Oct. 7, 2024: One Year of War

Trump visits the Ohel; Is Bibi trying to overthrow Biden?; The Resistance returns to Columbia

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The Big Story

It has now been one year since Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, working with the financial backing and logistical support of Iran and its proxies, invaded southern Israel, butchering more than 1,200 Israelis and abducting 251 more as hostages back into Gaza, where around half of them remain today. In addition to being a terrorist attack and the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Oct. 7 was a declaration of war: by the Hamas quasi-state against Israel, of course, but also by the “axis of resistance” against the Middle East regional order traditionally anchored by the United States and its allies. 

We put the emphasis there on traditionally. If you’ve been reading The Scroll for the past year, you’ll know that this is yet another American tradition that the Obama Democratic Party would prefer to jettison as an archaism, a relic of an imperial (and probably sexist and transphobic) past. In its place, the current administration—and its potential successor under Kamala Harris—would like to establish a system that it calls “regional integration,” aka “the Realignment” or “the Ottoman American Empire” in Tablet’s terminology. The goal is an arrangement in which Washington and Iran jointly administer the Middle East, and in which U.S. allies such as Israel are reduced to the status of nonsovereign clients. 

The Oct. 7 attacks were downstream of this U.S. posture. During Biden’s first three years in office, Washington granted Iran the funds and the freedom of maneuver to build up capabilities on Israel’s border while telegraphing to the axis that Washington would restrain the Israelis from devastating retaliation. While the attacks briefly chastened the United States, at least in terms of its rhetoric, they left its core posture unchanged, which is why the U.S.-Israeli relationship has become increasingly tense over the past year. When U.S. officials rend their garments over “Gazans” or “Rafah” or “the Lebanese people” or the impossibility of eradicating the “idea” of Hamas, what they are actually saying is: We must preserve the Realignment. In hard-policy terms, that means protecting Iranian equities from Israel. In soft-power terms, it means fanning the flames of “anti-Zionist” resentment in order to paint the Israelis as irrational, bloodthirsty genocidaires bent on dragging the world into war. For the faux-sophisticated crowd who would be embarrassed to be caught in a kaffiyeh, there’s always the line that “Bibi” is prolonging the war to ensure his “political survival.” For the streets, there’s the jubilant celebration of rape and murder and the chants of Khaybar, Khaybar, O Yahud! Both are ultimately versions of the same message, with the same source.

For the anniversary of the attacks, Tablet is featuring a curated collection of survivor testimonies, compiled in collaboration with the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation. A link to those testimonies can be found here. 

For today’s Scroll, we reached out to some of our regular contributors with two questions. First, What is the lesson of the past year for Israel? Second, What is the lesson of the past year for American Jews? Their answers are presented below. 

In response to the first question, Scroll editor emeritus Jacob Siegel writes:

Secular Zionism made two promises: Jews would never again be defenseless victims. And Israel, by ending the “unnatural” state of exile and homelessness, would make Jews normal among the nations. The first promise was fulfilled over the past year; the second, shown to be a dangerous illusion, must be buried for good. Not October 7th itself, but the “civilized world’s” response to Oct. 7th, proved that Israel will never be a normal nation. Israel’s future will depend on maintaining its strength and independence while abandoning the vain quest to be accepted as “normal”—a rapidly devaluing currency, anyway, as the normalcy of the postwar period goes up in flames—and embracing its role as the model of a prophetic nation. 

Lee Smith writes that despite the undeniable tragedies of the past year, Israel is now in a much stronger position than it was on Oct. 6, 2023:

The last year has reshaped the rest of the Middle East and the world. In short, while Israel suffered an immense and horrific tragedy a year ago, since that time it has won, while virtually everyone else across the world has lost for picking the losing side. 

The most obvious loser is Iran and its axis, which Israel has exposed as a Potemkin power sustained only by a global pact underwritten by the United States, more particularly the Obama faction. It’s now clear that without Obama's ministrations, both as president and later as the force driving Biden-Harris White House policy, Iran is nothing. Despite Team Obama’s best efforts to protect the Iranian axis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bided his time and seized various opportunities to dismantle it, the most spectacular being his recent devastation of Hezbollah. Israel’s successes have been so stunning that even the Biden administration has stepped up its defense of Red Sea shipping lanes against Houthi missiles the last few days. Even losers want to look like a winner, i.e., like Israel.

