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A Survivor's Account from Kibbutz Nir Oz
(JTA) Neomit Dekel-Chen - Neomit Dekel-Chen, 63, has been a resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz for the last 30 years. "After a half hour of nonstop red-alert sirens and incoming missiles, we started receiving messages that Hamas terrorists were everywhere in the kibbutz....I went into the security room alone. I heard all around people speaking Arabic; they had entered my house, they were breaking everything." After the room started filling up with smoke, she ran out to escape, but "They captured me. They caught my neighbor too....They led me barefoot in the direction of the fields, to the back gate of the kibbutz, toward Gaza. Along the way I saw houses in flames, and I understood no one was going to get out of those burning houses alive....We walked for about 150 meters on the road toward Gaza. I saw the terrorists walking with their loot, bulging suitcases, televisions, electric wagons used by elders. They had taken everything." "I was with a neighbor who told me they had killed her son and taken her husband....A tuktuk vehicle pulling an open cart stopped beside us. In the cart there were five people, all from the kibbutz. My good friend was there with three little girls, two of them only 3 years old....They continued to drive with us back toward Gaza, when an IDF helicopter appeared above us. At some point the helicopter shot at the terrorists. "All the terrorists were dead and we were alive, except for one of the women with us. She had died in the arms of her daughter, who had come to the kibbutz to visit and now would not leave her mother. I took one of the little girls in my arms, another friend took a second little girl and we started running towards the fields." "I was hit with shrapnel in my head, knee and back. I was bleeding. I lay down on the ground and a tractor showed up....There were terrorists on it....I decided to play dead - and they didn't take me. They took the three little girls...everyone who was there and still alive. They took them all to Gaza. More terrorists in more cars drove by, loaded with the things they had looted." "Every time more terrorists drove by, I played dead again, which I could do as I was covered in blood.... I lifted up my head and saw the kibbutzim in flames - Magen, Nir Oz and Nirim. They were all burning."