Sister of Missouri native killed by Hamas shares last words before she was killed

By Jennifer Henderson

Bar Yuval-Shani woke up Saturday morning to a message on the family WhatsApp chat from her sister, Deborah Matias, asking if everyone in the family was OK, she told CNN’s News Central’s Kate Bolduan Friday.

Matias was an American citizen born in Boone County, Missouri, and living in Israel who was killed by Hamas gunfire while shielding her son from bullets, along with her husband, Israeli citizen Shlomi Matias, CNN previously reported.

Yuval-Shani, a psychotherapist specializing in trauma, said Matias told her family that this time felt and sounded different to her. Yuval-Shani said Matias said in the WhatsApp message, “we got a text from someone there… infiltration… it sounds like they shattered the glass of the back door. Lots of shooting.” 

“She talks about their house being surrounded, lots of gunfire, about a knock on the door which had to be terrorists,” Yuval-Shani said.

“At 7:47, we got our final message from her and there was no response to our messages until a few minutes later [her nephew] Rotem wrote to us, ‘Mom and dad are dead. I'm sorry.’ And then began nine hours of supporting Rotem and making sure that he, that we did everything possible to get him through this,” Yuval-Shani said.

“I soon learned that he [Rotem] was lying underneath her [Matias], that he couldn't breathe, that there was smoke. I didn't know if he couldn't breathe because my sister's body had become a heavy body of a dead person. My beautiful, beautiful, vital sister, or if he was wounded badly in a way that was keeping him from breathing… we felt we needed to ascertain what his physical condition was, what his mental condition was or how we could help it and the whole family really banded together,” Yuval-Shani said.

“It was terrifying. It was terribly, terribly painful. We had to attend to making sure that his helplessness and his hopelessness were reframed into something that he was actually doing that was helpful. So that we could say your mission now is to protect yourself and you're doing a great job, and he was. And your mission is to keep us on the phone, keep communicating with us, make sure that we have the location so that we can get help to you,” she said.

“When he said ‘I can't wait anymore,’ … he was losing hope at that point, and I was afraid he was going to stand up… and we have to find a way to say well, waiting is actually doing something. This is doing something and break down the helplessness and break down what it was that made him feel that he couldn't do it anymore so that we could address that, ” she added.

Yuval-Shani said they got a doctor on the phone to listen to voice memos Rotem sent and assess his breathing. He also sent pictures of his wounds.

Yuval-Shani said the terrorists came back three times to make sure they “finished what they started.”

Matias and her husband were “peace activists and human rights activists and musicians and they were founding members of the bilingual school for Jews and Arabs, Yuval-Shani said.