An Israeli grandmother living close to the Gaza Strip was slaughtered by Hamas gunmen who filmed her murder and uploaded it to her Facebook page, her family says.
“This is how we found out,” her granddaughter, Mor Bayder, wrote on social media, calling the video “the nightmare of my life.”
“The purest thing in the world, the light of my life, my whole world, my grandmother, can’t make it real,” she wrote.
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Braha Levinson lived in Kibbutz Nir Oz right near the Gaza Strip, but was always “in high spirits” even despite tensions, her grandson, Yoav Shimoni, told CNN.
He said the entire family had used a group chat to check in with each other after Hamas fired a barrage of rockets at Israel on Saturday morning. His grandmother had initially sent messages showing “she was actually concerned about us,” he said.
But “about 10 minutes after that conversation ended, my sister commented on our group chat that there was a weird video on my grandma’s Facebook, and then that is when we all discovered it,” he said.
Shimoni said he believes his grandmother was one of Hamas’ first victims, given her close proximity to the strip. They “came into her house, shot her down, took her phone, and then posted her dying video on Facebook,” he said.
Her home was burned to the ground afterwards, the family said.
Levinson, a mother of two and grandmother of nine, was one of hundreds of Israeli civilians killed in Hamas’ shocking attack on Israel over the weekend, which saw gunmen slaughter more than 250 attendees of a music festival, open fire on civilians in communities near the strip, and take dozens of hostages.
The Israeli military has carried out a series of unrelenting air strikes on Gaza in response to the attack and said it has secured the border. But Hamas is believed to be holding up to 150 hostages in Gaza—women and children among them, according to Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan—and has threatened to execute them and broadcast their murders if Israel targets civilians in the Gaza Strip without warning.
With Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordering a “complete siege” on Gaza to destroy Hamas, Erdan told CNN the “unprecedented number of hostages” being held there would not “prevent us from doing what we need to do in order to secure the future of Israel.”