Given the extent to which Obama tied domestic policy to realigning the United States, and the Democratic Party, with Iran, Tehran’s loss can be expected to have consequences here as well.  Paradoxically, only a Trump victory, returning U.S. foreign policy to its traditional posture, will spare other regional losers further indignity. After Iran, the biggest regional loser is Egypt, discovered to have been collaborating with Hamas. Without Trump to make the case for Sisi, Netanyahu might be expected to exact a price from Cairo for its treachery. The Saudis have unwisely stated that there are no plans to normalize with Israel without plans for a two-state solution. Translation: Since Bibi knocked Iran down to size, there is less for Riyadh to fear and thus they have no incentive to act like a normal state and open relations with the region’s great power. It is apparently lost on Riyadh it has little to offer Israel and should MBS come to his senses he will find the price for comity is higher.

In short, the post-10/7 landscape looks like a group portrait of failure. Everyone, from the Obama faction to the right-wing’s cast of antisemitic influencers to Tehran to Cairo and Riyadh, has been exposed as a loser. Israel now stands alone as the Strong Horse of the Middle East, and perhaps beyond. Because Israel clearly demonstrated its ability to defeat its foes, powers desirous of protecting their people and preserving their civilization will want to know what Israel knows.  

As for American Jews, Tablet’s geopolitical analyst argues that the lesson of the past year is a version of The Onion’s famous spin on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign message, “Kill the Bastards”:

For American Jews, the lesson is that Israel’s deterrent power is a global phenomenon that directly affects them. When Israel appears weak, the wolves smell blood—and Jewish communities around the world are attacked and besieged. When Israel kills its enemies, and shows courage and skill, the friends of Israel are emboldened to push back against the haters, whose influence and strength is reduced. That’s because most normal human beings in all times and places naturally prefer the company of winners and see association with the weak as a threat to their own prospects. 

This logic may seem older and cruder than the idea that siding with losers is a sign of virtue and that the use of force—no matter how skillful—is futile, because it only multiplies your enemies. But in reality, it turns out that something more like the opposite is true. 

The fate of American Jews is inexorably linked to that of Israel, which means that American Jews have an interest in a strong Israel that kills its enemies—if only to preserve their own hides. A weak Israel that gives in to its enemies and is slaughtered by them is a threat to Jewish life in America, which a strong Israel helped make possible.

The same calculus of siding with winners and dispensing with losers, Jacob argues, should lead American Jews to accept their new rightful spiritual leaders—Chabad:

American Jews should never count on state bureaucracies to defend their rights or their status as special victims, which aside from being enfeebling, is profoundly un-American. The organization that represents American Jews is Chabad. This is not a personal endorsement, it is an observation of settled fact, which has nothing to do with an individual’s background or level of observance.  In the same way that the ADL represented all segments of American Jewry through the mid-20th century before it sold out and became an adjunct for the Democratic Party, Chabad now represents the mainstream of American Jewry. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Bruce Maddy-Weitzmann tells the story of Kibbutz Alumim on Oct. 7

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The Rest

→Speaking of Chabad, here’s Donald Trump praying for the release of the hostages at the Ohel—the gravesite of Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in Queens—on Monday:

→And speaking of losers, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and a handful of unnamed Democratic Senate sources, told The Hill on Friday that they suspect Netanyahu is “trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics by ignoring President Biden’s calls to negotiate a peace deal in Gaza and by confronting Hezbollah and Iran weeks before the U.S. election.” Asked on Friday whether he believed Netanyahu was trying to influence the election, President Joe Biden said, “I don’t know.” On the one hand, it’s a bit rich to hear Senate Democrats complain that Bibi is interfering in the U.S. election only a few months after Sen. Chuck Schumer, speaking on behalf of the White House, publicly urged Israelis to replace Bibi in favor of a more pliable client. On the other hand, we suppose it’s true that by winning, Bibi is making Biden look bad by comparison. 

