Today is October 7, 2024.
I used to love October. Even down in south Florida, where our seasons are basically more humid and less humid, October feels special. I’m not trying to take shots… The winter is pretty great.
But right now, it’s Jewish holiday season. For nearly a month, we cycle between synagogue and festive meals and family time and maybe even naps, if we’re lucky. The trees are aflame and the neighbors have their decorative gourds out and no one’s gotten sick of pumpkin spice yet.
And maybe one day, October 7th will go back to just being October 7th. But today is not that day. Because exactly one year ago today, Hamas invaded Israel. We’ve been dealing with the fallout ever since.
Last week, we unpacked the context leading up to the so-called Black Shabbat. If you haven’t listened/watched yet, go back. There’s a lot of important information in there.
But here’s a short recap:
In 2022, Hamas appeared to shift its focus toward governing Gaza rather than attacking Israel. Meanwhile, the Jewish state was consumed by political upheaval. The Prime Minister had included far-right voices in his government and proposed controversial judicial reforms that sent tens of thousands of Israelis pouring into the streets in protest. All the while, Hamas prepared for renewed conflict under the radar. But Israeli leadership, distracted by internal strife and the growing threat of Hezbollah in the north, believed that Gaza posed no immediate threat.
In other words, it was business as usual, right up until the wee hours of October 7th, the final Shabbat of the Jewish holiday season. Israelis of all stripes were looking forward to a day of celebration and rest, to take a break from the turmoil and political agitation.
And then, at 6:29 am, the first alarm went off. Just another Saturday morning in Israel’s south. Routine, until it wasn’t.
I probably don’t need to warn you, but I will anyway: this episode is not going to be easy to listen to. The entire team lost it at least once during the making of this series. Some of us, multiple times. To be honest, I’ll probably lose it again, here, as I go through it. We debated about how graphic to be, how many of the gruesome details to include. And we decided, in the end, to tell as much of the truth as we could bear.
Why? Why not just say “it was terrible” and leave it at that? Why introduce you to specific characters, why tell you specific stories in heart-wrenching detail, why break your hearts and ours over and over and over again?
It’s a good question, with multiple answers.
Jews place an almost unreasonable amount of importance on remembering. Nearly every one of our holidays commemorates an event from thousands of years ago. We’re commanded to teach these stories to our children, to make sure they don’t forget. All through the generations, an unbroken chain of remembering.
But this is more than just simple recall.
In Tractate Pesachim, page 116b, the rabbis tell us, “In every generation, each person must see themselves as though they left Egypt.” “בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם…” Now, we don’t know the names of the common folk who left Egypt as slaves and crossed the sea as free men and women. We don’t know their personal stories or their fears or their hopes. All we can do is imagine ourselves in their place. It’s a profound exercise in empathy.
And this is true for so much of Jewish history. What do we know about the regular people who hung on the racks of the Spanish Inquisitors? How many biographical details survived the gas chambers?
Some. But not a lot. Not enough.
And with every generation, those stories grow dimmer. Details soften and blur. Memories fade, until what’s left is “yeah, that was really bad.” Look at the stats. According to a Pew survey from 2019, only 38% of American teens know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. (I’m not putting the other 62% of American teens on blast, by the way. I’m just illustrating that even the most horrible events get forgotten, diminished, blurred.)
But exactly a year ago, we experienced an event that historians will write about. Another wrenching chapter in the long story of the Jewish people. A foundational story we can point to and say, this. This is the moment everything changed.
And this time, its characters are close.
We know their names. We know what they were feeling when Hamas stormed their party, invaded their homes, shot their families, and dragged them to Gaza. We watched it happen – some of us, in real time. We saw the fear and defiance in their eyes. And many of us understand: it could have been us. If we had been in those kibbutzim, it would have been us, too.
And so, we add these human stories to our ever-growing list of collective memories. Both as a moral imperative, and as an act of profound solidarity.
But there’s another reason to remember.
In the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis, Cain kills his brother, Abel, in a fit of petty jealousy. And then, when God comes around asking if Cain knows where Abel might be, Cain plays dumb. How should I know? Am I my brother’s keeper?
God is, predictably, enraged, informing Cain that actually, God knows perfectly well where Abel is and what Cain has done to him. God says to Cain, Your brother’s blood screams to me from the earth. “ דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ צֹעֲקִ֥ים אֵלַ֖י מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה.”
