Georgy Avazov outside his home in the southern Israeli town of Ofakim
Mr Avazov's father, Yuri, immigrated to Israel three decades earlier because he fled the war in Chechnya, he had only recently had an intercom installed while he was renovating his entire one-story house.
“I installed it about a year ago — and my relatives continued to make fun of me,” Mr. Avazov Sr. said The Telegraph
“They kept asking: why do you need this fancy intercom? I just love technology and decided to get one. We were so lucky: if it weren’t for that intercom, I would have walked up to the gate and opened it.”
There was constant shooting outside, and bullets continued to pierce the metal gate, despite the concrete wall. remained untouched. One bullet went through the gate into the yard and ricocheted into Avazov's house, hitting the glass door.
“It was terrible,” Mr. Avazov Sr. said.
“Terrorists went from house to house simply to kill as many people as possible. They had no other goal.»
The streets were left with the scars of the fighting
Some 36 hours after the unprecedented breach, the idyllic village of Ofakim, with low-rise buildings and eucalyptus trees lining the streets, still bears the visible scars of street fighting.
A charred SUV sat on the road Sunday afternoon. on the side of the road behind a white pickup truck with Palestinian license plates. Its doors were thrown open and all the upholstery torn off: Israeli forces apparently checked it for explosives.
On HaTamar Street in the center of Ofakim, population 29,000, every second car had a broken window or a bullet hole in the windshield. The sidewalk was littered with empty plastic water bottles abandoned by Israeli troops and first responders.
The two-story cottage near the parking lot had all its windows broken and the upstairs window was pockmarked. with bullet holes. The couple hid there for several hours before the police came to their aid.
On Sunday afternoon, a group of plainclothes police appeared at the fence of a house where the sidewalk was still splattered with blood.
One of the police officers lit a candle and placed it on the ground next to the blood stain. . Other officers donned police caps and took time for Jewish prayer.
“I thought it was a gang fight.”
Mr. Avazov stood outside the bullet-riddled metal gate of his home on Sunday afternoon, when neighbors were on the street for the first time since a one-day siege that ended only at one in the morning.
The sirens first sounded in Ofakim, 20 kilometers east of the Gaza border, at 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, and Mr. Avazov's parents and sister went to an outdoor bomb shelter in a concrete cubicle on the sidewalk.< /p >
After the second air raid siren, the family returned home and stayed in the kitchen.
No threat was expected on the doorstep. Then shots were heard in the streets.
“I thought it was a gang fight or something like that,” Mr. Avazov told the Telegraph newspaper.
As Israel has seen an increase in gang violence in recent months, this was not a wild guess.
Israeli soldiers eventually regained control in Ofakim Photo: AP/Ilan Assayag
The Israeli army finally entered the city around 4:30 pm on Saturday and managed to remove the hostages from a house across the road. Helicopters hovered in the air, urging residents through loudspeakers not to leave their homes.
Mr Avazov senior, a father of two who fled to Israel when Russian federal troops invaded his native Grozny in 1994, said he was aware that Israel was not the safest place in the world but never thought that an invasion Hamas is looming.
“I never thought I would see something like this in my life,” he said. “It’s always been such a quiet town. Everyone knew each other.”
On the street where his son's gray Honda sat on Saturday morning with slashed tires and a broken side window, Mr. Avazov Sr. pointed to the building across the street where a neighbor lived , a popular jack of all trades, was killed by Hamas. A young neighbor was shot dead as he tried to flee to his parents' home.
Mr Avazov wants the family to leave the area temporarily, fearing that a possible IDF operation in Gaza could have devastating consequences for the neighborhood.< /p>
But his father is skeptical after seeing large swathes of the country, from the south to the center, hit by rocket fire on Saturday.
“Where are we going? » He said. “Nowhere in this country is safe.”
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