A horrific loss amongst the violence in Israel — Brandeis University professor emeritus Ilan Troen shared with NBC10 Boston how his daughter Deborah and his son-in-law saved his 16-year-old grandson when Hamas began its attacks on Israeli civilians.
"She and her husband Shlomi were killed by Hamas terrorists who invaded their home," Troen said.
Troen, a former Boston resident and a professor of Israel Studies at the Waltham, Massachusetts-based university, described being on the phone with his daughter Saturday morning when she heard shooting and voices speaking in Arabic near their kibbutz in southern Israel.
Get top local stories in Philly delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC Philadelphia's News Headlines newsletter.
"And then she reported broken glass, and that was really the last we heard from her, spoken," said Troen, getting emotional. "The next we heard was from her son, saying … they're dead, and we learned that he was lying under her and was covered in part by his parents' blood, and that he himself had been wounded."
Incredibly, Troen and other relatives kept his grandson, Rotem, on the phone through text, helping him hide for 12 hours from Hamas militants.
A chat group formed among the family, including an aunt who is a trauma specialist who provided advice. "The reason that it was all texting was that we didn't want him to speak," Troen said.
Rotem is recovering from a gunshot wound at the hospital and is expected to survive, Troen said. When the family visited him at the hospital Saturday, they found him grey-black, discolored from fires set by the attackers at the kibbutz, presumably to flush out any survivors.
Troen's daughter's two other children no longer live at home and are okay, he said. Deborah had just celebrated her 50th birthday.
Troen said that one of his daughter's names came from an aunt who, along with his mother, survived a pogrom — an organized massacre on Jews — in Ukraine just over 100 years ago, an attack he likened to this weekend's.
"This is not a military campaign, this is not a war of national liberation fought against legitimate targets, this is a war of hate, fought against innocent civilians … who are taken captive because that's a part of the game, in contravention of every human right," Troen said.
It's unimaginable violence like what happened to Troen's family that former Bentley student Shira Violvovsky, who moved back to Israel a month ago, wants everyone back in the U.S. to hear to filter through online propaganda.
"This is very much real. This isn't like a political thought experiment, these are real people who are being dragged out of their homes by terrorists and being tortured, raped and held hostage."
