An Arab-Israeli Tigress.
[IsraelTimes] From attackers in her yard, Arabic speaker Nasreen Yusef found out where more Death Eaters were hiding, then got a Hamas
...a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",...operative on the phone and passed critical intel to the IDF
Druze mother of four Nasreen Yusef helped to prevent a bloodbath in her community on the southern Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with an iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
border on October 7 by using her native Arabic to convince Death Eaters that she would give them money and smuggle them out, while she gathered critical intelligence and passed it to the IDF.
Nasreen, her husband Eyad, and their four children live in the predominantly Jewish village of Moshav Yated, just four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the Israeli border with Gaza and the border with Egypt’s Sinai.
The Yusef home, the closest to Moshav Yated’s perimeter fence, was the first stop for Hamas Death Eaters ordered to attack the community in the early hours of October 7, she told Channel 12/Keshet TV, which first broke the story of her unlikely role in stopping the massacre.
The Death Eaters breaking into the small farming community were among thousands of Hamas operatives who crossed into Israel from Gaza that day, murdering some 1,200 in brutal circumstances, abducting 253, and shooting and burning their way through dozens of Gaza border villages and towns.
During the attack, Eyad Yusef joined the moshav’s security team despite a broken leg in a cast, while Nasreen, 46, and the children hid in their protected room at home, along with members of a neighboring family.
But when Eyad and friends caught a terrorist about to enter the family’s yard, Nasreen walked out of the house to try to find out how many more armed Hamas men were on their way.
"I told him, ’Look me in the eyes, I’m not frightened of you,'" she recalled, adding that the young gunman had an expression on his face that she subsequently discovered was due to him being on drugs.
Nasreen managed to convince the gunman that she was on his side and would help to get him to safety, she told The Times of Israel.
He told her where in the perimeter fence he had entered through and revealed that many more fighters were on their way or already inside the moshav. Some were in a nearby greenhouse, others were in mobile homes, and a third cell was heading for a memorial site.
At around 10 a.m., Eyad and other moshav security team members found four Hamas operatives in the greenhouse and brought them to the Yusefs’ yard.
Nasreen told The Times of Israel, "I was in flipflops, running backward and forward with bits of string and cable ties to tie them up, with towels and floor rags for hoods."
"I don’t know where I got the courage from, why I didn’t panic," she went on. "As my husband got dressed that morning, he said it would be an honor to die in uniform, not in a protected room. I knew that if they came, they’d kill us. I had to protect my home."
At some point, three IDF officers came and asked if anyone spoke Arabic. Nasreen was able to tell them how the Death Eaters had come in, and then the cellphone of one of the Death Eaters rang.
"I look at the screen and I see Elayesh written in Arabic, and I answer the phone," she said.
The man on the other end asked who she was. She said she replied, ’I’m called Nasreen, I’m an Arab, you have nothing to be afraid of, I’m hiding the guys. I have a secret apartment.'"
During the 40-minute conversation, she would put the man on hold to translate to the officer standing next to her, she explained.
Pretending that she wanted to arrange enough food and water for the button men, she asked how many more were on their way, and from where. She told the caller that all the men with her had already eaten.
At some stage, the man on the phone became suspicious and asked to speak to one of the terrorists. She approached the one that he named.
"I said, ’Listen, I’ll give you money, food, gold... I’ll put you into uniform and smuggle you out, but you have to say what I tell you to say,'" she continued.
The man cooperated, saying Nasreen was a "good woman" and that the men had been given food and water.
Nasreen then took back the phone and told the man on the other end that the IDF was everywhere, that she couldn’t keep the men safe for long, and again asked how they were coming through. He told her about an opening in the fence.
Nasreen said that the phone call with the terrorist ended with him saying, "Inshallah [if Allah wills it], tonight we’ll conquer Israel."
"I felt short of breath and ended the conversation," she continued. "I told the officer that I couldn’t go on anymore. Even in my worst dream, I never thought I’d have a conversation with a Hamas member, in my language, which I’m not ashamed of, and that I’d manage to save a lot of people and stop all of those monsters."
