Australian victim of Hamas Galit Carbone could hear killers at the door

The 66-year-old grandmother and former librarian was on the phone to her brother as the heavily armed terrorists broke into her home in the Be’eri kibbutz.

Galit Carbone, 66, right,who was born and raised in Sydney before settling in Israel in her late teens, was killed by Hamas on Saturday. Galit was a mother of three and grandmother of two.

Australian-born grandmother Galit Carbone could hear Hamas terrorists in her house but couldn’t close the door.

The 66-year-old former ­librarian was on the phone to her brother, Danny, as the militants broke into her home in the Be’eri kibbutz, 5km from the Gaza border. “She’s whispering and she says, ‘I hear them here in the house and I can’t close the door properly’,” her brother Danny told Seven News.

He told her to hold onto the door handle. “We say ‘OK, I’ll cut down the phone conversation so no one can hear us.’ And that was the end.”

Ms Carbone had been unwell and suffered chronic asthma.

“She couldn’t resist whatsoever,” her brother said.

Ms Carbone’s body was found just metres from her home in the small farming community in the western Negev desert.

“She was a kind woman, she was a lovely woman and she loved us so much,” said Ms Carbone’s nephew, Roee Majzner.

On Saturday Be’eri became the epicentre of the attack.

In all, 108 residents of the kibbutz were slaughtered; a further 40 were taken hostage.

Militants had set houses on fire to smoke families out of their safe rooms before killing or kidnapping them.

Ms Carbone’s cousin Julian Cappe and his wife Lisa Cappe, who live in Rose Bay, Sydney, said the family in Israel were in “a state of numb shock”.

“Over the last few days they’ve just gone through all the ranges of emotion, from hearing what happened to thinking that she’s been a prisoner to hearing confirmation that she was killed,” he said.

To many Israelis, the Be’eri kibbutz has become a symbol of the horror of the attack on their country. “Whenever outsiders dare criticise us, we’ll show them images from Be’eri,” wrote popular comedian and author Hanoch Daum on his Facebook page.