Hamas fighters booby-trapped the body of a Canadian-Israeli mother after killing her, according to traumatized neighbors. They put bombs in it to kill anyone who came near her corpse.
Adi Vital-Kaploun was killed in front of her two young sons on October 7 when militants stormed Kibbutz Holit. After shooting her dead, neighbors said the fighters covered her body with bombs under one of her son’s beds.
The two boys – Eshel, four months, and Negev, four – survived and escaped with a neighbor.
“They placed bombs all over her body and her father was in the house. Thank God he didn’t open the door,” said Dina Zaslacski, a family friend Canadian Globe and Mail.
The body of Adi Vital-Kaploun, a Canadian citizen, was found three days after the brutal Hamas attack
For days, many of Adi’s relatives believed she was being held hostage because her body had been shoved under her son’s bed.
Her body was found on Wednesday, October 10, three days after she was shot.
“When the terrorists finally came, they blew off the door of my house and the safe room,” recalled a friend, Avital Aladjem, who was in hiding with another neighbor.
“Hayim and I were hiding in closets, unfortunately he took all the bullets for me and his body saved me.”
Sobbing as she recalled his horrific death, she added: “He absorbed everything and saved my life.
‘Everything was destroyed and full of blood; They took us from house to house and shot all around, burning the houses and cars,” Aladjem added.
A Hamas terrorist carried the four-year-old on his shoulders while Aladjem held the baby.
After the group reached Gaza, all three were left alone. A quick-thinking Aladjem slowly began to leave the war zone with the children. During their journey back to the kibbutz, Aladjem was forced to hide in sand dunes with the children as Hamas patrols passed by.
Adi Vital-Kaplon, 33, was killed on Saturday in her home near Gaza, along with four-year-old Negev and six-month-old Eshel
“We kept going and going and I believed we would get home,” she said, adding that she wasn’t sure how long the trip would take.
As they got closer to home, Aladjem said she saw many of her neighbors preparing to flee. During the trip, Aladjem assured the four-year-old that he would see his father again soon.
The group landed in the town of Gvulot, where they were met by the children’s father. “I’m still alive, but their mother is missing,” Aladjem said.
In a separate interview with CNN, Aladjem described the two children as “traumatized” by what they experienced.
‘Both traumatized and silent. They both stood there staring at the terrorists with terrified eyes.” Negev was slightly injured by flying shrapnel during the ordeal, she added.
In that piece, Aladjem also revealed that Eshel was still being breastfed by his mother.
She doesn’t know why they were spared – she only speculates that the gunmen were ‘tired of all that murderous violence’.
The children were reunited with their father, who was treated in hospital. A bullet struck Negev in the foot during the extraordinary escape.
In an interview with The Australian In the newspaper, a friend of Kaploun’s family described the four-year-old as being used by the militants as a “human shield.”
“Adi tried to hold on as much as possible,” the friend said.
He said Hamas terrorists threw a grenade into the living room of their home, forcing them to leave.
Hamas terrorists also killed the girlfriend of Kaploun’s brother-in-law on Saturday.
The Hamas attack stunned Israel, with a death toll not seen since the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria – and those deaths occurred over an extended period of time.
It produced horrific scenes of Hamas militants shooting civilians in their cars on the road, on city streets and at a music festival attended by thousands in the desert near Gaza, as they dragged men, women and children into captivity.
US President Joe Biden will speak with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday about coordinating with allies to “defend Israel and innocent people from terrorism,” the White House said.
The Israeli military said more than 900 people have been killed in Israel. In Gaza and the West Bank, 704 people have been killed, according to authorities there; Israel says there are hundreds of Hamas fighters among them. Thousands have been injured on both sides.
The bodies of about 1,500 Hamas militants have been found on Israeli territory, the army said. It was not immediately clear whether these figures overlapped with deaths previously reported by Palestinian authorities.
More than 187,000 people have fled their homes in Gaza, the UN said, the highest number since an air and ground offensive by Israel uprooted about 400,000 people in 2014.
The vast majority are sheltered in schools run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. Damage to three water and sanitation facilities has cut off services to 400,000 people, the UN said.
Days after the first attack, Israeli warplanes bombed the Gaza Strip neighborhood by neighborhood on Tuesday, reducing buildings to rubble and sending people scrambling for safety in the small, gated area, as Israel vowed retaliation for Hamas’ surprise attack over the weekend. ‘reverberate… for generations.’
Aid agencies called for the creation of humanitarian corridors to get aid into Gaza, warning that hospitals, overwhelmed by injured people, were running low on supplies.
Israel has halted all food, fuel and medicine access to Gaza, and the only remaining access from Egypt was cut off on Tuesday after airstrikes near the border crossing.
The war began after Hamas militants stormed into Israel on Saturday, bringing gun battles to the streets for the first time in decades.
At least 1,600 lives have been claimed on both sides, and perhaps hundreds more. Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza are holding more than 150 soldiers and civilians hostage, according to Israel.
The expectation is that the conflict will only escalate. Israel expanded its mobilization of reservists to 360,000 on Tuesday, according to the country’s media.
After days of fighting, the Israeli army said Tuesday morning that it had regained effective control of the areas Hamas attacked in the south and the border with Gaza.
A looming question is whether Israel will launch a ground offensive against Gaza – a 40-kilometer strip of land wedged between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, home to 2.3 million people and ruled by Hamas since 2007.