When I first heard that Israeli civilians were being massacred on the country’s border with Gaza, I thought of my friend Amir Tibon. Amir is an exceptionally talented journalist, fluent in Hebrew, Arabic and English, who has dedicated his life and expertise to humanistic reporting on an often dehumanizing region. His works include an award-winning report on efforts toward a two-state solution and a biography of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
On Sunday I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead.
That’s because Tibon lives in Nahal Oz, a small community on the border with Gaza that is not protected by the Iron Dome missile shield. On Saturday it was attacked by Hamas terrorists with mortar shells from the air and ambushed on the ground. During their invasion of Israel, they murdered more than 900 Israelis and humiliated or kidnapped others, most of them civilians. The death toll continues to rise.
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Tibon and his family survived the indiscriminate killing, but only after a horrific experience. Tonight, just before she put her two young daughters to bed, we talked about what happened, how she was saved, why she believes Israel has come to this point, and what she wants from the international community in the days that follow would wish. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
“I’m worried about my country”
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Yair Rosenberg. What does your life look like right now?
Amir Tibon. I’m glad to be alive. I’m glad my family is alive. I’m with my relatives. I am very worried about my friends and neighbors who have been injured or kidnapped in Gaza. And I’m worried about my country.
YR As a practicing Jew, I do not use electronic devices or access the Internet on Jewish holidays or the Sabbath. So when I logged in two days later, you had already posted that you were safe and shared the heartbreaking story of your experience. and his family. Can you tell us what you experienced?
AT I’m glad you missed the events as they occurred, because it was a disastrous day, truly the worst day in the history of the State of Israel. It was Saturday, October 7th. We lay in bed and slept. I live with my wife and two small daughters in Kibbutz Nahal Oz. It is a small community with 500 inhabitants that is located right on Israel’s border with Gaza. A beautiful place, very brave and resilient people with a strong sense of community and camaraderie. But it was Saturday, it was six in the morning, and we heard a sound we’re used to: the sound of a mortar shell exploding. It’s like a whistle.
My wife Miri immediately pushed me. We ran from our bedroom to the so-called safe room. In every house in our community and other communities along the Gaza border there is a room made of very strong concrete that can withstand a direct hit from a mortar or rocket. And that’s where most families put their children to sleep every night. So we ran into the armored room where our two daughters were: Galia is three and a half years old; Carmel a year and a half.
שנה טובה מהלב הפועם של קיבוץ נחל עוז, והמקום החשוב ביותר בעולם עבור הדור הצעיר במשפחתנו: הספסל ליד הכלבו. pic.twitter.com/FSOafBPFly
– Amir Tibon (@amirtibon) September 15, 2023
They don’t know anything is happening. We close the door and wait. This is something we are used to. Living on the Gaza border, attacks like this happen from time to time. Sometimes you wait an hour, pack your bags in the meantime and when there is a few minutes break, you put the children in the car and drive away from the border to a safer place.
But this time, as I was packing, I heard the scariest sound I’ve ever heard in my life. Gunfire with automatic weapons in the distance. First I heard the shots in the fields. But then I heard them on the street, then in the neighborhood, then outside my window. I was in the room with my wife and heard gunshots and screams right outside my window. I understand Arabic. I understood exactly what was happening: that Hamas had infiltrated our kibbutz, that terrorists were outside my window, and that I was locked in my house with two little girls and in my bulletproof room and I didn’t know if anyone would go and see us rescue.
That’s how it started.
YR One thing people should understand: Nahal Oz is very, very close to the Gaza border. And that’s why there is no such thing as the Iron Dome and that’s why you take refuge in the armored room.
AT Yes, we are so close that the Iron Dome, an incredible invention that protects large parts of Israel from rocket attacks, makes no sense in our region.
But I’ll tell you one thing. In a way, the fact that they fired the mortar shells at our community before crossing the border saved many people’s lives because it caused people to flee and seek refuge in the armored room. And this room, if you close it properly, is very difficult to open from the outside. Many people remained barricaded in these safe spaces for hours, some even for an entire day. In many cases, terrorists attempted to enter but were unsuccessful.
