Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Israeli Mom, 81, House Set on Fire While She's Inside

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Nancy Grace is joined by defense attorney, Daniel Horowitz, and his friend Gabriel Gliksman. Gliksman's mother, 81, lives in Israel and has experienced first-hand the horrors inflicted there. Gabriel shares his mother's account of what happened when Hamas terrorists looted and burned her Kibbutz, killing over 100 and injuring many more. Gabriel's mother barely survived the night, and several of Gabriel's close friends have lost loved ones. Thousands of Palestinians are caught in the middle of the conflict, prevented from leaving the Gaza Strip by Hamas militants. Join us to hear Gabriel's story and his plea for humanitarian aid. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. As horror unfolds across the oceans in Israel, Americans are suffering. We see accounts on TV. We hear them. But what's really happening? Joining me right now is Gabriel Glicksman, who knows only too well exactly what is happening, seemingly across the world. With me, Gabriel Glixman, and my friend and colleague, Daniel Horowitz.

Gabriel, what have you learned and how? Yes, hi, good morning, Nancy. On the night of Friday, I was on my way to just, you know, just another ordinary night. I'm going to take a shower and getting ready to go to bed. And I get another phone call. It's been going on for many years, these phone calls from friends. Hey, is your mom okay? Is your parents okay? Everybody okay? What's going on over there? Rockets are being launched again.

So your mother is in Israel? She's in Israel. She lives on a kibbutz about a mile, a mile and a half from Gaza. You know, Gabriel, a lot of people read the word kibbutz, but they don't understand what that is. Explain. Okay, kibbutz is a collective village. You can look at it as a farm, agricultural community. They came in order to rebuild Israel as fast as possible, make it prosper, you know, so for people to come and get together and rebuild the country from nothing to where it is today, 70-something years now. So there, and there are many, many kibbutz. They are farming communities it's a collective of these as you say people

from america often travel to israel to live on a kibbutz to live a certain period of time and then return to america and that is where your mom is correct that's correct yes so what happened on that phone call so i call my mom and as usual, we're on a video chat. You know, it's always nice to see a familiar face. And I find her in the shelter pretty scared. As usual, those rounds come and running to the shelter, sometimes you don't have enough time my mom is 81 years old and it's pretty a frightening incident you just run to the shelter and you hunker down and you just wait till till it goes away what is the shelter What is the shelter? What is the shelter like? So the shelter,

actually, it's above ground. It's actually a reinforced room made out of concrete. It's just another room that is connected to the house itself. So you have a door, a reinforced door to go in there. And sometimes for older people, it's harder to shut the door behind them. So they leave a little gap. I can keep going and telling you where this one led to, if you want me to. Yes, please. Okay, so we're on the phone and really it's the first time that i hear gunshots automatic weapon outside my mom's house she's telling me can you hear that and i can hear it imagine myself helpless can't help my mother before seconds go by she's telling me, can't help my mother. Before seconds go by, she's telling me I can

hear them outside. They are screaming Allah waqf. God is great in Arabic. And that is really when I freak out. I tell my mom to turn off the lights and be quiet and not move. I tell her to put her phone on mute as I do myself. And I just stay there staring at the screen and just hoping for the best. Those shelter rooms, since they're reinforced concrete, they don't have good reception. So we're now being disconnected. So I text her and a few seconds go by, another minute, and then she texts me. Everything okay?

I can still hear them. I'm like, don't move. Hopefully military is on its way to take care of business. Then I text again. She's like, yeah, I can still hear him. I think they're trying to barge into the house. As you can tell, getting a little emotional here. It's very frustrating to even go through that.

I text again. I hear nothing. Then I go, mom, question mark. And two hours almost go by. And there's another mom, question mark. And I look at my wife and I tell her that might be the last time I've spoken to my mom. You can imagine my wife is in tears and it was a horrible night. A few hours went by. Then I started making calls and texting people who also didn't have good reception as everybody's in the shelters.

Hold on. Let me understand it up to right now. So you get a call, you start getting information from people. How's your mom? How's your mom? Your mother is 81 years old, living in Israel. That's right. And then you get in touch with your mom and you can actually hear automatic weapons being fired. And she says that the attackers are screaming in Arabic, God is great. Correct.

She gets into the safe room and then you start having bad reception. Then she tells you she hears them trying to break into the home, and then everything goes dead. Correct. Then what happened? Then what happened? Then what happened? So that was California time. It was about 1130 at night on Friday. And the next time I had contact with anybody there who knows what's going on with her,

that was about 6 a.m. on Saturday morning. And I guess you were watching the news the whole night and stunned. I was actually just on the phone, just trying to get in touch with my sister who lived in Tel Aviv and neighbors who barely wanted to text back. They were so scared. And then I hear your mom is okay. She is with neighbors. So again, a few hours since six o'clock in the morning here, I still, I just heard that she's okay. I did not hear her voice and she did not text me because I found out that when I talked to her, she was saying they came in the house

at gunpoint. They took my phone. They took my tablet. they told me to be quiet and wait in the shelter as they were shutting the door behind her and they were looting the house they were probably taking everything they could and then she heard some maybe flammable or something being poured on the on the floor outside or door of the shelter and she thought the worst and she made a decision to jump out out of the window and she just had a stroke about a month ago. This is an 81 year old lady. He jumped out of the window and ran across the kibbutz trying to not be seen by probably other terrorists that were around. He ran all the way to see my buddy's mother's house. She was burned in her house and she didn't make it. She burned down to death. My mom kept

running and she saw another friend laying dead on the ground. Nothing she could do about that. She kept running and knocking on neighbors' doors until eventually somebody opened the door and took her in to save her life. That's about as much as this story goes. First of all, praise the Lord. Your mother jumped out of that window, and I cannot even imagine, Gabriel. My mom is 91.

