Ex-captive Doron Katz-Asher recalls watching her mother die in her arms on Oct. 7

Doron Katz-Asher, who was released with her two young daughters from Hamas captivity in November 2023, has described watching her mother Efrat Katz die after an Israel Defense Forces helicopter fired at the vehicle in which they and other Kibbutz Nir Oz members were snatched to Gaza on October 7, 2023.

“I saw a helicopter, and it was firing, it fired 170 shells at a meter-by-meter [yard-by-yard] trolley carrying nine hostages,” Katz-Asher said as she and her mother’s partner, freed captive Gadi Mozes, visited Efrat’s grave in Kibbutz Revadim. “When I picked up my head, I couldn’t move… I was hit in my back, my hip. I remember screaming as the shots were fired.”

Katz-Asher, 36, was speaking in an interview broadcast Friday on Channel 12, whose reporters had documented her as she prepared for the birth of her third daughter in March. In that time, she also separated from her husband, Yoni Asher.

“Giving birth without a mother and without a husband is not something I imagined would happen,” she said. “But sometimes I sit… in the evening and think, ‘Wow, I haven’t thought about my brother for a few days.”

Katz-Asher’s half-brother, Ravid Katz, was killed defending Kibbutz Nir Oz as thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel on October 7, 2023, to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza. Ravid Katz’s body was captured and later recovered by the IDF.

“It’s too much,” Katz-Asher told Channel 12. “My pain for him and for my mom and for my home that’s falling apart, but on the other hand, I’m happy about the pregnancy and… Gadi,” who was released as part of the Gaza ceasefire-hostage deal in late January, weeks before Katz-Asher gave birth.

Katz-Asher has recently appealed to the public for financial help to get her back on her feet. On Channel 12, she spoke candidly about the economic hardships she has faced amid the trauma, calling the government stipend she gets “not enough.”

She told the network she has been unable to resume her job as an accountant, or even prepare food, since being abducted. “My whole sense of security and stability has come undone,” she said. “I need help.”

The last meal she prepared, Katz-Asher told Channel 12, was the holiday meal she and her mother had cooked in Nir Oz the night before the Hamas onslaught, which coincided with the holiday of Simhat Torah. Katz-Asher, a native of the kibbutz, had taken her two daughters to visit her mother there, while Asher stayed home in Nordia, near Netanya.

Nir Oz was destroyed in the Hamas onslaught, with roughly one in four of its 400-odd members murdered or kidnapped. During the onslaught, terrorists snatched Doron, her mother and two daughters, Raz, 5, and Aviv, 2, from Efrat Katz’s home. Gadi Mozes had gone out earlier to defend the kibbutz and was abducted by members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Doron, Efrat, Raz and Aviv were loaded onto a wagon with five other Nir Oz members — Neomit Dekel-Chen, Shani Goren, spouses David and Sharon Aloni Cunio, and their 3-year-old daughter Emma, whose twin Yuli was missing and reunited with the family only inside Gaza. An IDF helicopter shot at the wagon, killing the terrorists and likely also Efrat Katz, according to a military probe last year.

With their captors shot dead, Katz-Asher stayed with Efrat as everyone else fled. Dekel-Chen and Aloni Cunio each took one of Katz-Asher’s daughters.

Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui was kidnapped separately and released in February, has said they called out for Doron to join them, but Doron wouldn’t leave her mother: “She kept weeping: ‘Mama died in my arms, and I didn’t protect the girls.’”

Katz-Asher, herself wounded, tried to tend to her mother. She cleared out a space amid “the equipment, bicycles, all the things they’d stolen, and I tried to lie her down and see what I could to help.”

“I tried to see where she was hit and I didn’t see much, she was clean on the front part of her face,” she recounted, as Mozes, a stoic octogenarian farmer, burst into tears.

“She wasn’t talking, her eyes kept opening and closing,” she said. “I realized I had no way to help at this stage and I tried to close her eyes, but they were opening and closing. I just laid her down there and told her that I love her and that I’m going to the girls.”

The fleeing captives soon ran into more terrorists. Dekel-Chen, who was hit with shrapnel while escaping, avoided captivity by playing dead. The others were abducted on a tractor that the terrorists had stolen from her.

Of those captives, all but David Cunio were freed in the weeklong truce-hostage deal in November 2023, in which Hamas released 105 women and children in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners. Cunio remains captive.

Katz-Asher told Channel 12 that she and her daughters had paper and writing materials in captivity, but their captors warned that “if they find things in Hebrew on us, we won’t be released,” she said.

She and her daughters flouted the rules. “I hid a lot of things Raz wrote and drew… underneath the pretty dresses,” she told the network, showing some examples of Raz’s handiwork. She smuggled the papers out of Gaza in her bra, she said: “I hoped they wouldn’t go there.”

Katz-Asher shared an excerpt from a letter she wrote to Yoni: “Nothing will go back to be the way it was, but you and I will give our daughters a happy, loving home.”

“That’s still my goal: A happy and loving home, even if by other means,” she said. “I don’t want to be a victim of life, I don’t want to feel alone. I want to get back up on my feet, for me and for my girls.”

During the interview, Katz-Asher said it had weighed on her for a time that she had missed the funeral of her mother, who was buried in late October 2023, before Katz-Asher was released.

“I carried it for a time, that I hadn’t said a proper goodbye, that I didn’t accompany her on her final journey,” said Katz-Asher. “But then I suddenly said to myself, ‘I was there with her in her final moments, and I really did say goodbye.’”

She noted that Efrat had been buried in a temporary grave as the family waited for the return of Efrat’s partner, Gadi Mozes.

Sitting alongside Katz-Asher at the Kibbutz Revadim cemetery, Mozes revealed to her that he and Efrat had been gearing up to get married. “That’s the first time I’m hearing this, that she wanted it, that it was important to her,” said Katz-Asher.

“Efrat had wanted us to get married, and I said to her, ‘What does it matter? We love each other and are happy,’” said Mozes, adding that Efrat wanted to “make the relationship official.”

“You should know I was planning the wedding there, when I was in captivity,” before learning that Efrat had been killed, Mozes said. “I dreamt there of a wedding — who will come, where everyone will sit, what we’ll say — and suddenly the world came crashing down on my head.”