Missing peace activist Vivian Silver - son awaits news, good or bad

Watch: Yonatan Ziegen's mother Vivian Silver texted her son to say her home had been attacked

By Jeremy Bowen
International editor

Yonatan Ziegen woke early last Saturday morning in his home in Tel Aviv to the sound of alarms, the red alert that all Israelis know intimately.

Millions of Israelis and Palestinians were also waking, some hearing explosions as well as sirens, grabbing their phones and starting to follow the news that Hamas had broken into Israel and was on the attack.

In Israeli communities along the border wire with Gaza, it soon became clear that this was an emergency like no other. Concrete shelters are never more than a short run away, because of years of living with the threat and reality of rocket attacks from Hamas in Gaza. But when they started hearing shooting, and voices shouting in Arabic, it was different - closer and more deadly.

It took Yonatan no time to realise that his mother, Vivian Silver, was in trouble. He knows the border territory well, as he grew up there. His mother, now widowed, was still living in the family home in kibbutz Be'eri, a small community right on the border wire with Gaza.

Vivian is one of Israel's best-known campaigners for peace with the Palestinians. She stayed busy in her retirement, continuing her life's work as an activist, holding meetings - Yonatan said - with international supporters of her group, Women Wage Peace, only a few days before the Hamas attacks.

Yonatan rang his mother, and they kept talking as Hamas was moving through the kibbutz. Perhaps trying to cheer them both up, or to stop her thirty-something son from worrying too much, she made light of what was happening, until both realised it was deadly serious and that she was in mortal danger.

They switched to WhatsApp so she could stay quiet, hoping Hamas might bypass the house. Yonatan read me their last text messages. Vivien was typing them out from a cupboard in the house where she was hiding. It was time to stop joking. She believed that a massacre was happening.

Vivian Silver has not been heard from since the Hamas attack

Vivian wrote that she loved him.

"She wrote me, 'They're inside the house, it's time to stop joking and say goodbye.'"

"And I wrote back that 'I love you, Mum. I have no words, I'm with you.'

"Then she writes, 'I feel you.' And then that was it, that's the last message."

I asked Yonatan what Vivian would be saying now about everything that has happened.

"That this is the outcome of war. Of not striving for peace, and this is what happens.

"It's very overwhelming but not completely surprising. It's not sustainable to live in a state of war for so long and now it bursts. It bursts."

That was around 11:00 on Saturday morning. Neither Yonatan nor his brother has heard anything since, good or bad. Their mother's kibbutz was one of the first targets of Hamas last Saturday, as it's right on the border.

Video from a security camera shows them killing a man in a car at the gate at point blank range, as they stormed in and set about killing Israelis. By the time the Israeli army fought its way back into Be'eri, in a fierce fight that did a lot of damage, it was too late to stop the massacre.

We travelled to the kibbutz with the army, the only way to get in as it is in what Israel has declared as a closed military area.

BBC/Oren Rosenfeld

A burnt out car in Be'eri

When we arrived, the smell of decomposition hung over the wreckage, and the body bags of residents were still being brought out of the ruins.

In the ambulance they used to move bodies, we met volunteers from an organisation called Zaka - that recovers Jewish dead so they can be buried according to their religion's precepts.

On the way to the house where Vivian Silver lived, Moshe Minaker, a veteran volunteer, spoke of the horrors they had seen.

"No studio in Hollywood," he said, "can make this movie."

"Kids, ladies - they don't just kill, they mutilate, they burn, they sever. It's impossible to describe."

The army didn't allow us much time in the street where Vivian Silver lived and brought up her family.

BBC/Fred Scott

Vivian Silver's house was gutted by fire

She moved here, long before Hamas emerged, for space and country air.

We hoped to find out more about what happened to her. But if there were clues, they were consumed by fire. Vivian's house, and her neighbour's, were gutted.

We don't know if she's alive or dead. Her family, like so many others, waits for news, good or bad.

The remains of the house, and destruction at the kibbutz, are evidence for most Israelis that it is dangerously wrong for peace activists like Vivian to argue that a century of attempted military solutions to the conflict have failed.

The survivors have left the kibbutz. Now it is a staging area as the army waits for the order to enter Gaza. As the soldiers prepare, Israel's government vows that, this time, its forces will destroy Hamas.

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