The last thing Shuki Benjamin could find out was where his younger brother Ron had been at 7 in the morning on Oct. 7.
Shuki, 62, whose business installs tracking devices and other electronic devices in new cars, found out through the one in Ron’s car where it was and that it hadn’t moved since 7 a.m. And that’s the last they'd know for almost two months.
Ron Benjamin, 53, had left his home early that morning in Rehovot, Israel, south of Tel Aviv. He works in the service department of a car importer. An avid cyclist, he'd gone to ride with others, people he didn’t know well but had linked up with online.
The meet-up point was just outside Kibbutz Be‘eri, 40 miles or so from his home. They were supposed to start riding at 6:30 a.m. Ron arrived at 6:20 a.m., a little later than he’d planned.
He needed to unload his bike from his car and get ready. The others were set to go.
Ron never got the chance to unload, his brother said. At that moment, the Hamas terrorist group’s massive missile barrage began—they would fire 3,000 missiles at Israel that day.
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It was time to take shelter. The others needed to do that until they found a good moment to return to their car, load up their bikes, and flee.
Ron, though, didn’t want to leave his wife and two daughters alone. And he hadn’t unloaded his bike yet. So he got back in his car, turned around, and headed north the way he'd come.
He drove about 20 minutes before stopping about 400 meters from the gate to Kibbutz Mefalsim.
The kibbutz, less than a mile from the Gaza frontier, had been the target of Hamas violence before. Dozens of rockets had hit it over the years, and in 2018, according to online sources, it was the first Israeli site set ablaze by Hamas-launched fire balloons.
It was attacked this morning. But its security team managed to fight and hold off the Hamas terrorists until the Israeli Defense Force could arrive. It suffered several injuries but no fatalities.
Outside was something different. Shuki would learn, through videos he found online and through the report of a friend who could get to the scene—within the area sealed off by the army—that the road was littered with bodies.
Ron’s, though, was not one of them. His car was found robbed, with the bike, camera, phone charger, and other electronics gone. “It was a mess,” Shuki said. “They took everything from the car.”
However, there was only a small bloodstain on the seat, and none outside the car. Some other windows had broken from gunfire, but not the driver’s side. Shuki concluded that the windows shattered when an RPG hit a vehicle near his brother’s car and that Ron was cut by the flying glass.
The fates of many Israelis that day were unknown. That some were hostages was confirmed by Hamas’s social media videos. But it took days and weeks to identify bodies uncovered in the wreckage of Israel’s communities along the Gaza frontier. Some were so severely burned they required DNA analysis to identify them. Some initially thought to be Israeli turned out to be the bodies of Hamas terrorists, and Israel accordingly lowered its official death toll from an estimated 1,400 to a firmer 1,200.
Kibbutz Be'eri, where Ron had met up with his biking companions, was one of the hardest hit. Emergency workers there found a naked woman in the rubble, her feet bound with wires. They found 20 children, their burned bodies tied together.
A 10-month-old baby was shot in its mother’s arms there, Shuki Benjamin said. A pregnant woman was cut open. A woman was shot in the head while being raped, and the rape continued.
“They’re crazy,” he said.
But Ron’s would-be biking companions, who found shelter in a home’s safe room there, managed to survive until the army arrived at 4 a.m. the following day, his older brother said.
With no body found at the scene, Shuki said, the family assumed Ron had been taken hostage.
That was confirmed around Dec. 1, he said, when the IDF told them just that. The army declined to tell them more about the circumstances or how they knew but confirmed he was still alive.
“We had concluded he was kidnapped” from the evidence at the scene, Shuki said. “The army told us he was kidnapped and alive.”
“I asked if someone saw him. A few people had come back. They said, ‘We can’t tell you. Trust us. He was taken.’”
“I was happy to hear that he is alive, after a long time of not knowing what was happening to him,” Shuki Benjamin said.
Ron Benjamin was not among the 110 hostages freed so far. An estimated 120–138 remain in Hamas captivity. Dec. 1 was near the end of an eight-day pause in the fighting, as Israeli hostages were exchanged for Palestinian convicts from Israeli jails.
For Ron’s family, Shuki said, “it’s been very difficult. His daughters, they don’t eat, they don’t sleep.” One of them is engaged to be married. She’s delaying the wedding, Shuki said. “She’s waiting for her father to return.”