What happened to us was that we were sitting in the dark. A few minutes after entering and hearing the shots, the power went out. We didn’t have any food. We had some water. And we told our daughters, “You have to be quiet now.” You have to be completely calm. Not a word. You can’t cry. You can’t talk. It’s dangerous.” And my daughters behaved like true heroines. They waited in silence for ten hours in the dark and didn’t cry. They got it. It may not be the right word, but they sensed that we were serious. We So they were with them in the dark and they were completely silent.
At first we still had cover. After a while there was nothing left. I texted my parents: “There are terrorists outside.” In reality, we thought they were in the house because they were firing live ammunition at our house, and we heard it as if they were inside. And we looked at the messages that our neighbors had received, and everyone said that there were terrorists outside or in their house.
I called a colleague and friend, Amos Harel, a Haaretz correspondent and military affairs expert. I told him, “Amos, there are terrorists outside my house, maybe even inside.” And what Amos told me was the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. He said, “Yes, I know, but it’s not just in your kibbutz; It’s not just in Nahal Oz. They are found throughout southern Israel. They are everywhere. In cities, towns, kibbutz and villages. Thousands of armed Hamas fighters have entered the country. “They have taken over military bases.” That scared me because I realized that if this happened, it would take a long time for the military to stand up to the terrorists and save us.
Israeli soldiers stand next to a hang glider engine used by Palestinian militants during the attack on Kibbutz Kfar Aza near the Gaza border October 10. Amir Levy (Getty Images)
YR Can you tell us how we got to this point?
AT Yes, I would like to say something about this failure of the army and the government. Miri and I moved to this community in 2014, immediately after the war that took place that summer between Israel and Hamas, the Israel-Gaza War of 2014. We were living in Tel Aviv at the time, we were a young couple with no children. And during that war, communities along the Gaza border suffered as Hamas used underground tunnels to attack Israel. They basically dug tunnels under the border. Fighters came from underground to the other side and killed and kidnapped soldiers. The scariest thing back then were the tunnels. We originally came to support the community, but we fell in love with the place and decided to stay.
Successive Israeli governments, all led by [el primer ministro] Benjamin Netanyahu, they invested billions of dollars – I believe some of it actually came from American aid – to build an underground wall to prevent Hamas from using these tunnels again. It was a significant infrastructure project for the State of Israel. And this project allowed us to sleep at night, because you can resist the rockets that fall on your head if you have a shielded room in the house, but if the terrorists can penetrate underground and invade your own community, that changes everything. . And the reason we were able to live there, and that goes for everyone, is this underground wall that Israel built. And when we heard the shots outside our window in the early hours of Saturday, October 7th, we realized that this project had completely failed.
Israel invested a lot in it, and what did the Hamas people do? They took some tractors and SUVs and drove over the border wall. We prepared everything so that it was impossible for them to penetrate from underground and they simply crossed the border. It’s a huge failure. And when I came back to the conversation with Amos Harel, when I realized that the situation was the same everywhere, I thought: Okay, we’re going to die here. Nobody will be able to arrive on time. And if they manage to enter the house, they will try to break into the shielded room. And if they succeed, we will be dead or they will kidnap us.
YR How did you finally get out?
AT I called Amos, but I also called my father. My father is a retired general. He is 62 years old. Lives in Tel Aviv. And my parents told me, “Let’s go there.” It’s an hour and 20 minutes by car. “Well, that defies all logic. But I said to myself, “Okay, right now I’m asking my two little daughters to completely trust me and my wife, their parents, to do what we tell them to do to save their lives, which is.” , that they are very, very quiet and that they understand that we can’t leave the room, that we can’t get food, that we can’t go to the toilet, that we can’t go out to play, and I ask ask them to have complete trust in me.”
And I said to myself, now I have to do the same thing. I have to trust my father, he is a trustworthy man and if he said he will come to save us, he will do it. It was only after many hours when my father arrived that I learned what had happened to him and my mother that day, which is an incredible story in itself.
