A 16-year-old Israeli American boy who survived a Hamas attack when his mother shielded him from terrorists’ bullets with her own body revealed how he played dead for hours under a blood-soaked cloth, just steps away from his slaughtered parents.
While sitting on a hospital bed in Be’er Sheva, surrounded by his surviving relatives, a visibly shaken Rotem Mathias recounted for ABC News correspondent James Longman how gunmen opened fire at his family’s home in a kibbutz in southern Israel early Saturday.
The teenager helped his parents, Shlomi Mathias and Deborah Shahar Troen Mathias, barricade the door using mattresses and furniture — but it was not enough to stop the armed intruders.
“The terrorists shot open the door,” Mathias said during the interview, which aired on “Good Morning America” Wednesday. “They throw a grenade or something that exploded. The last thing my dad said is he lost his arm, and then my mom died on top of me.”
The boy who had just witnessed both his parents murdered in cold blood was later able to crawl from under his mom’s body and hide beneath a bloodied blanket for several hours as terrorists trooped through his house, looking for survivors to finish off.
“I just stopped my breathing, I lowered it down as much as I possibly could,” Mathias told ABC News. “I didn’t move. I was terrified. I didn’t make any noise. And I prayed for any god — I didn’t really care which god — I just prayed for a god that they won’t find me.”
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While in hiding, the boy sent a message to a family text chain, which read: “Parent’s [sic] dead. Sorry.”
When shocked and distraught relatives pressed him for details, Mathias replied that he had been shot and was in pain.
The terrorists later set Mathias’ home on fire, forcing him to flee for his life.
He was eventually rescued by Israeli soldiers and taken to a hospital to be treated for injuries.
Israel-Hamas war: How we got here
2005: Israel unilaterally withdraws from the Gaza Strip more than three decades after winning the territory from Egypt in the Six-Day War.
2006: Terrorist group Hamas wins a Palestinian legislative election.
2007: Hamas seizes control of Gaza in a civil war.
2008: Israel launches military offensive against Gaza after Palestinian terrorists fired rockets into the town of Sderot.
2023: Hamas launches the biggest attack on Israel in 50 years, in an early-morning ambush Oct. 7, firing thousands of rockets and sending dozens of militants into Israeli towns.
Terrorists killed more than 1,200 Israelis, wounded more than 4,200, and took at least 200 hostage.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to announce, “We are at war,” and vowed Hamas would pay “a price it has never known.”
The Gaza Health Ministry — which is controlled by Hamas — reported at least 3,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 12,500 injured since the war began.
Mathias’ older sister also survived the attack by barricading herself inside a safe room in the house.
Mathias’ maternal grandfather, retired Brandeis University professor Ilan Troen, previously told CNN that he was on the phone with his daughter when she was struck by gunfire while protecting her son.
Troen said the teen suffered a gunshot wound to the abdomen but survived.
“We were on the phone the entire day with our grandson, Rotem, as he lay first under her body, and then found a place to escape under a blanket in a laundry,” Troen said from Be’re Sheva, where he has been caring for his now-orphaned grandchildren.
