The dead are mummified in this Colombian town and no one understands why

“I’m from where Messi is from,” Ester Cunio, 90, told the two masked Palestinian gunmen who moments before had invaded her home in southern Israel.

It was the morning of October 7, and Hamas was carrying out a massacre in communities near the Gaza border, including Kibbutz Nir Oz, where Argentinian-born Cunio lived.

Cunio recounted the grisly encounter in a new documentary about the Hamas massacre focused on the Latin-Israeli community titled “Voices of October 7 – Latin Stories of Survival.”

The two armed men demanded to know where the rest of his family was.

“‘Don’t talk to me,’ I tell them, ‘because I don’t know your language,’ Arabic, ‘and I speak Hebrew badly,’ I tell him, ‘I speak in Argentinian, in Spanish,'” Cunio said. “Then he tells me: ‘What is Argentina?'”

She steered the conversation toward star Lionel Messi as she communicated with the intruders with a combination of broken Hebrew, Spanish and gestures.

“So I tell him, ‘do you watch football?’, and then he tells me, ‘yes, football, I like it.’ So I tell him, ‘I’m from where Messi is from,’ then he answers, ‘Messi! I like Messi’.

Then, in one of the most surreal moments of the Oct. 7 massacre, a man leaned over Cunio, who was sitting, and placed his assault rifle in her lap. The other man photographed them.

“He put his hand on me like that,” Cunio said, extending two fingers. “And they took our photo and, well, then they left.”

The photo of Cunio with an AK-47 in his lap, and the masked assailant with a Palestinian flag on his military vest, went viral on social media.

He was wearing a scarf from Islamic Jihad, a smaller armed group that joined the Hamas attack, on his forehead.

Elsewhere in Nir Oz, Cunio’s relatives were taken hostage.

His grandchildren David, 33, and Ariel, 26, remain captive in Gaza. David was kidnapped along with his wife and twin children, who were later released during a brief truce in November in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

Now, he said, he awaits the return of his “boys who are worth gold.”

The Hamas attack triggered the devastating war that has devastated Gaza for more than five months.

Both Argentina and Peru have stated that citizens of their countries have died in the conflict, while Mexico has said that Mexican citizens were among those kidnapped. Dozens of survivors were interviewed for the Spanish-language documentary.

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