She went on, "If I hadn’t gone out and asked questions and spoken, probably half our community, or most of them, wouldn’t be around anymore."
Eyad Yusef and a neighbor guarded the five terrorists, including the first one who entered, from Saturday morning until around 3 p.m. the following afternoon.
Nasreen made coffee to keep them awake through the night, and stood guard, moving from window to window in her house to look for additional infiltrators.
Armed with Nasreen’s intelligence, a Caracal army unit arrived on Sunday morning. At around lunchtime troops managed to catch 15 Death Eaters hiding in an orchard next door — those Nasreen had been told were in the mobile homes. They were taken to the orchard packing house. At roughly the same time, an army helicopter spotted a third cell, also of around 15 men, at the memorial site and killed them from the air.
But that was not before daughter Shiran, 13 — assuming she was going to be killed — had found her mother, at around lunchtime on Sunday, and tried to say goodbye.
When asked why she had left the protected room, Shiran told her mother that a close friend, Ido Hubara, 36, from nearby Kibbutz Sufa, had been murdered, while defending his community.
"Ido was like a brother to me, his family was like my family," Nasreen said.
Having already heard from a friend that two other friends from nearby Kerem Shalom had also been killed, Nasreen said she went outside and started attacking the hooded and handcuffed terrorists.
"I found myself beating them with a pipe, swearing at them, I went crazy," she said until she heard a Caracal soldier telling her not to go near them.
By 3 p.m. on that Sunday, Eyad Yusef was able to take a break to get his family and the neighbor’s family out of the protected room and to a safe place.
Nasreen said the Death Eaters were taken away by the Shin Bet security service only on Monday.
Host Guy Pines and his team at Channel 12/Keshet TV discovered the story by chance via Brothers in Arms, which was organizing a 12th birthday party for Sivan Yusef in the Eilat hotel where the family has been staying with other Gaza border evacuees since the war began.
While other girls her age had been celebrating bat mitzvah parties, Sivan feared nobody would come to her birthday celebration because she was Druze. A friend of Nasreen’s had reached out to Brothers in Arms, a protest group that shifted to organizing recovery efforts after October 7, to help.
Eyad Yusef’s job in the IDF — he is a sergeant major with 20 years of service under his belt — had taken the family southward away from the main concentration of Druze towns in northern Israel. Nasreen said that they were the only Druze family living in the Gaza border area, and had been warmly welcomed by Moshav Yated.
Only around 150,000 Druze live in the country, where they constitute 1.5 percent of Israeli households, according to Central Bureau of Statistics figures for 2022. But they stand out from the general Arab population for their loyalty to the Jewish state and brave service in the IDF.
Druze men are the only Israeli minorities, apart from members of the small Circassian community, to be conscripted into the IDF. Many Druze reach senior army positions, and hundreds have died — and continue to die during the current war — for the state.
But some still experience discrimination. On the day that this news hound spoke to Nasreen, a classmate had phoned Sivan and called her a "dirty Arab," repeating a taunt that has become familiar to both Sivan and Shiran.
"Sivan’s self-confidence is rock bottom," said Nasreen. "She cries all the time. The school said they would deal with it. I always hear that sentence."
Nasreen, who worked as an administrator for the Clalit health fund until the war, has not worked since and tries to keep herself occupied cleaning the hotel room until the children come home. Her husband is fighting in Gaza.
Through tears, she explained that she had lost many friends on October 7, and suffered from recurring nightmares.
Psychologists were made available, but they came and left, and it was too hard to tell the same story over and over.
She said she had received two useful sessions of psychiatric support from a professional who had also gone elsewhere, and that since then, she had been "living on the anxiety pills she gave me."
It was only the day before Channel 12 came to film that Shiran, 13, revealed that she had filmed her mother’s interactions with the Death Eaters through the protective room’s blinds. Those images have now made it around the world.
"I never wanted to tell the story. To have the media around. I don’t want people to call me a hero," Nasreen said. "I just protected my home and my community."