Fresh testimony reveals how Israel killed captives in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7

Hadas Dagan is the sole survivor of Israeli shelling of a house in Be’eri where 14 hostages were killed. She has withheld her testimony, until now.

Two months after the events of October 7, shocking new testimony reveals that the Israeli military, using an arsenal of gunfire, tank shelling and guided LAU missiles, killed almost certainly all but one of the 14 hostages held in a house in kibbutz Be’eri – along with their Hamas captors. 

The testimony, published by Israel's Channel 12, was delivered by the sole survivor from the massacre inside one house, Hadas Dagan, a resident of Be’eri who had previously maintained her silence.

Uncaptured Media has translated relevant segments of the report.

Yasmin Porat, whose October 15 interview first exposed that the Israeli military had killed their own civilians, was inside the house with Dagan. However, she exited the house with a Hamas captor before Israel began shelling and killing those trapped inside. 

The revelations contained in Dagan’s testimony add to a growing body of evidence that the Israeli military killed some of the captives in kibbutz Be’eri and other Israeli settlements, though it remains unknown how many, in what is an apparent implementation of the Hannibal Directive, the military protocol in which Israeli captives are killed in order to prevent negotiations and enemy forces from extracting concessions.

Among the Israeli civilians listed as killed in the assault are Pessi Cohen, Hanna Cohen, Yitzhak ‘Zizi’ Siton, Tal Siton, Hava Ben Ami, twins Liel and Yanai Hetzroni, Ayala ‘Aylus’ Hetzroni, Zehava Hacker, Ze’ev Hacker, Suheib Abu Amer, Tal Katz, and Adi Dagan – Hadas Dagan’s husband.

Hamas attacks

Dagan describes how she and her husband woke up to red alerts as the Hamas attack began. Soon after, Yasmin Porat and her partner, Tal Katz, knocked on their door, seeking shelter.

As the grave situation became apparent, the two couples huddled in the Dagan’s’ safe room. After a struggle to prevent their entry, al-Qassam fighters eventually broke the door down, taking the two couples captives and bringing them into the house of their neighbor, Pessi Cohen, where they joined several other residents of the kibbutz.

The Al-Qassam militants then used Suheib Abu Amer, a Palestinian bus driver from occupied East Jerusalem who they also took by force from the Nova rave, to translate between them and their hostages, and informed them that they intended to bring them as captives to Gaza, but that they would be taken to the Erez checkpoint between Israel and Gaza, and would be returned home by the following evening.

Porat suggested to the Al-Qassam unit commander, identified only as “Hasan”, that she speak by phone with Israeli police to negotiate. Once on the phone with a police woman, Hasan insisted on speaking via translator with her, informing her that they have 50 hostages that they intend to take into Gaza, and unless guaranteed safe passage, they would be killed.

‘I’ll never forget the children’s screams’

At 4pm, Porat says, Israeli military jeeps arrived on the scene. Within minutes, they opened fire on the house full of both captives and their captors, all of whom were still alive at the time.

“Bullets enter the house in every possible way. And suddenly something heavy, perhaps a mortar, made a big boom in all of the house,” Porat recalled.

Among those killed by Israeli military fire were the Hetzroni twins. Dagan describes the horrors of hearing their final moments of sheer terror.

“I’ll never forget the children’s screams, how they scream for help,” she recalled.

“The girl did not stop screaming all those hours. She didn’t stop screaming,” Porat said in a previous interview, as reported by the Electronic Intifada. “Yasmin, when those two shells hit, she stopped screaming. There was silence then.”

After a thirty-minute gun battle between Israeli soldiers and Hamas militants inside the house, the al-Qassam commander Hasan, using Suheib Abu Amer to translate, managed to negotiate his surrender, stripping to his socks and underwear and taking Porat as a human shield.

As he walked outside, carrying Porat, he was forced to strip completely naked. 

After police seized him and Porat, Hasan was blindfolded, left naked, and had his hands tied behind his back. Israeli soldiers instructed the humiliated commander to tell the remaining militants inside the house to surrender, which they did not agree to.

With the rest of the militants unwilling to follow the captive commander’s orders, Israeli soldiers resumed shooting and firing more LAU missiles at the house. At that point, Hadas and Adi Dagan noticed that two neighbors, Ze’ev Hacker and Pessi Cohen, had been killed.

‘If you fire shells, won’t they hit hostages?’

As the sun began to set, an Israeli tank rumbled onto the scene. 

Porat was alarmed by the thought of such firepower being applied to a hostage situation.

“If you fire shells, won’t they hit hostages?” she asked a soldier.

“No, we’re just hitting the sides to take down walls”, she recalls him responding.

However, Porat describes a fierce and deadly battle that would kill almost everyone inside the house.

