He listened, helpless, as Hamas closed in on his family: ‘They came to kill’

Deborah, 50, and her husband, Shlomi, 49, were dead. Rotem was injured. His parents had saved him using their own bodies to protect him, but militants were still searching Holit Kibbutz, where the family lived near the border with Gaza. Rotem’s two sisters, aged 19 and 21, who lived in another part of the communal farming settlement, were okay.

For the next 12 hours, Troen and his extended family guided Rotem using text messages.

They instructed him on caring for his injuries, including a gunshot wound in his abdomen. They told him to cover himself in a blanket and to stay still in silence. They helped him keep calm. Much later, about 8 p.m. that night, they directed Israeli soldiers to Rotem’s location, and Troen reunited with the boy at a hospital in Beersheba.

“He has endured this experience,” Troen said over the phone on Tuesday morning, from the Soroka Medical Center, the hospital where he had slept overnight near Rotem.

“There is deep anger, even amidst all the suffering and the pain,” he said of the sentiment in Israel.

Troen, his children including Deborah, and her children, are U.S. and Israeli citizens. Deborah was born in the United States, before the family moved to Israel in 1975 when she was a child. She had lived at the kibbutz for more than a decade with her husband Shlomi. They were both musicians.

What is a kibbutz? The communes bore the brunt of the Hamas assault.

Deborah and Shlomi Matias were among at least 900 people who have died in Israel since the surprise attack on Saturday by Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory of about 2 million inhabitants bordered by Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. About 100 Israelis were also taken hostage by Hamas, which does not recognize Israel’s right of existence.

At least 680 people have since died in retaliatory strikes into Gaza by Israel, which has declared a siege of the territory with food, fuel and electricity cut off. The Hamas attack followed decades of unrest, with 6,407 Palestinian and 308 Israeli fatalities since 2008, and restrictions on Gaza’s borders since 2007.

Troen, a professor emeritus of Israel Studies at Brandeis University in Boston, called Saturday’s attack a “pogrom” — an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, often applied to attacks on Jewish people throughout history.

“It’s not the first time it’s happened in our family,” he said. “And in this pogrom, the perpetrators were very well prepared.

“These people came very well-rehearsed, they knew exactly what they were going to do,” he added. “And they came to kill. They returned several times to ensure that they had succeeded.”

“At one stage in the afternoon, they set fire to all those residences with the expectation that had anybody somehow survived, they would shoot them if they came out of the house,” Troen said. “The advice given to Rotem was ‘stay where you are.’”

When he saw Rotem in the hospital, the boy was covered in soot from smoke that penetrated his hiding place in the home’s laundry room.

He is recovering from his wounds, Troen said, and the family will hold a funeral for his parents when they are able to identify the bodies.

The text message group guiding the teenager included physicians and a trauma specialist — another one of Troen’s daughters and one of Deborah’s five siblings.

“We were in a sense virtually present with him,” Troen said. “Everybody encouraging him, of how courageous he was.

“This is a family that was committed to peace.”