She'll be 92 in December. She can barely stand up straight. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Imagining her jumping out of a window after she hears terrorists throw accelerant flammable liquid into the house to set it on fire, because that's what they were doing. Telling people to go back in and then setting their houses on fire for them to burn to death inside. That's right. And Daniel Horowitz, now defense attorney, veteran defense attorney and friend, when you have, you know, you've worked on arson cases, when you have a flammable liquid, you don't die.

The victim doesn't die of smoke inhalation and just, you know, drift off to sleep smelling smoke. You die with a flammable liquid and accelerant. You burn to death because it's so fast moving. There's no time for smoke to seep in. You die because you burn to death. That is what's happening to these victims. You know, Nancy, in 40 years

of practicing criminal law, I have never seen a criminal act with the cruelty that you just described. Telling the grandma, 81, and this of course is Gabriel's mother, to go back in and go in your hiding place and then throw accelerant in the home. And this woman, 81,

jumps out a window and starts to run for her life, trying to hide. Imagine your mother, your mother ducking and diving and running as best as they can at that age. And seeing a friend dead in the street. street, seeing another home you're trying to go to for refuge burned with the neighbor friend, the lady inside, burned alive. Gabriel Glicksman with me, describing the hell he has gone through with his mother so far, far away. Have you spoken to her? What is her frame of mind now, Gabriel?

You know, she's staying with her sister in a town next to Tel Aviv. He took her in and he wakes up at night he has panic attacks he's a little better we're trying to treat her but I think overall he's a very strong

human being I was telling her how I'm not surprised of what she did, but I'm very impressed. The will to live and survive is beyond what we can imagine. You know, Daniel and Gabriel, Daniel Horowitz, high-profile lawyer out of California, and his friend, Gabriel Glicksman, owner of Krav Maga Extreme there in California. I'm stunned, Daniel. stunned that somehow attacks on children having their throats slit, dragging young girls away from a music festival

peacefully enjoying a peace, P-E-A-C-E a peace festival, attacking literally little old ladies like Gabriel's mother. How are people suggesting that that's okay? I know, Nancy. I think about a school shooter coming in, shooting up a school. Would the world then blame the school for the school shooter coming in, shooting up a school, would the world then blame the school for the school shooter? That's what is going on right now. And I think about the compassion

of the Israelis, where they're trying to get their people back, but they're so concerned about innocent lives. Again, I imagine if someone is in the act of killing a child and I stand in front of that person when the police are coming, am I out of my mind? And yet here the Israelis are saying, get out of the way. Our people are locked up. They're being tortured. They're being terrorized, but we're going to wait day after day so you can get out of the way and be safe. It's such a disconnect between the terrorists and the human beings. I just applaud the Israelis for their restraint and their compassion. And I just want them to get the people home. Daniel, you know how I very, very studiously avoid politics. It's not that I care about stepping on anybody's toes.

It's just I hate politics. I think they're all lying. I think the Democrats lie, the Republicans lie, the Independents lie, whenever it suits them to get what they want. I don't know the answer to the problem, the horrible, horrible problems in the Middle East. I don't know the answer, but I know this, this is murder. This is wrong. I'm not saying that there's nothing else going wrong, but this is wrong. And I'm having a really hard time with Americans actually defending it. Speak to me. If I may, this is not a war against Jews. It's not a war against Israel.

This is a war against humanity. It's 2023, for God's sake. We need to get on the same page. It's time. Friends who I grew up with from nearby kibbutzes are dead. I know too many whole family wiped. Mother, father, the grandma, and three little children were murdered in their own home. My very best friend whose mother died in that fire across from

my mom's house, his daughter and his niece were at that party. His daughter managed to get in a car and saved at least seven people with her. They drove as fast under fire and she saved those people and she's alive. Her niece got shot, four, five bullets, and she's in critical condition since then. A mother of another friend of mine is dead. People that we know were kidnapped and murdered in their homes. All the kibbutz is around. My cousin is pregnant with twins, and her partner, who lives with their little three-year-old daughter, they left the night before just because they wanted to go camping. 108 people died, were murdered in this kibbutz. It goes on and on and on.

We have horror stories, real horror stories here. We need to understand that what's going on over there is an extremist terrorist group in Gaza that needs to be eradicated. The people of Gaza, we have nothing, zero, absolutely nothing against them. We want them to live a good life and prosper. They are being held hostages in their own land. We need to get the Hamas out of there. We need to eradicate Hezbollah, and we need to take care of Iran. So I hate to get into politics, but we also need to look the truth in the eyes and say it and speak it and not stay in the shadows. Gabriel Glicksman, you're so right. Truer words were never spoken.

What I know right now is that people have been murdered horribly, innocent people, babies, young women being dragged away from a music festival, an 81-year-old woman being terrorized. Gabriel, many people actually don't believe this is happening. It's happening, Gabriel. It's happening. And now the only question is, what are we going to do about it? Gabriel, I praise God your mother is alive, and I pray for peace and justice for those who have lost the ones they love the most. Gabriel, thank you for being with

us. Daniel, of course, my longtime friend, thank you for being with me as always through the years, and we will continue our prayers. Goodbye, friends. my longtime friend. Thank you for being with me as always through the years. And we will continue our prayers. Goodbye, friends. This is an I Heart Podcast.