A Connecticut native whose kibbutz on the Gaza border was brutally attacked by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 is concerned about his son and dozens of other residents who were taken captive that day.
Jonathan Dekel Chen moved to Israel in 1982 after growing up in Bloomfield and West Hartford. He has lived on the Nir Oz kibbutz since 1990. His son, Sagui Dekel Chen, has two daughters, 6 and 3 years old, and his wife is expecting a third child.
“It’s horrible,” Jonathan Dekel Chen said of the attack at 6:30 a.m. Oct. 7. “We’ve lost our homes; they were destroyed. All of our property’s been looted, and our community, our tight-knit, proud, independent, industrious community is shattered. We have no homes to come back to, we have no property, and we’re mourning our dead.”
Courtesy of Jonathan Dekel Chen
Sagui Dekel Chen was taken captive by Hamas on Oct. 7.Most of all, Dekel Chen is worried about his son and the other captives that were taken back into the Gaza Strip by Hamas terrorists, and who he said could be vulnerable to the Israeli assault on the Palestinian territory.
Israel opens another ‘safe passage’ for Gazans to move south
“Our greatest fear is that these hostages will fall victim to Israel’s own assault right now on the Gaza Strip, which in the meantime is from the air and artillery, but evidently will turn into a ground offensive, and these hostages might be collateral damage,” he said. “But they’re not collateral damage to us. They’re our loved ones.”
Dekel Chen said his son left his home on Oct. 7 to go to his machine shop.
“And when he got there, the machine shop, he observed a group of terrorists, Hamas terrorists, very well armed, well trained, and seemed to be very well organized, breaking into the kibbutz,” Dekel Chen said.
“And he put out the alarm to our small security team and to the rest of the kibbutz, telling everyone that he had seen this group of terrorists and they should take shelter, and for the security team to come out,” he said.
The security team is a group of civilian men guarding the 400 members of the kibbutz, Dekel Chen said.
“What my son didn’t know at that moment — it only became evident over the next hour or so — was that approximately 170 well-armed terrorists with light weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, explosives and heavy machine guns, assaulted the kibbutz starting at around 6:30 and proceeded to massacre dozens of our residents on the kibbutz regardless of their age,” he said.
“Those people that they didn’t massacre, they took into captivity,” he said.
A couple dozen are estimated to have been taken hostage. Just 160 kibbutz members were not killed or taken captive.
“The assault was followed by a larger wave of looters from Gaza,” he said. “These were civilians. These were unarmed people who essentially looted everything that they possibly could from a kibbutz, from wristwatches to large farming machinery. Anything that they couldn’t take with them they burned, including our homes.
“So in fact, what was a wonderful kind of paradise rural farming community, kind of botanical garden in the middle of the desert is a shell right now.”
The assault continued until mid-afternoon, when the Israeli army arrived and “chased out the last of the terrorists,” he said.
Sagui Dekel Chen kept in contact until 9:30 a.m., his father said.
“Mostly it was just communicating, even tactically, where the terrorists were,” Dekel Chen said. “He was part of the security team and communicating with the other guys in the security team about what he was seeing and where they were engaging around the kibbutz. Very short bursts of information. And also asking, Where’s the army?”
That question became more urgent as time went on. “We have been taught by the army to learn and be trained in such a way … that within a few minutes, regular army units would arrive on the kibbutz and engage whatever infiltrators were coming in,” Dekel Chen said.
“But in reality, for reasons that are still unknown — and this is a national problem; this isn’t just a local kibbutz problem — it took the army nine hours to get to all of these kibbutzim. It was a monumental intelligence failure and military failure for Israel that first day,” he said.
Derek Chen said Americans should “absolutely make sure that their elected national officials are aware of this situation, and are engaged with them to do everything that the U.S. can do. They can’t do everything, but to do whatever the U.S. can do to get these innocent civilians out of there. These aren’t U.S. soldiers by any stretch of the imagination. These people were either murdered in their homes or ripped from their homes by a terrorist organization.”
For now, Derek Chen’s and other families of the kibbutz are safe in the southern Israeli city of Eilat.
“There’s not a single family on the kibbutz that wasn’t touched by this,” he said. “Either a family that were murdered or taken into captivity. Almost not a single family.”
Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com.
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