Shirit Yerushalmi raises her arms and covers her face with her hands in a defensive attitude to illustrate the story of what her daughter’s last seconds alive were like. Eden, who turned 24 during her almost 11 months of kidnapping in Gaza, ended up being murdered at the end of last August by her captors, according to autopsy data provided to the family and the version of the Israeli army. The family had access to three proofs of life, the last a few days before the young woman was shot at close range. “They shot him in the head. She tried to protect herself and the bullet went through both hands,” details the mother, who relies on information from the investigators. He speaks with Morning Express at his home, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. He still has a hard time referring to his daughter in the past tense.
There are a hundred kidnapped people left in the Strip and the course of the war, with several fronts burned and the leader of Hamas, Yahia Sinwar, murdered, does not suggest an upcoming agreement for their release, although many of them have already been presumed dead. . This Friday, October 18, one day after the death of the head of the fundamentalist group was announced, the army said that it had also ended the life of the head of that organization, Mahmud Hamdan, in Tel al-Sultan (Rafah), just 200 meters from where Sinwar fell. Israel considered Hamdan responsible not only for the safety of the leader, but also for the group of six hostages of which Yerushalmi was a part. They were all killed in a tunnel dug nearby.
Shirit does not want, however, to place blame on either the army or the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu. “Israel is doing everything it can to free them,” she says while a large portrait of her daughter, leaning on the living room floor, watches her between the comings and goings of her sisters May, 19, and Shani, 26. Shani is the one with whom Eden spoke the longest on the phone while giving a live account that October 7, for several hours, of the Hamas attack, his attempted escape and, finally, his capture by the fundamentalists. “Shani, they caught me,” was the last thing her sister whispered, as the family detailed to this newspaper last November.
The family has facilitated and authorized this newspaper to publish the recording of a call from Eden to the Police during the massacre, while he saw the jihadists shooting left and right around him. They are four minutes of vertigo, which give an idea of the young woman’s adventures before falling into the hands of her captors. “They are shooting at me. “This can’t be happening to me,” she warns while shots are heard over the phone and a police officer, to whom Eden sometimes asks for silence due to the proximity of the attackers, tells her to try to open a message that the young woman, desperate, don’t see on your phone. These are the first moments of the major attack led by Hamas that caused 1,200 deaths, almost a third of them at the Nova music festival where Eden worked as a waitress and from where she called for help, a few kilometers from Gaza.
“Everything will be fine,” the officer on the other end of the line tries to reassure her, barely understanding what is happening or where. “They are here, they see me, they are shooting at me. I beg you, send the police,” she says while voices in Arabic are heard in the background. “That’s it. “I’m going to die,” says the girl. Moments later, without cutting the communication, he starts running through the trees. “Don’t stop running. Try to hide (…) We have to end the call, okay?” says the police on the other end of the line. “Find me, please. “I am hidden,” she implores. That’s where the recording ends.
Days after this scene, the authorities confirmed the kidnapping to the family. First, her captors took her to central Gaza. Then, in November, to Rafah, in the extreme south, next to the border with Egypt, where they ended up killing her. On the afternoon of Saturday, August 30, rumors, messages on social networks, fears exploded… Calls and visits from relatives and neighbors of the Yerushalmi continued, as the list in which Eden appeared was spread. There were no good winds blowing from the Palestinian Strip, but, in the absence of official confirmation, Shirit still clung to a possible return of her “girl” home alive. “We remained optimistic,” he recalls. It was what had kept her going during the long months of war under the bombardment of uncertainty.
The army liaison officer who had accompanied them all this time showed up at the house in the middle of the commotion. She, a reservist about whom the Yerushalmi family only has good words, did not have reliable information at that time, as night fell. The soldier stayed until three in the morning on Sunday with Shirit, Shani, May and another small circle of the family environment.
Barely half an hour had passed when the soldier returned with other officers with the fatal news. They had just identified Eden’s body thanks to the DNA samples that Naor, the father, had provided throughout the kidnapping. That Saturday was Shirit’s 50th birthday. She already assumed that they were not going to celebrate it together, but she never thought that it would coincide with the blow of her death.
“She was not only my daughter, she was my best friend,” he adds, remembering the words he spoke during the massive funeral. That day, in front of the body, he said: “This is not how I imagined your end. My girl, I so wanted to have you back alive. (…) I don’t know how I will get out of here, but I will make an effort.” “I continue grieving, crying often, everything is very recent,” comments Shirit during the interview after the shivaathe week of condolences in which they received hundreds of people, some relatives of hostages still in Gaza. “I need to know how to live with Eden’s absence, because I still have two daughters,” acknowledges the mother, whose intention, as soon as she feels better, is to return to her job at a Post Office to which she never returned. since October 7.
After 330 days of captivity in Gaza, Eden Yerushalmi and five others of the 251 hostages captured on October 7 returned to Israel in body bags. “His body only weighed 36 kilos. He had lost 11″, details his mother, trying to imagine the harsh conditions of captivity. The army showed images of the tunnel which, according to the families, measured around 60 centimeters wide and 1.7 meters high, lacked sanitation and barely had oxygen and light. Eden’s name had been included since July, along with that of two other hostages murdered with her, on a list to be released in the event of an agreement in the so-called “humanitarian category,” two Israeli officials confirmed to CNN after the recovery. of the corpses. “Our prime minister delayed it,” one of them said.
The popular indignation after the six deaths, spurred by the arrival of six other hostage bodies a few days before, gave way to the most massive demonstrations of the entire war against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There are still 101 hostages, of whom, according to the latest information, only half are alive. There are no signs of a ceasefire that would open the door to the release of hostages in Gaza, where an intense Israeli offensive is taking place these days in an enclave where troops have already killed more than 42,500 people.
Eden’s parents and members of the other five families released a letter on September 25 through the magazine time in which they criticize the lack of an agreement and demand that something be done to save those who remain inside the Strip. The Government had the opportunity to “reach agreements” to “free our loved ones” and “due to calculations that they considered strategic, they chose not to do so,” denounces the letter in which they also point out the international community for its passivity as “accomplices to avoidable deaths.”
The six hostages had been killed by their captors with close-range shots as Israeli soldiers approached, according to the official version. They believe it was Thursday, August 29, two days before the military found the bodies, says Shirit. Later, on September 21, the army showed a photo in which two young men appear in one of those underground passages with the word removed written about each of them. They claim to have killed them because they considered them, thanks to DNA tests, to be two of those responsible for Eden’s captivity and the other five kidnapped. “Pure evil,” Guy Izhaki, Shirit’s brother, reacts in a message days after accompanying her in the interview.
In addition to the aforementioned call to the Police, Eden also broadcast to his family for several hours via cell phone what was happening on the esplanade where the Nova festival was taking place over the weekend with several thousand young people. This place was the main scene of the massacre on October 7, with more than 350 dead. Before trying to escape through the forest, she took refuge with her friends Dorin and Lior in the car. The two died when the vehicle was riddled with bullets and Eden remained unharmed under their bodies. He continued narrating everything, mainly to his sister Shani, until the battery ran out. Then she managed to continue communicating with the phone number of one of her murdered friends, her mother said. “I feel the blood dripping over me,” he told his family via cell phone.
“We know that Israel is faced with a terrorist organization. If they manage to eliminate them, there will be no more October 7th,” understands Shirit, who remembers with the reporter how in November, in the previous meeting with him, he asked him to return to this same house to interview Eden after the liberation.