→The death toll from Hurricane Helene has risen to 230, making it the deadliest storm to strike the United States since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Relief efforts are still ongoing in hard-hit areas such as western North Carolina, where some locals have complained about a slow and inadequate response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal entities, and where relief efforts were initially spearheaded by civilian volunteers who clashed with federal responders over airspace restrictions and other logistical hurdles. We hope to dig more deeply into this story later this week, including by speaking to people who have been on the ground in the area over the past two weeks, but we’d simply note for now that the reality of the federal relief efforts is remarkably difficult to sort out from media coverage. Currently, “coverage” of the storm response is split between sensationalist yet unverifiable social media accounts of federal neglect and attempts by the mainstream press to run cover for the federal response by focusing more on “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation” than on the underlying reality:   

We’ll update you in greater detail later on this week. 

→With the Gulf Coast and much of the Southeast still recovering from Helene, a new hurricane, Milton, is set to make landfall in the Tampa Bay area on the west coast of Florida late Tuesday night. Milton was upgraded from a Category 2 to a Category 5 on Monday afternoon, with measured wind speeds exceeding 175 miles per hour. In a Monday morning briefing prior to the upgrade, the National Weather Service announced that “if Milton stays on its course this will be the most powerful hurricane to hit Tampa Bay in over 100 years. No one in the area has ever experienced a hurricane this strong before.” The last major hurricane to directly strike Tampa Bay was in 1921, when the city had a population under 120,000. Today the Tampa metro area is the 17th-largest in the United States, with a population just under 3.2 million.  

→The anniversary of Oct. 7 has brought out the usual pro-Hamas ghouls to celebrate the massacre of Jews—sorry, “mourn the genocide in Gaza.” For instance, hundreds of students staged a mass walk-out at Columbia University, dressed in the usual face coverings and kaffiyehs and bearing signs reading “Free Gaza, Free Speech” and “Resistance Until Revolution”: 

Back in reality, however, it appears that even Hamas may be backing away from its genocide claims, now that they’ve done their damage. On Sunday, the Israeli journalist Ohad Hamu said on Israel’s Channel 12 News that a “Palestinian official linked to Hamas abroad” told him that the organization is now admitting that 80% of the claimed 40,000 dead in Gaza are “Hamas operatives and their families.” While we haven’t seen further confirmation of this statistic, Salo Aizenberg notes on X that this sort of late-breaking correction is something of a pattern for the terror group. During the “Great March of Return” in 2018, for instance, Hamas initially claimed that more than 200 Gazans were killed, the vast majority of them civilians. After facing criticism from other Palestinians over sacrificing so many innocent lives, however, the terror group admitted that the death toll was only 62—and that 50 of those had been Hamas members.

→In a Saturday radio interview, French President Emmanuel Macron urged other countries—principally the United States—to “stop delivering weapons” to Israel in order to pressure the Israelis to accept a cease-fire in Gaza. “The priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering weapons to carry out fighting in Gaza,” Macron told France Inter (France itself does not supply weapons to Israel). Macron was particularly focused on halting Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, declaring that “Lebanon,” the alleged country that houses Hezbollah, should not be allowed to “become a new Gaza.” “The Lebanese people,” Macron said, without evidence, “cannot, in turn, be sacrificed.” 

→Israeli defense company Elbit Systems has signed a $400 million (1.5 billion-shekel) contract to manufacture bombs for the Israeli Air Force, Defense Update reports. According to the report, Elbit, like other Israeli defense companies, had focused until recently on the manufacture of “precision-guided” bombs and other high-tech aerial weapons, considering bunker-busters and so-called “dumb” bombs to be “commodities” that could be supplied from abroad. But with the United States holding up bomb deliveries and other allies, such as France, calling for an arms embargo on Israel, the Israeli Ministry of Defense is now aiming to “reduce Israel’s dependence on bomb supplies from abroad.” As we reported on Sept. 26, U.S. officials have said that if Kamala Harris wins the November election, President Biden could “leverage” U.S. military aid by threatening to remove a clause from the U.S.-Israeli Memorandum of Understanding permitting Israel to spend up to 25% of U.S. military aid on weapons manufactured in Israel. 