I don’t know what angers God more. The fact that Cain killed his brother in the first place… or the fact that he had the chutzpah, and frankly, stupidity, to stand there and lie about it to an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful force.
But I think I understand just a fraction of what God felt that day. Because I never, ever, ever thought that terrorists would record and release footage of their crimes against humanity… only for the world to deny what they were seeing. To twist it. To find some way to blame the victim.
I was wrong.
I like to think no one is beyond redemption. But God help me – the last few months have challenged that conviction. When I see the denial, the justifications, the celebration, the complete lack of empathy, I want to smash the entire world with my bare hands.
But you don’t fight hate with more hate, and you don’t fight death with more death.
You fight it with life. You fight it by telling the stories of thousands of people, each an entire universe, each bursting with life. You fight it by remembering who they were before October 7th. You fight it by holding up their stories, daring the world to look away.
The blood of my brothers and sisters is screaming from the earth. And all I can do for them now is hear it. Amplify it. Force the world to stop, just for a moment, and listen.
For a year, I’ve lived with an entourage of ghosts. I can’t explain why some cling to me so persistently. Is it their bravery? Their open smiles? Their commitment to life, to kindness? Their heroism? Is it their youth?
I don’t know. All I know is they stay with me, whispering reminders every so often.
Be brave. Be strong. Be kind.
So now I’ll turn to them and offer my own reminder.
Aner, Youssef, Sahar, Na’ama, Liri, Daniella, Karina, Agam, and Yuval – I know these stories capture only the tiniest slivers of who you are. Whether you are dead or alive, at home or a hostage, we will not let you be forgotten.
This episode is for you.
Chapter One: Nova
Part One: Aner’s Story
Even the seasoned ravers were impressed by this year’s Nova party.
For some in the crowd, these music festivals were a way of life. Just a few months earlier, Hersh Goldberg-Polin had spent his summer backpacking across Europe, hitting six festivals in six countries. Now, he and his best friend Aner Shapira were about to experience the Israeli version of the 9-day Brazilian psytrance festival Universo Parallelo, which TribalReunion.com describes as, quote: “an international gathering of people from different styles and cultures, all together to celebrate Peace, Love, Union, and Respect…. aiming to give people the tools so they can become more aware and help in the path to transcendence.”
Big goals. But that’s exactly the point. Nova, and other parties like it, is a living embodiment of the raver mantra of “Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect.” For many ravers, PLUR is an aspiration, a life philosophy, a code of ethics. In a war-torn country like Israel, PLUR is a reminder that another world is possible, for those with the courage to build it.
And the Israelis with tickets were very excited.
“We wait for this party. It was big. Like Coachella or something. So yeah, we were having the time of our life, me and my boyfriend and other six of our friends, it was a great time, great party, everybody celebrating love and happiness… We got there at one AM. Until 6:30 in the morning, it was the best party I’d ever been to.”
So many accounts begin this way. As though the survivors need us to understand the contrast between the start of the festival and its horrible end.
Aner and Hersh had spent the previous evening with their families in Jerusalem, enjoying a festive holiday meal. His parents, Moshe and Shira, described it later:
“We were all together, and we had a really fun dinner…. We even kept saying out loud, this is so fun”.
After their respective meals, Aner and Hersh left Jerusalem with their tents and their backpacks to go to what promised to be one of Israel’s most epic festivals. 16 DJs from all over the world fanned out across three stages, while thousands of revelers danced their hearts out, high on life and probably other substances.
Honestly, it sounds profoundly exhausting. But that’s because I’m (a) in my late 30s and (b) an introverted curmudgeon. Most of the revelers were heartbreakingly young. Aner was 22; Hersh, a newly-minted 23. They had the vibrant, irrepressible energy required to stay up all night dancing and drinking and laughing with four thousand other people.
I hope they had an amazing five or so hours. I hope they danced goofily and laughed at inside jokes and hugged strangers and heard their favorite DJs. I hope they had the best five hours of their young lives that night. It was the last night of Aner’s life. It was the last night that Hersh would be free.
The sun hadn’t fully come up yet when the DJ cut the music, shouting, red alert, red alert! Yesh tzeva adom. Rockets. Everyone, get on the ground.
Rocket attacks are scary. But as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, they’re also routine for a significant percentage of the Israeli public. So as some of the revelers began to panic, others assumed the barrage would pass, the music would be turned back on, and the party would resume.
