A British-Israeli lawyer is holding out hope of being reunited with family held hostage by Hamas after being told the gunmen had murdered his sister.
Ahal Besorai said his sister Yonat Or, 50, her husband, Dror, 50, and two of their three children, who are 15 and 13, were seen being dragged out of the safe room of their burning home in Be’eri kibbutz by Hamas militants on 7 October.
Besorai, 60, who lived in London for 25 years and is now in the Philippines, spent hours trawling through Hamas propaganda videos online in the hope of spotting his family alive after Yonat’s phone was traced to Gaza. But he said he was told on Friday that his sister’s body had been identified among the 120 people murdered at the kibbutz. The rest of the family remains missing.
“It’s really devastating. There are no words to say about how such a beautiful person can be murdered so viciously by these terrorists,” he said.
As he grieves, Besorai remains hopeful of being reunited with his brother-in-law, his nephew, Noam, and niece, Alma. “We always have hope. This is how we are wired. As long as they’re alive, as long as we don’t have a body, we are hopeful,” he said.
“I am still hopeful that maybe the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] will go in and bring them back and maybe there will be some pressure on Hamas from Qatar or other Middle Eastern countries to at least release the babies, children, women and old people.”
Besorai, who grew up in the kibbutz before moving to the UK in 1991 to study law at Cambridge University, spoke to his sister while she cowered in a safe room as Hamas gunmen rampaged outside. He recalled: “She said: ‘I cannot talk, terrorists are around, they are shooting’, and she hung up the phone.”
Besorai’s 89-year-old father and another sister, 58, who live in the same kibbutz, sheltered in their own safe rooms before being rescued hours later. A nephew, Yonat’s eldest son, 17, whom the family did not name, escaped the attack as he was volunteering with the Israeli army.
“He’s really, really devastated,” Besorai said. “I don’t think he’s fully come to terms with it yet, it takes time. There’s no grave, so maybe the hope is it is only a nightmare and we will wake up from it. He is at the moment an orphan: his mum is dead and his two siblings and dad are presumably hostages in Gaza. It’s rather a bleak future.”
The family plans to bury Yonat this weekend while they pray the others are still alive. “We delayed the funeral because we didn’t want to have four funerals. That would just have killed us. So we just wanted to hear whether the others are part of the unidentified bodies,” he said.
“Everybody expects me to be strong, but I’m also not so strong. I want to cry and be sad. I’m trying to be strong for my dad and everybody, but it’s not always easy.”
Besorai paid tribute to his sister, who ran a successful vintage furniture business on the kibbutz. “She was an entrepreneur in spirit. She was spiritual, a very kind person and an amazing mum to three kids. She was just a really sweet person, she was really something unique,” he said.
Besorai said he wants Hamas to be “wiped out” and he is “really pained” that the horrors have changed him as a person. “When I was a teenager lying on the lawn in the kibbutz and looking at the sky and seeing a falling star all I wished for is not to be rich, not to have money, just I prayed for peace,” he said.
“We are very peace-loving but now you deal with this – I don’t even know how to describe it – people say Nazi, people say Isis but I think it’s even worse and we will now need to do something.”