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My parents drove from Tel Aviv. They reached the city of Sderot, the largest in the border area. When they arrived, they saw people walking barefoot on the street. They were survivors of a music festival that had taken place nearby, where Hamas men arrived at dawn and massacred more than 200 people, young people who had attended a music festival. My parents put the survivors in their car and drove them away from the border. They had already arrived at the border area, but saw people who needed help and picked them up. Then they turned around and continued towards our area.
They stopped in a nearby community that is close to the border, but not as close as ours. And my father convinced a soldier who was there and was looking for a way to help, to go with him to Nahal Oz, my kibbutz, to kill terrorists and save families. They make their way to the kibbutz, but on the way they see that Hamas fighters have attacked a military unit. They get out of the car. My father is retired; It does not have weapons for military use. In Israel, unlike the United States, citizens cannot purchase an AR-15, and I’m glad about that. But my father carries a gun, and he and this other soldier join the soldiers fighting the Hamas cell and help kill them. Now they are very close to my kibbutz. They are five minutes from the entrance to my kibbutz, but two of the soldiers are wounded. And again my father has to turn back. He puts the wounded soldiers in the car with the help of the other soldier who joined him and they return to where my mother is.
My mother takes the car and takes the wounded soldiers to a hospital. My father sees another retired former general, Israel Ziv, who is closer to 70 than 60. But Israel put on the uniform and came south as another soldier to help. My father says to him: “Israel, I don’t have a car. My wife took the wounded soldiers to the hospital to save them. I have to go to Nahal Oz, where my family is holed up. My granddaughters are here. Take me to Nahal Oz.”
These two over 60 year olds drive a normal car. It’s not even an off-roader or anything. It is not an armored vehicle. It’s just a car like the kind you drive to work on the New Jersey Turnpike in the morning. Now they are driving along the road where they had laid a deadly ambush for the soldiers half an hour earlier. Both carry weapons. My father had taken the weapons from the wounded soldiers that they gave him because he had told them, “I’m going back in.”
They arrived at the entrance to the kibbutz. And when they get there, they encounter a group of special forces soldiers who are about to begin the very dangerous process of going house to house in our community to confront the terrorists and free the entrenched people. At this point I have no idea any of this is happening. We are in a shielded room. The terrorists are still outside. And we have no cover. The phone has no battery. We wait in the dark.
Israeli soldiers walk next to a civilian killed by Hamas militants in the municipality of Sderot, Israel, on Saturday, October 7, 2023. Ohad Zwigenberg (AP)
But we hear shots again, and this time they’re from two types of weapons. And we realized there was a fight. We discovered that there was an exchange of fire. And I said to my wife, “It’s coming. My father is coming. They fight. He’s with those soldiers.” They didn’t come to our house right away. They went from house to house, from neighborhood to neighborhood, within our community. I can’t remember how long it took.
We heard the shots getting closer and closer. The girls had fallen asleep, but then they woke up. I think it was two o’clock in the afternoon. They hadn’t eaten anything since the night before. There were no lights and cell phones were turned off, so we didn’t even let them see our faces. But there was one sentence that stopped her from breaking down and crying. I told them, “Grandpa is coming.”
“Your grandfather will come and get us out of here.”
I told them: “If we remain silent, your grandfather will come and take us out of here.” And at four in the afternoon, after ten hours, we heard a loud knock on the window and my father’s voice. Galia, my eldest daughter, said: “Saba higea”, “Grandpa is here”. And then we all burst into tears. We knew then that we were safe.
YR I want to move a little from the personal to the political. You work for a liberal newspaper in Tel Aviv. Most people assume that they live in Tel Aviv, but that is not the case. He moved to Nahal Oz and told me that he got the idea to move there after visiting the city for the first time as a journalist, after another confrontation with Gaza in which the community was repeatedly attacked with rockets . And yet there he met people, patriotic Israelis who were committed to their country and to peace and who wanted to find something better, even though they perhaps had more reason than anyone else to distrust the future. I know you share this belief, but I wonder how you feel now. Does this belief ever shake?
