Woman (21) sees in video on social media how Hamas kidnaps her brother (12): “Don’t know if he is still alive” | Israel-Palestine conflict

Gaya Calderon was in Tel Aviv on Saturday when all hell broke loose. She heard from a friend that Hamas had invaded the kibbutz in Nir Oz near the Gaza Strip where her relatives were. She herself had left only a year ago to live in Tel Aviv. She was able to reach her family, but she heard that the situation did not look good. Her sixteen-year-old sister Sa’ar texted: “I’m so scared, Gaya, I want to cry.” A little later, Sa’ar WhatsApped in the family group: “Mom, I love you”. And then nothing more. “I knew that probably meant she knew this was the end,” Gaya says. Her mother wrote from another place in the kibbutz: “Gaya, I hear gunshots, I think this is the end.”

The next day Gaya tried to find out more. “I wanted to do everything I could to find something on them, a video or something, to see if they were still alive,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper from Tel Aviv. “And then I see a video with my brother. I see Hamas grab him and take him away. It was so hard to watch. I have been protecting my brother all my life.” The boy was still wearing his pajamas. He was in a house in the kibbutz together with his sister Sa’ar and their father Ofer. Gaya’s grandmother and her cousin live in another house. Gaya doesn’t know where they are now or if they are still alive. The fact that Erez was not bloodied gives her hope. Gaya’s mother and her brother Rotem (18) were in another house and survived the storming of the kibbutz by Hamas.

21-year-old Gaya realizes there is nothing she can do. “I can’t go there and save them. It’s horrible that I have to hear something like that in a video. Something like that shouldn’t happen in this world.” The Israeli woman only wants to see her relatives again. “I just want them with me, at home, even though we no longer have a house, everything has burned down. My mother and my other sister are desperate, we don’t know what to do.”