An Israeli mother who escaped after Hamas terrorists broke into her home says her newborn baby went 27 hours without formula while they waited to be rescued.
Shaylee Atary said that by the time she and her 1-month-old daughter Shayla were saved and taken to the hospital, the newborn was so dehydrated she produced no tears when crying.
Atary was getting ready to feed Shayla early Saturday morning when bombs rang out outside of the Kfar Aza home she shared with her husband.
“I thought it’s a regular bombing we have, like each couple of months,” Atary told PBS. “But then we understand it’s bigger.”
The couple soon heard people yelling “Come, come” in Arabic, and moments later, the attackers opened the window into their bedroom.
“So I took my daughter, 1-month-old daughter, with no shoes, no phone. My husband was left there with a lot of people that want to kill him probably,” she recalled.
Atary ran behind bushes, trying to remain hidden as Hamas gunmen shot at them, and eventually found empty flower pots that she fashioned into helmets for them to wear.
While hiding in a shed, Shayla began to cry, prompting Atary to run off again to find help.
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“But then one family, actually, they saved me. They were the only ones who opened. They had a camera around the house. And they could see I’m not one of them. So they could see I’m with child. They opened up the house with a child. And we were in that house for 27 hours,” Atary said.
“They were bombing [for] 27 hours and they’re still bombing now,” she added.
Atary recalled how difficult it was keeping her young daughter calm during the horrifying incident, during which she felt like there was a target on her back every time her daughter began to cry.
Once they were located over a day later, Shayla had become ghastly white. At the hospital, doctors told her mother she had become so dehydrated she produced no tears when she cried.
Now days after the horrifying incursion, Atary’s husband of over 10 years, Yahav Winner, still remains missing.
Winner, an Israeli filmmaker, has a colored tattoo of a feather, brown hair and blue eyes, his wife told the outlet, adding that none of the bodies they’d found were his.
“We had a lot of bodies — and they didn’t find him. I don’t know. Like, in this time, I quite hope he is kidnapped to Gaza. I know it’s like not like a great hope. But if I think of the hours that — that were since the bombing, it’s too much time for him to last,” Atary said. “So, I hope he was kidnapped, I hope, right?”
