"This is Israel's Pearl Harbor," Brookline woman living in Tel Aviv says of Hamas attacks
BOSTON - The sounds of war now surround the home of Abbey Onn, who moved from Brookline to just north of Tel Aviv eight years ago.
"We get sirens, you know, a couple of times a day. You hear booms all the time. We have Iron Dome outside of our house," she told WBZ-TV Tuesday.
Onn and her family woke up to sirens echoing Saturday morning as the Hamas militant group launched a surprise attack on Israel from Gaza.
"Immediately got the kids out of bed and ran to a bomb shelter," she said.
Shortly after the sirens stopped, Onn started messaging back and forth with relatives who live within miles of the Gaza border.
"They could hear gunfire and they feared for their lives. So, we were getting messages from them in their bomb shelters and at a certain point those messages stopped," Onn told WBZ.
With homes by the border burned to the ground, Onn said a video of her 12-year-old cousin surfaced a day later, posted by Hamas.
"Hamas shared it, and we saw it on Instagram for the first time," she said.
Onn now believes five members of her family, ranging in age from 12 to 80, are possibly being held captive in Gaza.
"These are civilians, these are humans. And this is atrocious, and we are doing everything we can as a family in all of our languages, to make sure that people know about this," she told WBZ. "This is Israel's Pearl Harbor. It's its 9/11. It's something we never come back from."
Onn is holding out hope that video of her cousin means her family members are still alive.
"I just want people to put aside any sort of politics here and understand that this was not coming to us. This was not something anyone deserved. This is terror, and I want them to put themselves in the place as a mother, as a child, as a sister and understand what it would feel like to have their family ripped out of their homes in an act of terror," she told WBZ. "We are asking for people to begin putting pressure where they can to try to make sure these people are brought home."
Onn said her brother was actually visiting her in Israel this weekend. Both he and her father made it back to Boston safely.