“Insane exchanges of fire that I don’t know how someone can possibly survive such a thing,” she commented.

‘A disgrace’

At 7pm, the battle reached its peak. 

One of the soldiers commented to Brigadier General Barak Hiram, the commander leading the operation, that what was happening was a “disgrace.” 

“I know,” Hiram concurred.

Minutes later, the tank fired two shells at the house, one at the floor and one at the roof.

While it’s unclear what the soldier and brigadier general thought was a disgrace – whether being forced to negotiate with Hamas or opening fire on a house full of captives –  the fact that they shelled the house with a tank afterwards suggests the former.

Israeli shelling kills Adi Dagan

As tank shells continued to hit the house, Dagan found herself covered in blood, and saw that her husband, Adi, had been fatally wounded by the shelling, and her attempts to stop the bleeding were futile. 

“There is no point in trying to block the blood flow anymore, and I simply hug him again with my face, my hair, all inside a huge pool of blood,” she recalled. “I remember hearing one more shot from inside the house, and I don’t hear anything anymore.”

Hadas Dagan’s husband Adi, who was killed by Israeli tank shelling.

At that point, Israeli soldiers entered the house, finding Dagan wounded from tank shrapnel and covered with blood. As she begged them to tend to her dying husband, they put her in a truck, where Porat found her. Dagan told her that her own husband, Adi, was dead, but declined to inform her that her own husband, Tal, was among the dead too.

In a previous interview, Porat described her interaction with Dagan.

“Yasmin, when the two big booms hit, I felt like I flew in the air,” Porat recalls a disheveled Dagan telling her minutes after the battle ended. Dagan was still covered in her husband’s blood, her hair standing on end, full of dust and styrofoam. “It took me two or three minutes to open my eyes, I didn’t feel my body. I was completely paralyzed,” Dagan told her, Porat says.

Whitewashing the Hannibal directive

Despite the Israeli police and military killing her husband along with the rest of the captives, and almost killing her too, rather than negotiate with the Hamas captors, Dagan does not take issue with that aspect of their conduct.

“I am angry… for us being abandoned, for us being betrayed. For the fact that we were left alone for so many hours,” she complained. 

Regarding the decision to open fire on the house, she refused to condemn the Israeli army – a point repeatedly highlighted by the Channel 12 journalist.

“It’s clear that in this event lies a very heavy moral dilemma. I don’t want anyone to take this case with the very hard moral dilemma, and point their finger at the army,” Dagan said, reiterating that she and her husband were hit by Israeli army tank fire. “It’s quite clear to me that I was hit, and Adi, from the shrapnel of the… shell of the tank, because it was at the very same moment.”

Brigadier General Barak Hiram claims to have saved lives, despite having killed multiple Israeli captives.

In contrast to Dagan’s refusal to blame the military for killing her husband, another survivor from kibbutz Be’eri, Omri Shifrony, the nephew of Ayala ‘Aylus’ Hetzroni, criticized Brigadier General Barak Hiram, who claimed weeks before that his leadership actually saved Israeli lives, accusing him of lying.

“He didn’t have the slightest clue, even when he spoke, and that was two weeks later. He didn’t have a clue about what happened here, the slightest clue, because that’s not the truth,” Shifrony said.

For her part, Lee Naim, the Israeli journalist who covered the story, couched the shelling of the house as a challenge, despite the fact that Israeli fire apparently killed all but one hostage.

“The police and IDF forces have fought with great bravery in Be’eri. Fighters and policemen were killed in battles in the kibbutz, and many more were wounded. And yet, the battle that was conducted over Pessi’s house, as a painful example of the complexity of hostage releasing under fire.”

‘A mass Hannibal’

Dagan’s and Porat’s testimonies adds to a body of evidence that Israel implemented the Hannibal Directive

As reported by The Cradle, Colonel Nof Erez said in a Haaretz podcast in November, that “the Hannibal Directive was apparently applied” and that October 7 “was a mass Hannibal.”

Erez’ account followed testimony of an anonymous Israeli helicopter commander published by the Israeli news outlet Ynet in October, saying that the air force dispatched more than two dozen attack helicopters and drones, using Hellfire missiles and machine guns to destroy everything along the Gaza fence.

Another Israeli Channel 12 report profiled a soldier who said she was ordered to open fire on homes in kibbutz Holit whether there were civilians inside or not. Indeed, ten Israelis were killed in Holit.

Source: X/Israel Nitzan

As more information comes out painting a picture of what really happened on October 7, the need for international and impartial investigation is clear. While Hamas officials have called for such an investigation, the Israeli government is promoting a propaganda campaign to justify its shocking brutality in Gaza and distract from the testimonies like these.