During the October 7 attacks in Israel, the children of Hadas Jaoui-Kalderon were kidnapped. Erez, 12 years old, and Sahar, 16 years old, spent 52 days in the hands of Hamas in Gaza. In a book titled 52 days without them (Editions Alisio), available in bookstores Wednesday April 24, their mother recounts her fight and their story since the attack.
On October 7, Hadas Jaoui-Kalderon lost his mother and his niece. Her former companion, father of her children, is still held hostage. In her story, she returns to the attack on the kibbutz on the morning of October 7. She wants to share what she experienced so people know what happened.
“We lived a real pogrom, a massacre, a Shoah”, assured Hadas Jaoui-Kalderon, guest of RTL, Tuesday April 23. During the attack, the terrorists tried to enter her home, even though she had taken refuge in a shelter. “I was behind the door, I heard them on the other side of the door, in my house. Brutally, They broke everything in a barbaric, aggressive way, they clearly wanted to kill me”she remembered.
After seeing that the men had methodically gone from house to house, “I realized it was a massacre”, she indicated. During the eight hours she was in her shelter, she interacted with members of her family. At one point, she no longer received news from her children and their father, who were in another home.
“My daughter didn’t know if they were going to rape her”
“They jumped out of the window and hid in the bushes,” said Hadas Jaoui-Kalderon. “I didn’t believe we were going to get through it. We looked death in the face”, she added. Little by little, she became the face of the fight for the families of the hostages and challenged Benjamin Netanyahu. She said she was “disappointed” with the government. “We were abandoned that day and we are still in a state of abandonment”.
After an agreement, his children were finally released. “I have no words to express the feeling I had when I saw my children again. It’s a kind of miracle,” she assured. They told him what they had experienced. “They saw the massacre with their own eyes, they saw lifeless bodies, burned houses.” “We were constantly moving them […] My daughter did not know if they were going to rape her, abuse her, if they were going to kill her or touch her,” she detailed.
“They just told me they’d never be the same again, it’s as if they had lost their innocence”, said Hadas Jaoui-Kalderon. The conditions of detention of his children were difficult: they had to beg to eat, to take a shower. His daughter, a prisoner, stood up to her jailers and managed to see her father.
From now on, her children “don’t feel safe anywhere”. They ask to go to the hospital, where they feel protected. Despite the trauma, the mother of the two former hostages, who grew up on a kibbutz near the Gaza border, confided that she “would like” to always believe in peace.
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