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TODAY IN TABLET:

The Year of October 7, by Tablet

Tablet’s coverage of the day that changed everything

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Black Sabbath

The defenders of Kibbutz Alumim fought off Palestinian terror squads on Oct. 7 and saved their homes and families

By Bruce Maddy-Weitzmann

The evening of Oct. 6 was especially festive at Kibbutz Alumim, one of the two religiously observant kibbutzim among the communities that dot the Gaza envelope, the part of Israel’s fertile northwestern Negev region adjacent to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Most of Alumim’s 500 residents and their guests had gathered at the kibbutz’s synagogue to celebrate with song and dance the start of the Simchat Torah holiday, one of the two most joyous days on the Jewish calendar. Many of them didn’t finally retire until after midnight.

Ordinarily they would have returned to the synagogue the next morning to continue the celebration. Instead, at 6:29 a.m., they were suddenly roused from their beds by a deafening cascade of rocket launches from a nearby Iron Dome anti-missile battery, and the resulting booms marking the interceptions of some of the thousands of missiles launched from Gaza, less than 4 kilometers away. The usual Color Red warning alarms were barely audible amid the deafening tumult. So many intercepts were being fired that it was as if the Iron Dome firing mechanism was somehow stuck in the “launch” position. After a few minutes, the firing stopped completely, apparently because all of the battery's available missiles had been used.

After more than 15 years of intermittent attacks from their neighbors, Alumim’s residents ostensibly knew the drill: One had 30 seconds to scurry into reinforced rooms (mamadim) and remain there for 10 minutes, until the risk of being hit by rocket or mortar fire, or falling shrapnel from the interceptions, had passed. This time it was different. The unprecedented barrage of rockets and mortars was quickly followed by a sustained ground assault by thousands of heavily armed men at 30 different points along the border. Their mission, explicitly defined in documents later found on the dead bodies of their commanders and on computer files, was to kill as many people as possible, to take hostages, and wreak destruction on both civilian and military installations.

A map of Alumim found on the body of one of the Palestinian commanders showed two different lines of attack. The one carried out by the first squad was pointed toward the nerve center of the kibbutz—the nishkiya (armory), the secretariat, and the kibbutz’s “war room” (hamal), a below-ground, two-room complex monitoring the various security cameras spread around the kibbutz. A similarly detailed plan for neighboring Kibbutz Sa’ad described the location of the secretariat (“a significant source of information for our forces”), the dining hall (a place to gather hostages), and the animal feed factory (a suitable place for the forces to gather and replenish themselves). For whatever reason, however, the first wave of attackers at Alumim didn’t follow the plan, instead choosing to try and first secure the front gate and adjacent areas of Road 232, the north-south artery parallel to the Gaza border.

The blackest day in Israel’s history had begun. Alumim’s residents, like those in neighboring communities, would spend many harrowing hours closed up in rooms that proved to be safe from rocket attacks, but in most cases couldn’t even be locked from the inside. In some localities, they would prove to be death traps.

Fortunately for Alumim’s residents, they would be spared the worst of the horrors visited on neighboring kibbutzim, thanks to a combination of good fortune, apparent mistakes by the Hamas attackers, late arriving assistance from various security forces and, most of all, the courage and resourcefulness of its plucky defenders. Alumim’s 41 foreign workers—22 Thais and 19 Nepalis—on the other hand, were far less lucky, and paid a terrible price.

As elsewhere in Israel’s border areas, the first layer of Alumim’s defense rested on its 12-member security team (kitat konenut: KK), backstopped by three persons manning the kibbutz’s hamal. In recent years, the IDF had cut down the sizes of the KKs, viewing them as increasingly unnecessary in light of new technological and engineering measures that supposedly ensured the defense of the border, and even a nuisance. It had also imposed new restrictions upon members who wanted to keep their weapons in their homes, requiring the installation of heavy wall locks embedded in concrete to prevent thefts (in fact, the thefts mostly occurred at army bases). The weapons themselves had neither long-range scopes nor night-vision equipment. Hence, the size of the KK at Alumim, once 16, was now 12.

