Former Seton Hall star details escape from war in Israel, future plans in basketball
On Oct. 7, Khadeen Carrington was at home in Jerusalem when he was awakened by a phone call from his old friend and former Seton Hall teammate Isaiah Whitehead.
Like Carrington, Whitehead was playing professional basketball in the Israel Premier League and wanted to alert Carrington that the country had just been attacked by Hamas, the terrorist organization in charge of Palestine.
“His phone call actually woke me up,” Carrington, 28, told NJ Advance Media during an exclusive interview at halftime of The Hall’s 72-51 win over Wagner Saturday at Prudential Center.
“I didn’t know what was going on at first, but I woke up to the madness, so it was definitely a little scary. I heard explosions.”
Whitehead was in the Israeli coastal city of Ashdod -- West of Jerusalem -- and recounted to NJ Advance Media how he heard “missiles and bombs” exploding that morning. He returned to the country this past Thursday ahead of the league’s planned restart on Friday, as exclusively reported by NJ Advance Media.
Carrington, who has played professionally in France, Belgium, Spain, Germany and Montenegro, is in his first year with Hapoel Jerusalem.
“Jerusalem is kind of like the safe place for everybody because the Muslims live in Jerusalem, Jews and Christians, so Jerusalem doesn’t really get attacked,” he said. “It wasn’t too bad, just the scariness of not really knowing what was going on, that was kind of tough.”
He added: “We knew that they attacked the South, but we didn’t know if they were coming towards Jerusalem or anything like that.”
After the war broke out, Carrington moved to the safe house in his apartment building before his club flew the team’s five foreign players to safety in Greece.
“It was pretty scary but our management did a pretty good job of getting us right out the same day,” Carrington said. “They told us to move to the safe house and then right from then we started doing Zoom calls. And then our owner [Matan Adelson], he has jet so he flew all the foreigners out on a jet the same night.”
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Carrington spent a couple of weeks in Greece -- where Whitehead had also been flown -- “trying to figure out how we were going to do our European games and stuff like that and then we ended up moving to Belgrade [Serbia] right before the European competition started.”
Because his club team also competes in the EuroLeague, Carrington was able to keep playing games in Europe.
His club is now on a break so he was able to return home to Brooklyn and visit with his girlfriend, who attended the Seton Hall game with him.
Pirates coach Shaheen Holloway did not get to visit with Carrington Saturday in part because he was involved in a post-game handshake incident with Wagner coach Donald Copeland (they later apologized and made up), but said he was glad to hear that Carrington was in attendance.
“It’s great, Khadeen’s one of my favorites, great young man,” Holloway, who was an assistant under Kevin Willard when Whitehead and Carrington led the Pirates to the 2016 Big East Tournament championship over Villanova, said in response to a question from NJ Advance Media.
“I’m glad he’s home, I’m glad he’s safe,” the coach said. “I’m super-sad I didn’t get a chance to see him, hopefully he’s still around. But it’s good, it’s good to have those guys around [the program].”
As for the future, Carrington said his team is still trying to determine if it will return to play games in Israel; the league is supposed to resume play on Friday.
“I’m going through the same thing [as Whitehead],” Carrington said. “We’re trying to figure out exactly what we’re going to do, how many games we’re going to go back and play because we’re going to have to move back and forth from Israel to Belgrade because of our European games.”
Asked if he would feel safe going back, he said, “Yeah, yeah, going in and out until everything is kind of settled down a little bit.”