But the barrage didn’t stop. Strange specks appeared on the horizon, drifting low and close. Paragliders, carrying masked men with machine guns. Staccato bursts of automatic weapons began to ring out through the empty fields, followed by screams.
But Aner and Hersh were long gone by then. Within minutes of the first barrage, Aner’s commander had called his cell. Technically, Aner was off-duty, enjoying a holiday break. But when your commander calls you at 6:30am, and thousands of rockets are flying overhead, you get yourself to base.
He and Hersh managed to flee the festival grounds. But the sky was teeming with rockets, and they needed to get to shelter, fast. They ducked into one of the many miguniot that dot all the roads in Israel’s south.
There’s no precise English translation for miguniot – singular, migunit. Technically, I guess they’re bomb shelters, but in reality, they look more like tiny bus stops made of concrete. They’ll protect you well enough in the event of a siren, provided the rocket doesn’t land directly on top of you. But they’re nothing fancy. They don’t even have a door.
Still: shelter is shelter, and the miguniot were crammed with revelers who had escaped Nova. Aner and Hersh were the last to duck into a migunit, where roughly 30 terrified people huddled together, panicking.
Most of those people are dead. But the few who survived all recount the same thing: A tall blond boy – Aner – standing at the entrance of the shelter and immediately taking control.
Over the roar of rockets and the pops of gunfire, he told them his name. “I’m a soldier,” he said. “I’ve been in touch with the army. It’s going to be all right.”
They listened.
Some were texting furiously, giving a grim blow-by-blow to parents or partners or friends who were frantic with worry. Those texts survived, even if their senders didn’t. And people who loved Aner cling to them like a lifeline, reading them over and over, as though hearing about his last moments will bring him closer. This is Aner’s girlfriend, Shelly, reading texts from that day.
“I tried to remain optimistic. Suddenly, Aner said they were getting closer. They were at the next left, on the road heading south.”
So Aner gave them all a new plan.
“They’re close, he said. If they throw anything in here, like a grenade, I’m going to try and catch it and toss it back out. And if I can’t do it anymore, someone else should take over.”
They all knew what that meant. Aner had been in that shelter only a few minutes. He understood that he might never leave it. But he gave the instruction with absolute calm, and everybody listened.
It was 7:56am.
Hamas had been getting closer all this time. Now, they were directly outside. But they weren’t alone. With them was Osama Abu Assa, a 36-year-old Israeli Bedouin with a neatly-trimmed beard. But he didn’t look so neat now, shirtless and bleeding.
Hamas had caught him as he made his way home from Kibbutz Re’im, where he worked the graveyard shift as a security guard. Even as he appealed to them, in Arabic, as fellow Muslims, they stripped him, beat him, and forced him to drive his own car to find Jews.
They ended up outside Aner’s migunit.
Through it all, Abu Assa’s dashcam kept recording.
It recorded the terrorists kicking him, vicious, as he begged them not to enter the shelter. It recorded the boy who made a break for it, darting out of the shelter as fast as he could. It recorded the gunshots that cut him down. It recorded the men in fatigues lobbing in grenade after grenade, then running from the boom. And it recorded the seven grenades that bounced right back out and exploded off-screen, shaking the car.
Aner had plucked them from the air and tossed them right back out. Seven times. Seven live grenades, about to explode in a tiny enclosed space. And Aner, grabbing them with bare hands, giving everyone in that shelter a few seconds of respite from the reaper who waited outside.
Depending on the model, a grenade takes between two and six seconds to explode after you pull its pin. It took seven grenades for Hamas to remember they were the ones pulling those pins. They could control when the grenade exploded.
So when they pulled the pin on the eighth grenade, they waited a beat longer than before. Aner had no time to throw the eighth grenade back before it exploded and ended his life.
Only then did Hamas enter the shelter.
I don’t know how they decided who to abduct. Maybe they just took anyone who was still moving. They chose three young men: 33-year-old Or Levy. Eliyah Cohen, 26. And Aner’s best friend, Hersh, bleeding monstrously, yelling, “My hand is gone. My hand is gone.” Ein li yad. The grenades had blown off his left forearm.
Hamas recorded themselves cramming Hersh and the other two hostages into the bed of a pickup truck, bleeding and dazed, as a few whooping men flash “victory” signs. In the background, you hear one tell Hersh to smile for the selfie as he grabs him by the hair. They keep their guns trained on their captives the entire time. The same guns they’d used to spray the shelter with bullets after the eighth grenade exploded.