Most of the KK members ranged in age from mid-30s to late-40s. Some worked on the kibbutz, others outside: One was a lawyer, another a university professor in brain research, two others were engineers in large companies. Had the attack taken place during the week, and not on the holiday or Sabbath, some of them would not have been home, and the outcome would have been far worse. Eerily, a similar situation characterized the beginning of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war exactly 50 years and one day earlier: The Egyptian and Syrian surprise attacks were launched on the Yom Kippur holiday, when nearly everyone in the country was at home, thus expediting the army’s ability to mobilize in the first critical hours and days.

Each KK member had considerable military experience. Nearly all were married, with three or more children. Most of their weapons, primarily M-16 rifles, were locked in the small nishkiya located in the center of the kibbutz not far from the hamal. The annual training exercise had been held a month earlier: The scenario that they practiced was one in which a few terrorists penetrated the kibbutz, took hostages and held them in a building. The KK’s role was to set up a thin line of defense, confront any attackers, and isolate the building in question, until nearby army units arrived, within the expected 15-20 minutes.

***

Eyal Rhein, 49, father of four, was the head (ravshatz) of the KK. His responsibilities included organizing the annual one- or two-day training exercise, mobilizing new members when needed, maintaining the necessary weapons and ammunition, and communicating with the IDF’s nearby Gaza Division during any emergencies and escalations. Realizing that the rocket fire was out of the ordinary, he quickly donned his Shabbat (Sabbath) pants and shoes, a simple protective vest, and the white shirt marking his status as ravshatz, grabbed his pistol, and went outside to have a look around, on an electric bike. At 6:52 a.m., while near the kibbutz's back gate, he received a message from the army command to activate the KK. He quickly sent everyone a WhatsApp message to meet at the nishkiya, but not everyone would see it right away. Rhein was also told to close roads and gates in the fields immediately surrounding the kibbutz.

Fortunately, Rhein didn’t have the keys for two outlying gates, and headed back home to get them. Otherwise, he would have run into a squad of heavily armed attackers that was approaching from Gaza. Luck was also with other members of the KK: Nitai Nachtomi had overslept and thus didn’t make his regular early morning jog around the perimeter of the kibbutz; Eitan Okun had turned his alarm clock off at 6:05 a.m., thus delaying his planned drive to the Zikim beach just north of Gaza, where he would have found himself assaulted by seaborne Hamas squads; Amichai Shacham had overslept as well, delaying his attending to the cow sheds that were directly in the path of the Hamas invaders.

Rhein returned to his house, grabbed a helmet, rifle and ceramic vest, and the keys to the nishkiya. By this time, he had received an urgent message from 59-year-old Avi Braverman, who had gone to the hamal to monitor the security cameras: Armed men were at the back gate, and breaking in. At 7:06 a.m., Rhein sent another WhatsApp message to the KK that terrorists on motorcycles were in the kibbutz. The perimeter fence and gate separated fields and orchards from the kibbutz’s economically productive areas—packing houses, the cow sheds and state-of-the-art milking station, and chicken runs. Alumim’s foreign workers were also housed in this area, which proved to be fatal for many of them.

Ohad Braverman, 23, recently discharged from the Israeli Air Force’s elite heliborne search and rescue Unit 669, lived in the young people’s neighborhood of the kibbutz, about 500 meters from the back gate. Along with curious others, he had gone outside after the initial 10-minute waiting period to view the aerial spectacle. Just before 7:00 a.m. he heard an explosion, followed a few minutes later by bursts of small arms fire. Braverman exchanged knowing looks with his friend, 25-year-old Saguy Kenaan, a career army officer home for the holiday, and they quickly got organized. Toting a rifle, Kenaan gave Braverman his pistol, and together they set out in the direction of the firing.

Suddenly, two motorcycles, each carrying four or five heavily armed Hamas fighters, zipped by on the kibbutz’s outer circumference road, just 30 meters from where they stood behind some bushes. Shacham saw them too: He was on his way to check on the cows when he heard the shots and grenade explosions. He was first to arrive at the nishkiya, where he was joined after some minutes by Rhein and most of the rest of the KK, and also by Yaniv Beigel, 27, whose father, Zevik, was also a KK member. They hurriedly equipped themselves with the available rifles, five ammunition clips (each containing 29 bullets), a variety of well-worn helmets and protective ceramic vests.

