A heroic Israeli mum and daughter survived a 12-hour Hamas siege of the kibbutz they lived in by barricading themselves inside a shelter using only a rolling pin and a vacuum cleaner.
Irit Lahav rushed her daughter into the safe room after hearing the initial attack on the Nir Oz kibbutz, in southern Israel, thinking they were the target of a “regular bombing”.
Lahav was not initially concerned because of previous attacks on the community, noting that “we’re used to for years and years now.”
She however realized soon after that rather than rockets the kibbutz was being targeted directly by Hamas militants – and that the safe room would not be able to keep out the advancing attackers.
Israeli buildings erected after 1993 are required to be equipped with a bomb shelter capable of withstanding bombings and rocket attacks.
But as emergency services need to be able to access the shelters to rescue residents in case of a direct strike, the heavy steel doors to the safe rooms are not lockable.
She quickly reached out to other residents of the kibbutz for advice: “Everywhere endless, endless, endless shooting and grenades.
“So I’m trying to figure out what to do. Are they going to maybe break into our door? How can I make sure it’s locked?
“And I started texting and calling people from the kibbutz how to lock the door, and nobody knew.”
But it wasn’t until she received a message from her brother showing her how he had secured the door shut “with two broomsticks” that she turned to her vacuum cleaner.
She told CNN: “I thought, I don’t have any brooms. How would I do that? But then I remembered I had a rolling stick and I took that and then I took my Dyson vacuum.
“It’s hard to imagine how, you know, that you’re just going to die if they break in. And I was just tying these things to the door. It’s just fear, fear, fear.”
Lahav said she and her daughter started hearing Hamas fighters “banging everything” within minutes of her locking the door with her makeshift contraception.
She continued: “There was nothing we could do except we were hugging, my daughter and I, under the table, hiding in the dark.
“We started saying to each other, ‘I love you’. My daughter says ‘Mom, I love you, I really appreciate everything you did for me.’ And I told her how much I love her.
“We thought we were just going to die and they kept banging on the door trying to open it. And I was sure that whatever I did, the vacuum cleaner and the rolling stick wouldn’t hold, but it did.”
After the initial attempt to force their way in, the terrorists left the mother-daughter duo alone only for another group of attackers to try making their way in an hour later.
The second attempt also failed and they remained stuck inside the safe room for 12 hours, surviving a third attempt to break in as well.
Lahav said she and her daughter were among the lucky ones to make it out, estimating that approximately 30 percent of the kibbutz’s residents had either died or were kidnapped by Hamas.
Nir Oz was one of several kibbutzim Hamas terrorists targeted as they launched their deadly incursion into Israel on Saturday.
The 250 small farming communities spread across Israel are home to approximately 125,000 people.
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