AT The politics in our region, in the border area with the Gaza Strip, are very interesting and a microcosm of politics in Israel. The kibbutz communities, like mine, are very left-wing. And the major city in the area, Sderot, which also fell victim to a terrible, terrible disaster, is actually much more right-wing and religious and supportive of Netanyahu. So there is a division. But we’re in this together. It is true that this division exists, but we are both suffering from the same situation at the moment. And I think when this is over, a lot of people will reconsider everything.
I love my community. I love my neighbors. I am proud of them for their resilience on that terrible day. What we live is not a unique story. It is the story of an entire region of Israel.
I am ashamed of my government. We had a deal with the state to have communities like ours protect the border. That’s why people live there. With our presence we protect the border. It is a fundamental strategy of the State of Israel since the country’s beginnings: a border where there are no civilian communities and no civilian life is not adequately protected.
We kept our end of the bargain. We live on the border. Sometimes we experience difficult situations, with mortars and the use of incendiary devices to start fires in the fields. When you live in a place like Nahal Oz, you wake up every morning knowing that there are people on the other side of the border who want to kill you and your children. And that was the deal: We protect the border and the state protects us.
And this government, the worst government in the history of the State of Israel, led by a corrupt, powerless and selfish man with eyes only for himself – Benjamin Netanyahu – has failed us. There were warning signs that this would happen. The army and intelligence services pointed out that Israel’s neighbors saw the country’s internal division over the government’s disastrous plan to suppress the powers of the judiciary. It is currently reported that Egyptian intelligence services warned Netanyahu a few days ago that Hamas was planning something big on the border.
An Israeli civilian was taken to Gaza in a golf cart by Palestinian militiamen on October 7 and captured in southern Israel. – (AFP)
“The army is falling apart”
The way the day’s events unfolded is the worst failure in the history of the State of Israel. I mean, people like my father, like Israel Ziv and other retired army officers had to come here to save the citizens, to try to save their families and others. On the other hand, the military is falling apart and the entire civilian infrastructure that is supposed to support the military and society in such events is not functioning.
Listen, now we have to win this war. We must destroy Hamas. We have to make it impossible for them to do anything like what happened on Saturday again. No country in the world can allow something like this to happen to its citizens and simply return to normality. I feel terrible for the people of Gaza. My heart is broken. But that was our 9/11.
After we win the war and wipe out Hamas, it will also be time to consign every politician, starting with the prime minister, who had anything to do with this failure to the dustbin of history. But that’s a conversation for tomorrow. Today is about saving our citizens and destroying the enemy’s ability to do something like this again.
YR And what will happen to Netanyahu tomorrow?
AT First of all, we have to win the war. That’s the most important. After the war, I believe that the people who went to fight and saved their families, and the people whose relatives were kidnapped in Gaza, and those who lost their homes, these people will not allow this government remains in place for another day. The protests Israel experienced last year will be child’s play compared to the public anger that followed. But now it’s about winning the war.
YR It’s not over. This continues. There are people who are being held hostage. What do you expect from the United States and the world now?
AT First, I was relieved to see President Biden’s very, very firm commitment, in words but also in actions, in sending U.S. forces into the region and making it clear that if any other actor in the region is confused, he is Should try to do wrong in this moment of crisis, the United States will support Israel.
It’s about the kidnapped Israelis, some of whom have dual citizenship from other countries. And as someone dedicated to reporting on diplomatic issues, I think language is very important. You can say, “Hamas is responsible for its fate.” That’s, you know, standard diplomatic language. But the phrase that I hope to hear from countries, from the United States but also from others, is: “We hope for your immediate release.”
You’re a citizen, okay? Most of them are non-military. There are a lot of women there. There are children. There are old people. And I think the international position should be that they should be released immediately. That’s what I hope to hear.
Yair Rosenberg He is a contributor to The Atlantic and author of the newsletter Deep Shtetl, about the intersection of politics, culture and religion. This article was published this week by American Magazine.
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