But beneath the pile of bodies, a handful of young people were still breathing. They lay underneath their murdered friends, soaked in blood, until the army arrived at 2:30. Their first words to IDF forces were “Aner saved us.”
Here are Aner’s parents describing what happened next.
“They came to us on Monday. it started with one girl that called us and she said, I was with your son in this shelter, and I call you only to say thank you because because of your son I’m alive, and my friends are alive. I owe my life to your son.”
No one knows exactly how many people Aner Shapira saved that day. Some put it at 7. Others at 12. Even if it had only been one, even if it had been none, I would call Aner a hero. He stared his own death in the face and said I’m not afraid of you. And for a few minutes, he gave 29 other people the strength to do the same.
Aner’s story captivated Israel. How could it not? He was talented and handsome and strong and brave. A soldier, a songwriter, a bit of an anarchist, who questioned authority but commanded a room.
He’s a new role model to add to the pantheon of Israeli tragic heroes. The men and women who sacrificed themselves for their country and their fellow citizens. A reminder of the terrible blood price of a Jewish state.
But there were so many heroes at the Nova festival. People who ran towards the fire, instead of away, thinking not of themselves but of their fellow human beings.
Many of these heroes are no longer with us.
But Youssef al-Ziadna is.
Part Two: Youssef
Youssef al-Ziadna probably knows he shouldn’t be smoking. But like so many Israelis who have taken up the habit since October 7th, he can’t help it. They help blot out the snuff film playing nonstop in his mind. A few weeks after that Black Shabbat, he told the JTA, quote, “‘I would never wish on anyone to see what I saw. This is trauma for my whole life. When I sit alone and recollect, I can’t help the tears.’”
He has plenty of reasons to cry. Four of his relatives were kidnapped that day. At least one was murdered. And so was his close friend, Abed el-Nasasra, as he tried to save lives.
Youssef is a 47-year-old Bedouin Muslim – not exactly your standard psytrance raver. But he wasn’t at Nova to party. He was there to drop off passengers.
Youssef drives a minibus, and all weekend, he and his friend Abed had been shuttling customers back and forth to the party. He wasn’t scheduled to pick anyone up until much later in the day. But at 6:30am, his phone started beeping. Messages and calls pouring in from customers, begging him to save them.
So Youssef threw on his clothes and tore down the highway, heading south. Above his head, the sky was thick with rockets. But he didn’t turn around. He had a job to do.
It didn’t take long to reach Kibbutz Be’eri, where the invasion had already begun. A group of Jews flagged down his bus, urging him to turn around. But it was too late. They all heard the gunshots growing closer.
For a little while, Youssef and others took cover in a nearby ditch. But he couldn’t stop thinking of the people at the festival who were waiting for him to save them. Some of his Jewish friends called him “Yosef Hatzadik – Yosef the Righteous.” He thought that maybe today, he’d earn that title. The group urged him to stay down, to stay safe. As shots rang out around him, he raced back to his bus, which was miraculously untouched, and kept driving south.
He arrived to an inferno.
His customers were waiting for him, exactly where they said they’d be. They poured into the bus, shouting “Go! Go! Go!” But just a few feet away, a man lay on the ground, bleeding but alive. Youssef wasn’t going to leave him to die.
And he wasn’t going to leave behind the other frantic, injured people who needed his help.
Youssef’s bus seats 14. But by the time he left the festival site, 30 crying, bleeding people had crammed in.
Hamas had taken over the main highway. But Youssef had been driving for years. He knew the back roads, the side roads, the shortcuts. So he drove over fields and rocky, half-paved roads. And when he looked in his rearview mirror, he noticed a line of cars snaking behind him. He’d become an accidental Pied Piper, leading a convoy of desperate people to safety.
His friend Abed wasn’t as lucky.
Like Youssef, he’d gotten a series of frantic calls that morning, begging him to come and help. Like Youssef, he’d thrown on his clothes and raced down the highway, towards the danger. Like Youssef, he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving helpless people to die.
But unlike Youssef, Abed took the main road. And by the time he and his passengers turned onto the highway, it was too late.
Road 232 had become a graveyard. Days later, fires still raged in the fields along the highway. And everywhere you looked, there were cars clustered together, all bearing evidence of what happened that day.
