” Luis says with a smile.
Everyone was annoyed when the first air raid siren rang out at about 6.30am, but dutifully went to the safe room of the house. The first siren was followed by another, and then one more. It was then they realised something was wrong.
While Luis and Clara’s relatives were in the kitchen, collecting orange cake and water to take to the safe room, they caught a glimpse of news on TV, showing a Hamas pick-up truck cruising around the Israeli town of Sderot, a few miles away to the north, and heard reports of a terrorist infiltration in Be’eri.
They saw white smoke billowing outside the windows. Attackers set cars on fire outside the gate – as it later turned out it was a tactic to lure out the kibbutz’s first responders. Shortly after the family locked the door to the safe room, they started hearing noises inside the house, glass shuttering, men rushing around.
“They’re coming in,” was the last thing Luis texted to his daughter [one of his four children] who lives on the other side of the country. Before he knew it, masked and armed attackers stormed the safe room and started shooting as the five of them lay on the floor, holding each other. When the terrorists dragged them out of the house, Luis saw scenes of chaos and devastation.
“Crowds of people were coming into our house and coming out with loot as if it was their own, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Luis says. He tried to keep his calm when a masked man with a machine gun grabbed him and started shouting at him in Arabic.
While the breach of the border was carefully planned and even rehearsed at Hamas’s training grounds inside Gaza, multiple reports suggest that Hamas themselves were taken by surprise at how easy it was to break through the $1 billion fence with Israel and catch the Israeli army unawares.
The Hamas terrorists on pick-up trucks and paragliders were soon followed by mobs of Gazans who destroyed property, looted homes and helped to kidnap the Israelis.
Luis and his girlfriend’s brother Fernando were taken to the hole in the kibbutz’s fence while Clara, her sister and her niece were put in a car and driven outside.
After a shouting match between two groups of Hamas fighters, who Luis believes did not know whether to take them hostages or where to take them to, the five Spanish-speaking Israelis, all hailing from Argentina, were put together in a white Toyota pick-up truck and driven through the fields separating Israel and Gaza.
Out in the field, Luis saw a stream of Gazan civilians on the rampage. One of them spotted the hostages in the back of the car and went at them with a pair of large garden shears.
“They wanted to kill us,” Luis says, as he counts it one of the most horrifying moments of his ordeal. Once they were in Gaza, the group of Israelis were taken down a tunnel. They were in near-complete darkness for over three hours while their captors would occasionally stop to check the map.
Luis assumed this is where they would be kept: “Every metal door they’d open – I thought: ‘This is it’. I didn’t believe they were leading us outside.”