I heard and incredible story this week which I would like to share:

Rav Zamir Cohen, related that one of his students shared with him that his wife works as a mid-wife in one of the hospitals in Israel and she helped a woman who recently gave birth to a healthy baby. The woman explained that she and her family lived on one of the kibbutzim which were attacked and massacred on Simchat Torah. She said that their community is entirely secular but at some point she decided that she would start keeping shabbas. Although her husband wasn't too thrilled about it he acquiesced and participated as well. Because they were on a secular kibbutz they decided that staying home for Shabbat was too difficult so they would leave every shabbas and spend it with friends or family in areas that were more religious. Every shabbas they would pack up and leave the kibbutz. As this woman's pregnancy progressed it became harder for her to make the weekly move and they decided on Shabbat/Simchat Torah that they would just stay home in the kibbutz and not travel. Instead they would invite some friends to join them on the kibbutz to spend Shabbas with them. 

In the morning when the terrorist entered their kibbutz they began going door to door slaughtering people. The woman explained that they all realized what was happening and they retreated to their safe room. The terrorist came near their house and just skipped over and didn't shoot or try to enter. The terrorists continued with the next house until they were finally repelled by the armed resistance. In the aftermath the woman said they couldn't understand why the terrorists literally just skipped over their house and they were all saved from the massacre. 

As the army began efforts to clean the area of terrorists and to gather information, they recovered tons of ammunition, papers, maps etc. They realized that many of these kibbutzim employed people from Gaza who had permits to enter every day into Israel and cross back over to Gaza at night. These "employees" in many cases carried out very detailed reconnaissance of the kibbutzim and provided Hamas with this information. The terrorist had detailed maps of each community and how many people live in each house and who lived where. They found on the terrorists a list of each and every house in this specific kibbutz and when they came across the house of this particular family listed there was a note "these people are never home on Shabbas, so nobody is there". The family realized that this is the reason that the terrorist skipped over their house entirely. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Heath