Nearly a dozen members of the same family — including three young girls — remain missing more than three days after Hamas terrorists stormed their Israeli kibbutz, a close friend told The Post on Tuesday.
The parents, sister, brother-in-law, young nieces, uncles and aunts of Israeli lawyer Shaked Haran have not been heard from since the sneak attack at dawn Saturday, the family friend said.
The pal, Haran’s boss, Manhattan native Rachel Gur, said a chilling call — possibly from one of their kidnappers — came on Sunday when family members were frantically phoning the missing kin.
“Someone picked up one of the phones in Arabic-accented Hebrew and said something along the lines of ‘Kidnapped’ and “Gaza’ and hung up,” Gur said. “That’s the last of any sign of life that we’ve seen.
“Since we’ve had no sign of life.”
Gur, a lawyer and ministerial aide in Israel who studied law at New York University, said Haran has been part of her staff since graduating law school — and is like family herself.
Haran’s family lived at Kibbutz Be’eri near the Gaza Strip, one of the first sites overrun by Hamas terrorists during Saturday’s attack at dawn — and where at least 100 bodies were found this week.
Gur said Haran, who is pregnant and has two young children, is safe with her husband — but frantic over her missing relatives. The last communication from her dad came just after the attack when Haran’s brother received a short message from their parents.
“His parents sent him a WhatsApp saying that we’re in the safe room,” Gur said. “‘There’re armed terrorists, masked terrorists, just swarming. We don’t think we’re gonna make it out alive.’And that was it. He just lost communication. That was Saturday around 7:30 a.m.”
Among those missing are Haran’s nieces — Yahel Neri Shoham, 3; Haveh Shoham, 8; and Noam Avigdori, 12 — who are German citizens, while other relatives are Italian citizens, Gur said.
The horror of the sneak attack, which has left more than 1,100 Israelis dead, resonates with Gur as well.
“I grew up on stories — my husband’s father fought in the Yom Kippur War,” she said. “And we grew up on stories of people coming to the synagogue and saying to everybody, ‘You have to go home, or you have to get into the army.’ I never thought it would happen to our generation.”
Now, Gur said the Hamas attack has already surpassed the devastation of that 1973 conflict.
“The Yom Kippur War, you have to remember, about 2,900 people die altogether in their weeks of fighting,” she said. “The majority of them were soldiers. It was bitter fighting, but the majority of them were soldiers. There was no mass civilian massacre.
“This was a day when more Jews were killed since the Holocaust,” she added of Saturday. “We haven’t seen a day like this since the Holocaust.”
Gur said she and Haran’s friends and relatives are trying to carry the burden of her worry, fearful for her health because she is eight months pregnant. But the sorrow extends beyond just one family.
“There is an enormous amount of anger,” she said. “It’s just we have to focus.
“There is anger at Hamas, anger at the Israeli government. People are feeling it,” Gur added. “But we have to focus on who we can save. We can be angry afterward.”