Though all the footage is burned into my mind, one video has haunted me.
In the footage, a man and his two sons are woken up by the assault on their neighborhood. The man and his two young boys run to a backyard bomb shelter in their underwear.
One of the terrorists throws a grenade into the shelter after them. The next thing that can be seen is the two young boys, bleeding and crying but alive, being forced out of the shelter and back into the home.
The terrorist then searches through the family’s fridge, ignoring the crying children and drinks from a bottle of Coca-Cola.
I began crying when the screen flashed to another atrocity and my mind began to race. I am the father of two boys. I am one of two boys. What would I have done? What would my father have done? Would I have been as brave as that father who jumped on the grenade to save his sons? Would my father have saved me?
After the screening, I became obsessed with finding out what happened to the boys. I didn’t see their names. I tried multiple online searches but couldn’t figure out if they had been taken hostage or were killed.
It wasn’t until today, the 1-year anniversary of the atrocities that I found out what happened to the boys.
New footage was released by Israel’s Channel 12 to commemorate the anniversary. It shows new angles of Gil Taasa, a firefighter who lived in Netiv Ha’asara with his two sons Koren (12) and Shay (8).
When the terrorist left, the two boys ran to their mother Sabine’s home. She was separated from Gil, and was living in an attached apartment.
The Taasas also had an older son, Or. He was killed at Zikim Beach on October 7 by terrorists while fishing with friends.
According to The Times of Israel, originally, Sabine did not want the footage shown, saying she wanted to “commemorate their lives, not their deaths.” She later approved of the publication of the footage so that the world could see the atrocities committed by the Palestinian terrorists.
Last month, Sabine told the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva that Shay, who lost the sight in one of his eyes from the grenade, “cannot sleep without me. He needs me 24/7.” She said he calls her “every minute,” and if an hour goes by without them speaking, he says, “Mama, I was pretty sure that something bad happened to you. I don’t want you to die.”
In March, Koren celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at the Kotel, the Western Wall. He said at the time, “There were huge explosions and dad and I and Shay heard terrorists on the road behind us, and he told us to be quiet and not talk.” Koren added that his father grabbed his gun and shot at the terrorists until he ran out of bullets and that when the terrorists threw the grenade into the shelter, his father “decided to save us and he jumped on the grenade… there was an explosion, I saw smoke, suddenly we were covered in blood.”
Last month, the IDF confirmed that an Israeli airstrike had killed Ahmed Fawzi Nasser Muhammad Wadiyya, the terrorist who led the massacre in Netiv Ha’asara and who drank the Coca-Cola in the Taasa family home in front of bleeding children who had just survived a grenade blast that killed their father.
In the past year, Israel has eliminated far more terrorists than the US has in decades of The War on Terror. Israel is on its way to eradicating Hamas and Hezbollah.
It says in the Haggadah, which we read at the Passover Seder, “in every generation they rise against us to destroy us,” yet we are still here. The Jews have survived the Egyptians, the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Nazis and many more. We celebrate our victories over empires that have been swept into the dustbin of history. Often you can even find Israelis selling items to tourists outside the ruins of those civilizations.
The shock and sadness felt by all Jews after October 7, 2023 has turned to rage. We will survive this too, but we will never forget and never forgive as we say never again.
Am Yisrael Chai.
