Dafna Shai Heiman from the Gaza border town of Sdei Avraham was walking in the streets of her community on Simchat Torah.
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"Last Saturday, at five minutes to 10 in the morning, I was still able to talk to my mother, Ditza, before the terrorists arrived in Nir Oz. She had entered the safe room, this is a reality we are used to. Little by little, indications began to arrive that terrorists had infiltrated the kibbutz," she said.
"We continued to be in contact by phone. I asked her, 'Are you in the safe room, are you okay?' After 10 in the morning, she stopped answering me. All this time we kept trying to call, me and the rest of the family. Around late afternoon, I called again and someone answered me: 'It's Hamas, It's Hamas'. I hung up and immediately called my brother. He called the police. My nephew also tried to call my mother, and again they told him it was Hamas," Heiman says.
"In the evening, I heard from the neighbors that my mother came out of her house and shouted 'Save me, save me.' We called everyone we could, including the Eshkol Regional Council. There's no one to talk to. None of the official bodies are functioning. The entire kibbutz is burned down, there's no way to get there and you can't come and just look for her. People are sending me lots of videos so we can look and check if she's in Gaza, but we haven't seen her in any video yet. We are trying to organize all kinds of measures, for example, to contact the United Nations so that medicine can be brought in to the captives," according to Heiman.
"My mother is an amazing woman, very honest. A social worker who was widowed at a young age and raised four children. She is one of the founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz and the one who established the assistance unit at the Family Court in Be'er Sheva.
"We have become a war room. We wrote a post in Hebrew and English to reach the whole world. One moment we are sitting and crying and the next we are working"
"Since then we have become a war room. We wrote a post in Hebrew and English to reach the whole world. One moment we are sitting and crying and the next we are working. I didn't sleep at night. I count every moment that passes, and I can't help but see pictures and imagine that she is there, in Gaza, and what is happening to her," her daughter says.
After her abduction, Ditza's children posted a video on social media networks in which one of the girls talks about their mother's absence.
"When I heard from Daphna that they answered her in Arabic, I called the community resilience team in the kibbutz. He said he would try to send the army," according to daughter Neta Heiman. "At some point, I heard that they did a mapping of the people on the kibbutz, and an ambulance driver from the area has lists of the wounded and dead. I talked to him, he checked and told me that my mother is not on the lists."
"We don't have much to do. We joined all kinds of groups of missing families, we sent them details about Mom. At the 105 hotline, they also asked for details and a photo of her. My brother went to the police to give a DNA sample. They informed us that they entered mother's house and it was empty, nobody," Neta Heiman says.
"A member of our family is looking at the videos and trying to find her in them. So far, she has not found her. No one is talking to us, we have no idea what happened to her. An 84-year-old woman, barely walking, dependent on medication. She is not the only one. There is a group on the kibbutz of 80-year-olds who were kidnapped. We are helpless, it's crazy anxiety and worry, the feeling that we have nothing to do. We can't bring them to her. If there is no humanitarian aid and if they don't bring medicine to the older captives, they won't survive for long," she says.