Kibbutz Holit is located just a few kilometers from the border with the Gaza Strip. On the morning of October 7, this small agricultural village became one of the settlements where Hamas terrorists carried out a massacre. In Holit, 14 of the 84 kibbutz members and two Nepalese workers were killed. The terrorists also kidnapped a Bedouin family with children who had worked in a cowshed for many years.
This is the story of two kibbutz residents, a mother and son, who managed to survive October 7th.
Interviewed by Alla Gavrilova.
“You hear shots behind the wall and you realize you’re next.”
Daniel Kukushkin is 29 years old, he has lived in Kibbutz Holit since 2009 – in a three-apartment long house, where each apartment has its own entrance and courtyard. Daniel’s apartment is in the middle.
At 6:30 a.m. on October 7, Daniel calmly walked into the secure room, thinking that he would sit there for about ten minutes as usual. He left there at 19:30.
At 6:35 Daniel heard machine gun fire not far from the house. Kukushkin called the regional council’s dispatch service to report the shooting, but was told that they already knew. After a few more minutes, the shooting intensified and screams in Arabic began to be heard.
Daniel ran out of the secure room (mamad) and barricaded the door to the house.
“I blocked the door with sofas and a shoe closet. It only took about 30 seconds, I was on adrenaline. And while I was running to the “mamad”, they already started shooting at the house. Glass shattered in the windows and plaster flew off the walls. I closed the door, turned off the lights and air conditioning, and began to read to the kibbutz chat, gradually realizing the scale of what was happening,” says Daniel.
In the group, residents of Kholit wrote that there were terrorists in their houses, that militants were setting houses on fire. People asked for help because they were sitting in “mamads” and were suffocating. Then it turned out that not everyone managed to escape.
Terrorists fired at the metal shutters of protected premises to see if there were people there. To hear if there are children crying or dogs barking. They also shot at Kukushkin’s window. He says that he managed not to make a sound, although it was not easy.
“The worst thing was losing hope. Hours passed, the army did not come, no one came. You hear shots already behind the wall, near the neighbors, and you realize that you are next. I managed to say goodbye to my friends. I wrote to all my loved ones that I love them. I lay there and waited for them to shoot me. I didn’t have anything that could pass for a weapon, not even a knife.”
Daniel says that he heard people shouting in Arabic behind the wall and the little children of his neighbors crying. He wrote to his neighbors, but no one answered him. Then he realized that apparently no one was alive from his house.
Kukushkin spent 13 hours in the mamad. Without water. Reading messages asking for help, listening to shots and grenade explosions, inhaling the smell of smoke. As he himself says: “I read and said goodbye, read and said goodbye.”
“Something inside me died that day. I think many of us feel that way. Because no one thought they would survive. They just went from house to house and shot everyone.”
The army entered the kibbutz during the day, and the cleansing process took a long time. The kibbutz chat warned residents that the terrorists could be in IDF uniforms and could speak Hebrew, so only to those who knew the password they could open the doors. The IDF asked residents not to leave their homes until they came for them. They came for Daniel around 19:30.
“I left the house and saw mountains of corpses of terrorists. I couldn’t even imagine how many there were. Mountains of corpses and pools of blood. In the neighboring house, where small children live, the door was open and there was a pool of blood at the entrance. I told the soldier that the neighbor in the second neighboring house was not answering. They asked me not to go with them, but only to describe the neighbor. That’s how I found out that he was dead. I found out about the rest later.”
The neighbor’s children survived. Their mother was killed, and the children were handed over to another local girl and taken hostage. But at the border with Gaza, she and the children were released. She returned to the kibbutz on foot. With a baby in her arms and a four-year-old child with shrapnel wounds.
“There was terrible chaos, no one was prepared for something like this. The soldiers loaded the wounded. All the cars around were smashed. I realized later that while the terrorists were shooting people, ordinary Gazans were simply taking home everything they could from here. Then I went with the soldiers to my mother’s house, we took her out of there, we were given a few minutes to collect things, I left something in my backpack, and we left to spend the night in Kibbutz Gvulot.”
One of the messages Daniel sent to his loved ones when he decided it was time to say goodbye was addressed to his mother, Olga. Daniel wrote it, but did not send it, so as not to scare his mother. Olga lives next door.
“I don’t want to feel like a victim”
On October 7, Olga Chagin woke up to the sounds of rocket launches: “It was so intense that at first I thought it was fireworks. Then the signal “Tseva ado” sounded. I immediately heard machine gun fire behind the house and read in the kibbutz chat that terrorist infiltration had been recorded. But, to be honest, I didn’t understand that the terrorists had penetrated the kibbutz itself.”
Olga says that after peeking out of the house, she returned to the secure room that also serves as her bedroom, put on headphones and began watching the news on TV. The news talked about the infiltration of terrorists into Beeri, but nothing was said about Kibbutz Holit.
“It just didn’t connect in my head. I was sure that we lived in the safest place in the country. Yes, we have shelling, but terrorists – they can be in Tel Aviv, but this can’t happen here, we have an army everywhere,” says Olga.
Olga had water in her room, and there was also a container so she wouldn’t have to go to the restroom.
“We corresponded with my son all the time, but he didn’t write to me exactly what was happening, he didn’t want to worry. But I read the kibbutz group and roughly understood. I sat and was afraid. What else was there to do? The room opens to the outside. They wrote in the chat that under no circumstances should you be near the door, because it could be shot through with a Kalashnikov. But luckily for me they didn’t come to see me. I realized the scale of the disaster only later.”
When Daniel and the soldiers came for her mother, she refused to use the bus that was evacuating residents to Kibbutz Gvulot and went in her own car.
“Dani was driving ahead. And I was driving along our 232nd road, which we used to go to work every day, and I saw rows of burnt out cars and many, many bodies. So many”.
All residents of Kibbutz Holit were evacuated to Ein Gedi the next day, but a few days later Olga returned home, already as a volunteer. She works two shifts in the barn. From 7 to 12 in the morning, and then from four to nine in the evening.
“I couldn’t sit there doing nothing. You can’t just sit there and feel like a victim. I don’t want. I saw an advertisement that our kibbutz really needed people to work in the cowshed, and I had such an experience at the very beginning of my life in Holit. And I returned. I’m home”.
Author – NEWSru.co.il
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