Bullet holes. Bashed-in fenders and doors. Bloodstains. Bodies. And then there were the cars that had been set on fire with their passengers inside. A Times of Israel headline from October 13 sums it up perfectly: “Once an artery of thriving southern region, Route 232 transformed into road of death.”
That road claimed Abed, too.
But in the early hours of October 7th, Youssef al-Ziadna wasn’t thinking of Abed. He was thinking only of who he could save.
I don’t know how many people would show that kind of reckless bravery. I don’t know if I would. I like to think so, though I hope I’m never tested. But when a reporter asked him why he did it – why he left his home despite the rockets, why he drove into danger, why he risked his life – he sounded almost outraged.
“Why should I flee? I’m Israeli, and there are Israelis there. If I can help them, why wouldn’t I?”
Youssef al-Ziadna isn’t Jewish. But his answer echoed a proverb that Jews have been repeating for a thousand years, always in the form of a question.
If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?
The Nova festival claimed 360 lives and another 40 hostages. 400 souls, gone, in a matter of hours. And yet somehow, horrifyingly, Nova was just one chapter in the bloody story of October 7th.
All over the world, people have asked Where was the IDF? And that’s an important question, which demands a thorough government inquiry.
But the IDF is made up of people. Here are two of their stories.
Chapter Two: The Soldiers
Part One: Sahar
There’s a charming expression in Hebrew for the youngest child in the family: ben – or bat – zekunim. The child of old age. Sahar was her parents’ bat zekunim, number five of five, a mischievous toddler with big black curls and an even bigger smile. She had plenty of role models to look up to. Including her brother Dvir: an Iron Dome operator, keeping his nation safe.
Her sister, Stav, described the moment that Sahar realized what she wanted to be when she grew up.
“When she was 12, Israel was fighting Operation Protective Edge. She was a kid. But she said, I saw the people of Ashkelon, of the south. They didn’t have any protection. I wanted to be there for them.“
There’s even a clip of her, captured on a blurry cell-phone camera, after she shot down her first rocket with the Iron Dome. She’s so gleeful. She almost can’t believe that she did it. This was her.
She sounds like any other teenage girl, thrilled about something exciting. But most teenage girls don’t spend their days shooting down rockets. Most teenage girls aren’t shouting with excitement because they’ve just potentially saved an untold number of lives.
I’m not knocking most teenage girls, by the way. My greatest wish for kids all over the world is a life of mundane normalcy. A life that doesn’t demand the kind of choices that Sahar faced. Sahar didn’t get normalcy. She chose greatness, instead. The desperate, tragic kind.
She wasn’t even supposed to be on base that day. She’d been injured in a mild car accident and had been given time off to recover. She spent it cooking for her family.
Her mom kept telling her to relax. Her siblings were on vacation in South America, anyway. What was the point of preparing all these lavish meals?
But Sahar just shrugged her off. I like being at home with you, she said. And it’s the holidays, the chagim. Now we’ll have something to give guests if they drop by.
Guests did end up dropping by, and the food did get eaten, by the hundreds of people who came to comfort her parents while they sat shiva for their youngest child.
Because even though she wasn’t fully recovered, Sahar decided to go back to the army early. A friend had been grumbling about being stuck on base during the holiday, and Sahar offered to cover for her. She was the commanding officer. Her soldiers sometimes even called her “mom.” She’d throw them a festive holiday dinner and enjoy an uneventful shift.
It started off just as sleepy and boring as she’d expected. And then, the clock struck 6:29, and the first siren whistled overhead, and no one was remotely sleepy.
Sahar and her crew sprang into action. Rocket after rocket after rocket, flying faster than she could shoot them down. She’d never experienced anything like this. No one had.
“She was the officer in charge of intercepting rockets in the south, including Be’er Sheva and the Gaza Envelope. She intercepted more than 200 targets, using all the missiles she had in her arsenal. That’s more than anyone has ever intercepted with the Iron Dome. We didn’t even know it was possible”.
And still, Sahar kept her cool. In between, she checked on her soldiers and texted her dad. I’m okay. It’s okay. I got this.
But there were so many rockets to shoot down, and by 8am, Sahar’s launchers were empty. The ammo wasn’t kept on base. She had to drive south to get it.
By then, everyone knew that something was wrong. Texts had been trickling in from friends and family in the south. Clinical words like infiltration had given way to panic.
Help us
I hear Arabic
They’re here
So Sahar knew that her country had been invaded. She knew that driving south meant driving into danger.
