'Nightmare of my life': Israeli grandmother’s murder posted on her own Facebook page by Hamas
11 October 2023, 10:31
An Israeli grandmother’s murder was posted on her own Facebook page by Hamas, her family have said.
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The unnamed woman’s granddaughter, Mor Bayder, said she found out what had happened when she looked at social media to see the post at 7am on Sunday.
It was Ms Bayder's aunt that made her and her mother aware of the livestream showing her grandmother "lying in a pool of blood".
The killer had called to force her to watch her final moments, Ms Bayder said, calling it "the nightmare of my life".
"I opened it from my phone and I saw, like, the worst [thing] you could possibly imagine," she told Israeli TV channel Canal 13.
"My grandma on the floor in her house being murdered in a video. The entire floor covered in blood. My grandma lying there.
"The terrorist just took her private phone, filmed her and uploaded it to her private Facebook wall. That's how we found out. That's how we learned about it.
"We screamed at the top of our lungs. Everyone here just lost it. It is the most horrible thing you could ever imagine and run through your head."
The family had last spoken to her on Saturday morning, when Hamas first launched its multi-pronged attack.
She had reassured the family that she was in a protected space and was "ok".
As a lifelong resident of the Nir Oz kibbutz, near the Gaza border, Ms Bayder's grandmother was accustomed to the sounds of sirens.
She said she had not received any special instructions since the first rockets were launched.
Paying tribute to her grandmother on Monday, Ms Bayder said in a Facebook post of her own: "Those who know me know what she is to me, what a connection we had, what a person she is, pure and good.
"My grandmother loved life but how do we go on without you? Who am I without you? I'm not willing to talk about you in the past, it's a nightmare of my life.
"I love you and you know it, in every room of my heart, in every particle of my body, in every fibre of my organ.
"My grandmother, my flower, the light of my life, my whole world."
The Israeli military said more than 1,200 people, including 155 soldiers, have been killed in Israel, a toll unseen since the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria, which lasted weeks.
In Gaza, 950 people have been killed, including 260 children and 230 women, according to authorities there. Israel says hundreds of Hamas fighters are among them.
Thousands have been wounded on both sides.
The bodies of roughly 1,500 Hamas militants were found on Israeli territory, the military said. It was not clear whether those numbers overlapped with deaths reported by Palestinian authorities.
In Gaza, more than 250,000 people have fled their homes, the UN said, the most since a 2014 air and ground offensive by Israel uprooted about 400,000.