What they didn’t have at this point were two-way radios, which under army regulations couldn’t be stored there, but had to be held in the hamal. Two hours would pass before KK members were able to get them. However, there weren’t enough to go around, and not all of them were properly charged. Led by Barak Shalom, who was in charge of the KK’s operational decisions, they set out, deploying in a number of places, and cautiously heading toward the front gate, where at least four of the Hamas attackers were awaiting them.

Menachem Binyamini was running about 20 minutes behind the others. He had been busy settling his four children in the family’s mamad and hadn’t immediately seen the burst of WhatsApp messages. Wearing shorts and sandals, he met up with the rest as they deployed. Some went toward the front gate, where they heard shooting. Ayal Young and Shacham went to a two-story building (the mechina, in kibbutz parlance) to check on visiting family members, and guide them to a mamad. Nachtomi and Okun joined them.

Shacham and Ohad Braverman were both trained combat medics. Together with Young, Kenaan, and Yaakov Bergstein, they proceeded to the area of the cow sheds, where they had heard some of the initial explosions and shooting. Some of the equipment had been damaged, and they quickly searched the area to ensure that there were no terrorists in the vicinity. Joined by Gilad Hunwald, a medic with the Magen David Adom (MDA) ambulance service when not tending to the kibbutz’s avocado orchards, they then went to the foreign workers’ quarters. Some of the workers gradually emerged from hiding, and led them to the others.

The Thais, having taken shelter in a communal reinforced kitchen were as yet untouched. But the Nepalis, some of whom had crowded into a small shelter (migunit) adjacent to their rooms, were not. The scene was grim. Two were dead, and five more were injured, some badly. One had had his leg blown off by a grenade.

Braverman immediately called his old army unit to send a helicopter to evacuate them, but to no avail, as Bergstein tried to calm the frightened workers. The remaining Nepalis were concentrated in the large reinforced kitchen and the kibbutz defenders rejoined the rest of the squad as they deployed. Shacham, Braverman, and Schlissel went up to the roof of the nearby packing house, from which they saw some Hamas terrorists on the road outside the kibbutz.

Seeing how bad the situation was, Hunwald left Shacham with the wounded Nepalis while he went to get a large vehicle to evacuate them to a hospital, but with the terrorists operating in the kibbutz and outside, that wasn’t possible. When the unarmed Hunwald returned, Shacham was no longer there, as he was responding to a large-scale Hamas attack that had just begun. Hunwald saw four terrorists by the soccer field, 50 meters away. They saw him too, and shot at him. He ran to hide among the cows and the milking stations. Certain they would come after him, he recited the Shema Yisrael prayer traditionally uttered before one dies. Eventually, hearing firing, he decided to run to the vehicle repair area. Sure that he would be found, he again recited the Shema. Removing his bright orange MDA vest, he carried on an internal dialogue with God over the next hour, asking to be saved. He thought of his family and the catastrophe that was taking place, while also preparing to battle the terrorists with a hammer if they discovered him.

***

Road 232 and the surrounding fields outside the kibbutz was a scene of mayhem. Hundreds of young people fleeing the two-day Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, 13 kms to the south, were being slaughtered in their cars, roadside makeshift bomb shelters, and neighboring fields by marauding Hamas gunmen. Women were being raped, murdered, and kidnapped. A few terrified young people ran into the kibbutz from the road, only to be suddenly attacked from behind by the Hamas gunmen who had arrived from the back gate. Kibbutz security camera footage captured a horrifying scene of a young woman on her knees begging for mercy, only to be shot dead, and another mercilessly cut down as she fled.

Some of the gunmen joined the killing spree on the road, and they would never regain control of the front gate. Nor did they have free rein on the road, even though hours would pass before sizable Israeli forces would arrive in the area. Two brothers, Noam and Yishai Slotki, both reserve soldiers in the Golani infantry brigade, had jumped in their car in Beersheba upon learning of the Hamas attack, drove 50 kms and fought the terrorists along the road near Alumim’s entrance, before being killed, at approximately 9:30 a.m. An IDF lieutenant colonel, the commander of an artillery battalion stationed at the southern end of Road 232, had been at his home in Kiryat Gat, 90 kms away, when the attack was launched. He grabbed his weapon and jumped in the car, but he could only get halfway there, to Alumim. A few other Golani infantry brigade soldiers stationed nearby had joined the fight as well.

