‘I Will Never Be the Same Person Again’: Israeli Reporter On What It Was Like Covering Hamas Attack

“This is the Holocaust,” says Liron Shamam, a television reporter based in Tel Aviv, Israel, of the horrific attack by Hamas. “There are piles of bodies everywhere. I’m having goosebumps. It’s an awful situation.”

Shamam spoke with Mediaite one week after Hamas militants stormed into Israel from Gaza, launching a spree of terror that left more than 1,400 Israelis dead, mostly civilians. At least 150 hostages are believed to have been taken from Israel to the Gaza Strip during the attack. Israel declared war on Hamas soon after, launching a bombing campaign of Gaza that has killed at least 2,215 Palestinians so far, according to local authorities.

Shamam, a reporter for Channel 13, described in harrowing detail the panic that fell upon Israel when Hamas launched its attack in the early morning 0f Saturday, October 7. That morning, she and other reporters began receiving calls from people under attack by those terrorists.

“Me and all of my colleagues, we got hundreds of locations and cries for help at about nine in the morning,” she said “I got the first message about the rape at the music festival, and people told me there’s shooting them and please send someone to help us. Then, someone that I don’t know contacted me, and another one. And then I got this voice message from a mother.”

Shamam said the message left on her phone was “the worst thing I ever heard in my life”

The mother, she explained, said “that terrorists came inside her home and shot her husband in the head, and he’s dead, and they killed her little girl. And she was crying. ‘They killed my little girl.'”

“In the background you could hear another child crying,” Shamam said. “Like the worst kind of cry. A cry like terror. And she was asking for help. And basically there was nothing we could have done to help them. We tried. And it’s very hard to leave knowing that people will murder at 12, and again five and six and 10 hours later. And we couldn’t help them.”

“I will never be the same person again,” she said.

Shaken and visibly distraught during the interview, the seasoned journalist detailed the horrific images of the atrocities committed by Hamas that she witnessed firsthand.

“Terror sounds like Disneyland compared to what I have seen with my eyes,” she said. “Mountains of bodies and little body bags. All the women, all the bodies, they’ve been raped, brutally raped.”

“I can’t even describe what they’ve done,” she said. “It’s more than anyone can handle. I don’t have any air in my lungs. I’ve had panic attacks. It’s terror. It’s a nightmare. And the babies, the little babies, they took little babies and they separated babies from the mother. They shot the mothers and took the baby. I have no words. I’m sorry. I have no voice.”

Since the attack, Shamam said she remains suffocated with fear.

“I’m afraid of just being at home,” she said. “Even when I’m out on the field, my kids are at home and there are sirens every now and then. So being a mother in Israel feels like I can’t breathe.”

Shamam addressed criticism that the Israeli government’s response to the attack, which has taken the form of an extensive bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip, as well as the cutting off of electricity and food to the densely populated territory, is harming innocent Palestinian civilians.

“I can say that the Israeli army, before the bombing, they are sending from the sky messages telling everyone to evacuate. If you’re innocent, please evacuate the people of Israel.

Despite the Israeli army’s efforts to warn Gaza residents of incoming rocket attacks, the relentless bombing has killed thousands, including hundreds of children, according to Palestinian authorities.

“I’ve seen the pictures,” Shamam said. “As a mother, every time it’s breaking your heart.”

Shamam disputed labeling the current conflict a war.

“A war is between armies,” she said. “This is a war against children and women. Even in the Holocaust, they mass murder quickly. They put them in so-called showers. This is a different level. It’s not human.”