What do two Britons living in a small Israeli kibbutz have to do with a death in Dubai?

(EPA)

Nearly as old as the State of Israel and well known for its ancient olive trees, this peaceful little kibbutz about 10 miles south of the Lebanon border was in a state of shock yesterday.

It had been bad enough when one of Beit HaEmek's long-standing residents, Michael Barney, woke up last week to see his name all over the press as one of people whose identity was used by the assassins of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. But when his daughter Gabriela's name featured in the second wave of details on the fraudulent passports this week, it seemed too bizarre to be true.

The sudden media attention Beit HaEmek has attracted is hardly welcome, to judge by the reaction of Shlomit Gross, secretary of the kibbutz and the woman who taken on the task of protecting the Barney family. "I'm quite angry," she said. "We don't want all this."

She was at a loss to explain how the identities of Mr Barney, a British-born Israeli writer who has lived here for more than a quarter of a century, and his 23-year-old daughter, who works in the medical services department of the Israeli trade union organisation Histadrut, could have been appropriated.

"It's so strange. It jumped out of nowhere. No-one understands it. Even when people talked about Dubai, no-one imagined this would come to our villages."

But Ms Gross did admit there had been relatively frequent break-ins in the kibbutz – which is proud of having no perimeter fence and whose security gate was open yesterday – and thieves had sometimes taken papers as well as jewellery, money and even cars. "Every month someone finds that someone has been in their house."

The last thing Mr Barney and daughter wanted to do was speak to reporters yesterday. His courteous older brother Philip explained: "He has been under terrible strain since this happened. They're in shock. Gaby was absolutely hysterical."

Beit HaEmek was founded in 1949 by Hungarian immigrants, and has a long tradition of British residents. Some 500 people live there today and it could hardly be more typical of the mainstream Israeli kibbutz – except that the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen lived and worked here for some months during his youth.

Flourishing with its hothouses filled with plants and a small factory making medical products, Beit HaEmek is secular but traditional. Like most kibbutzim, it has gradually dropped its fiercely collective approach, with each household these days keeping its own earnings, and children now living with their families instead of communally.

But it is proud of the Army service carried out by its sons and daughters, who almost invariably add a year of voluntary service to their time as military conscripts. And of its success – unusual for a kibbutz – in absorbing 60 elderly Russian couples who came in the wave of immigration after the fall of the Soviet Union.

"In the first years of Israel in the Fifties and Sixties," Ms Gross said, "there were people here who were connected with security and used to disappear for a week or so and we didn't know where they had gone... But some of those have died and others are in their eighties now."

These days, she said, she knew of no-one in the kibbutz with those kinds of connections. She added: "It's not these people. It's not their character. They don't want to be under the light. "They have nothing to do with this beyond that they come from England and have passports from England. It's a very difficult situation for these families."

Mr Mabhouh was killed last month in his hotel room – almost certainly, Dubai police say, by Israel's Mossad spy agency. At least 14 of the people whose identities were used by the assassins are living in the Jewish state.

But Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has said there was nothing to link Mossad to the killing, although he did not confirm or deny Israel played any role.

One friend and neighbour of the Barneys, who declined to give her name, expressed doubts about whether, leaving aside the issue of the stolen identities, the assassination of Mabhouh was even justified.

"It's a hard story," she said. "If you're asked 'Do you want a terrorist taken off the map?', you say 'Yes', but you should stick to your values and principles." She and her husband felt it was better to "do it the proper way and transfer him for trial", she said. And in any case, the targeted man was likely to be replaced because "there is no shortage of people wanting to kill us".

Philip Barnea – who left Chingford during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 to live in the kibbutz and, unlike his brother, has "Hebraised" his name – was also unable to explain how the identities of his brother and niece could have been usurped.

Neither had been abroad for at least a year, he said, adding: "I can't believe any intelligence agency would use the passports of its own citizens."