2023-11-06 13:44:00
“I told my mother, ‘I’m already in love after one night and it’s going to end badly’,” remembers Irene Shavit with a smile. On October 7, her fiancé jumped on the Hamas grenade thrown at them and saved her life.
Young Israelis Irene Shavit and Netta Epstein, both 22 years old, met in a pub in April 2022 and it was “immediate attraction” and reciprocal, testifies the survivor.
Unified, they finished the army, Irene in military intelligence and Netta as a paratrooper officer, then moved together to the family kibbutz Kfar Aza, in the south of Israel.
The buildings of Gaza City are at the end of this “paradise of trees and flowers”, but “they forget”, explains Irene.
On Saturday October 7, the young people of the kibbutz had planned a collective breakfast with “jakhnoun”, a Yemeni specialty, before a kite festival.
“We wanted to fly them with peace messages to the border with Gaza,” she sighs.
At 6:30 a.m., the couple woke up to the sound of the words “red alert” shouted over the kibbutz loudspeakers. Routine, until then, for this border town accustomed to rocket fire from Palestinian territory.
The couple takes a selfie, makes a sleepy face to reassure their families, then goes back to bed embracing. Their bed is in the shelter, the small anti-missile room.
At 8:00 a.m., they received a collective message: “lock yourself up, suspicion of infiltration, hide”. A message that surprises in this kibbutz where everyone lives with the door open.
They turn off the light and don’t move. The first shots “in the distance” ring out and the young people follow the massacre live: a text message announces the death of Netta’s grandmother, then that of a cousin.
The sobs are muffled in the darkness of the shelter. The hands tighten on the phone, the only link with the outside world.
“Learned to the army”
“No one understands what is happening outside. The shots are getting closer,” continues Irene.
At 11:30 a.m., “we hear broken glass in the living room.” The couple sticks to the wall, hoping not to be seen. Irene feels “indescribable fear”.
The door opens. Irene steps back, Netta moves forward. Two grenades are thrown. The Hamas commando shouts in Hebrew: “Get out! Where are you?!”
On the third projectile throw, Irene hears “Grenade!”. She looks up and sees her fiancé jump on the unpinned machine, in a heroic and unreturnable act.
“This is what he learned in the army: if there is a grenade in an enclosed space, we jump on it to protect others,” she adds.
Netta falls back onto the doorstep, torn apart by the impact and a burst of bullets fired to finish her.
The commando retreats, setting the room on fire. Irene awaits death, her pajamas stuck to her mouth to protect herself from the fumes. But when she hears the Palestinians leaving, she slips into the bathroom, takes something to put out the fire and slides under the bed, hidden by her partner’s body and a backpack.
For two hours, she remained crouched while the fighting continued, losing around 2 p.m. the telephone network and thus contact with the outside world.
At 4:00 p.m., when she heard Israeli soldiers shouting in Hebrew and asking if there were any survivors, she hesitated, before accepting her extraction under fire.
According to the authorities, more than 1,400 people have died on the Israeli side since October 7, mainly civilians massacred that day by Hamas commandos.
Nearly 10,000 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli army’s response in the Gaza Strip, according to Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist movement that Israel has sworn to “annihilate”.
His kisses
Since October 7, in Irene’s head, there have been three things, she lists: “A lot of ‘What if?’, a lot of guilt and a lot of loneliness.”
Ms. Shavit is followed three times a week by a medical-social team and is recovering “day by day” under the protective but worried gaze of her parents.
“He died so that I could live, so I have to live,” she explains as she goes to look for her bride-to-be dress in her closet.
Living after this act of self-sacrifice, considering one day starting a new life is a terrible dilemma: “if I don’t do it, it’s a betrayal, but if I do it, I also have the impression of betray him.”
“I miss his kisses, his arms, his love,” she says in a sob.
At the funeral, there were “thousands” to pay tribute to him. Irene has few memories of it.
“I was just like, what am I doing here? Shouldn’t this be 70 years from now?”
Netta and Irene were to get married on April 24.
06/11/2023 12:43:11 – Bitzaron (Israel) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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