Crucially, one of the Hamas commanders was badly wounded in the neck in the initial fighting. At 7:19 a.m., he was hustled back to the front gate, and then evacuated to Gaza, via the same way he had first penetrated the kibbutz. The loss of one of their commanders probably threw a wrench into the attackers’ original plans to take over the kibbutz, which had not even begun to be implemented. Yet numerically, Hamas retained a considerable advantage for many hours, as scores more of their men filtered in to join the assault.

About 10 minutes later, Eran Schlissel, Kobi Be’eri, and the battalion commander killed two Hamas attackers near the front gate. Together with the two Beigels and the three Golani soldiers, they then met up at the gate and hurriedly discussed tactics, even while exchanges of fire continued. The battalion commander went back toward the road. A number of policemen were there too, and called for a medic. Be’eri, a trained medic who had brought some supplies with him when he left his house, went out to the road, while father and son Beigel were left to guard the gate.

What they saw on the road outside the kibbutz was a scene from hell: The bodies of 12 to 15 persons fleeing the Nova festival were already strewn along the side of the road. Be’eri began treating those who were still alive, and put two of the wounded in a passing car; others, fleeing in the fields, were too afraid to heed his calls to come with him to the kibbutz. It was at this moment that Be’eri began to understand the enormity of what was taking place.

Meanwhile, at 7:45 a.m., most of the rest of the Alumim defenders rushed to the house of an elderly couple, the Kurtzmans, who had reported that someone had broken in. They were evacuated from the window of their mamad. Failing to establish any verbal contact with the intruders, one of the Alumim defenders decided to enter the house, via the mamad. He was immediately jumped upon from behind. Assuming it was a terrorist, he was able to shoot and kill the attacker with his pistol, with the KK’s Eitan Sabag also firing from the mamad window inward.

Only later did it turn out that the incident had been a tragic case of mistaken identity. Each of the two combatants had thought that the other was a Hamas terrorist. The dead man, 24-year-old Ofek Atun, had fled the Nova festival together with his girlfriend, Tamar Kam. They had been slightly injured by a grenade thrown into the packed roadside migunit where they had taken shelter. At 7:23 a.m., they entered the kibbutz seeking refuge, and hurriedly broke into what they thought was an empty house. After Atun had been shot, Kam, who had been hiding in the bathroom, tried to communicate with the defenders, who failed to verify her identity. She then opened the front door of the house, but was shot and wounded by a member of the KK, who mistook her for a terrorist.

Kobi Be’eri heard what had happened, and rushed to the house. He attended to Kam for the next three hours, with the assistance of Gilad Huler, an ex-policeman and MDA volunteer, who brought medical supplies, including an intravenous line for fluids. Eventually, with her situation deteriorating, Hunwald brought a vehicle to evacuate her. Huler drove, and Be’eri sat with the wounded Kam in the back. Just as they exited the kibbutz onto Road 232, a burst of fire hit the vehicle. Be’eri was wounded in his left hand by a bullet that ricocheted off the barrel of his rifle, and bullet fragments were later found in Huler’s phone and in the car. They “flew” toward Mabuim, a helicopter landing area where ambulances had gathered, 18 kms away. There, Be’eri bandaged himself and put another badly wounded person in the car, as well as a paramedic. Never in his 30 years as a combat medic had he seen so many wounded, and so many different kinds of wounds: He treated 15-20 persons over the course of the next half hour.

While the tragic episode at the Kurtzman house was unfolding, outside the kibbutz, on Road 232, the battalion commander stopped an Israeli police special patrol unit (Yasam) heading south, just before they ran headlong into a large Hamas force, many of whom were now situated by the kibbutz’s packing house and firing outward toward the road. A fierce battle ensued, lasting 20-30 minutes. Many of the Hamas men were killed. At least one of the Yasam members, Sgt. First Class Ran Gvili, was also killed and his body was abducted to Gaza.

The Beigels, still at the front gate, had already taken heavy fire from the direction of the packing house. Now hiding behind a concrete barrier, they could only wait while the battle unfolded in front of them, knowing that if Hamas prevailed, their fate was sealed.

Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/black-sabbath-kibbutz-alumim-hamas