On the morning of October 7, a car came to pick up nurse Klaudia Ľacho, which took her, along with other health workers from the region, to work just like every other day. She came out in front of her house at 6.18.
A few minutes later, when sirens rang out in the town of Ofakim and terrorists from the Hamas movement started shooting people in the street, she and her colleagues were already on their way to Beer Sheva. “A raped woman is lying in the hospital. When they swabbed her, they found samples from 58 men. She was raped by 58 men. She survived, but she’s already dead inside,” Klaudia Ľacho tells about one of the victims of Hamas terrorists on October 7.
In the first days after the attack, Klaudia Ľacho was afraid that she would be shot. “When I heard the atrocities that had happened, I thought that if the attack happened again, let them just shoot us. But it is unimaginable to get into a state where one is thinking about something like that,” says the Slovakian woman who has lived in Israel for 23 years.
He admits that he cannot feel pity for the people of the Gaza Strip after October 7. “When I saw the video of the baby being burned in the oven, it destroyed me.”
Our ninety-minute conversation was interrupted twice by the sound of a specific notification on her phone. “Did you hear the click? The application shows me that a siren is sounding somewhere. Right now rockets are flying somewhere in Israel,” explained Klaudia Ľacho.
We didn’t have to end the conversation early, according to the application, the rockets were not aimed at the city of Ofakim, where he lives. If so, she would have had 45 seconds to move to shelter, according to government regulation.
Three quarters of a minute.
Klaudia Ľacho describes in the interview:
- how is it possible that she drove past a car with terrorists on October 7 just before the attack and survived;
- as survivors described the terror at the Supernova festival.
He also talks
- about doctors who had to amputate people’s legs all day;
- about loved ones who lost their lives, relatives or body parts;
- of what the sight of a child roasted alive does to a man;
- about how he views the attacks on the Gaza Strip and why he does not want to leave Israel.
You live in the city of Ofakim in the south of Israel, 22 kilometers from the Gaza Strip. How did the October 7 attacks affect the city?
Several cars with terrorists also reached us. One car was less than 150 meters as the crow flies from our house, the other about 70 meters.
The cars were set up in three places in the city. Dozens of terrorists arrived in them. They had anti-tank missiles, machine guns and weapons that look like footballs. When he throws the weapon into the house, it explodes and burns at a temperature of 3000 degrees Celsius.
The day of the attack was Saturday, Shabbat, which is the day people celebrate here. At the same time, there was also Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday. People who are more pious – they don’t even have to be orthodox – observe certain customs on that day. For example, they don’t lock the doors.
The terrorists went house by house. They walked into one where there was a grandmother with a grandfather, their two grown sons with their wives and children. The family was hiding in the upper room of the house. When they heard that something was happening and the gunmen were approaching, they started to climb onto the roof through the window. Everyone hid among the solar collectors, except for
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