But she was the officer on this base. She had a mission. And as long as rockets were flying, she would be there to shoot them down. She took two of her soldiers with her, just in case. Three young people, armed and in uniform and ready to fight for their home.
I want to stop her so badly. To yell No!, to remind her of her family. To tell her your brothers and sister are on a plane back from Brazil. Don’t let them come back to a house without you in it.
But I can’t turn back time. And she probably wouldn’t have listened. By all accounts, Sahar was kind and gentle and maternal and warm, but she was also immovable when she wanted to be. Once she’d made up her mind, no one could change it.
You know the end of this story.
I’ve already given it away.
Hamas had taken control of the road south. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of fighters clogging the intersection, shooting at anyone who drove by. Sahar and her soldiers were stubborn and brave and armed, but there were only three of them, staring down an army of terrorists wielding grenades and RPGs.
They never had a chance.
There’s no way to know how many people Sahar saved when she was shooting down those rockets. Hundreds, maybe thousands. So many people will never know the name of the woman who saved their lives. But now you know her name, this lively 21 year old, with her radiant smile and her backbone of steel. Sahar Saudiyan (“Sah-OO-dee-AHN”), bat zekunim of Helen and David, beloved little sister to Dor and Dvir and Dolev and Stav.
In Hebrew, Sahar means “crescent” or “moon.”
Her older brother told a colleague of mine that whenever he feels hopeless, he looks up at the moon and remembers his sister. The family tells each other all the time Be good. Be Sahar. They say it helps.
So I’ve begun to do it too, just like I’ve started giving the name Hersh to the baristas at Starbucks. It might seen grim from the outside, but it isn’t. It’s a reminder that even if Sahar isn’t with us in a way we can understand, she’s still making the world better by reminding us to be brave, to be good, to be Sahar.
But what do you do when you aren’t sure if someone is still with you? How do you honor someone who is in limbo – neither living nor dead, merely, horribly, gone?
What do you do with the five beautiful, smiling, heartbreakingly young girls who were taken from the military base at Nahal Oz?
Part Two: The Soldiers of Nahal Oz
If you watch American TV, you’re probably familiar with the going-away-to-college cliches. The teary-eyed parents driving SUVs packed with suitcases; the pretend bravado of teenagers, just kids, living away from home for the first time; the cramped dorm rooms; the promises to text every day and See you at Thanksgiving.
But Israelis have a different rite of passage.
Instead of heading off to college, 18-year-olds in Israel go to the army. The drill is largely the same – the teary-eyed parents; the tiny shared sleeping quarters; the teenagers pretending to be cynical and brave.
Many of the tatzpetaniyot of Nahal Oz had played out a similar scene just days before October 7th. Their parents dropped them off on base with pots of food so they would have a taste of home during the holiday.
Not one of them was older than 20.
Under international law, soldiers and military installations are fair game. Even when those soldiers are unarmed teenage girls in pajamas. Even when they aren’t combatants. Even when all they do is watch the border.
Every day, the tatzpetaniyot of Nahal Oz spent hours in front of their computers, alert to the smallest irregularity. And as we discussed last week, there were plenty of irregularities to report in the months before 10/7.
But no one could have imagined the horror that was about to unfold.
The tatzpetaniyot aren’t the only ones on base, of course. There are always a handful of active combat soldiers there, too, to patrol the border fence and operate the observation balloon stationed at the Gaza border.
Observation balloon is a new phrase for me. It’s basically like a big floating camera that transmits real-time intelligence to the soldiers on base. Because it floats high above the ground, it can see deeper into Gaza than the cameras along the border fence.
But that day, the Nahal Oz balloon wasn’t in the sky.
It had been malfunctioning for weeks. Top brass assumed it was a technical issue. No one considered that perhaps someone had sabotaged the balloon, leaving the outposts blind. They’d sent a civilian crew to check it out that day. But the repair crew never made it to base.
A barrage of rockets did. Minutes later, a horde of Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters followed.
The handful of soldiers manning the balloon outpost’s were Nahal Oz’s first line of defense. They managed to take out a few of the invaders, but they weren’t trained or armed for a prolonged battle. And they were fighting under heavy rocket fire. All five balloon operators were killed within the hour.
And then Hamas turned their attention to the rest of the base.
The cameras had been shot out, but the tatzpetaniyot understood what was happening. They’d heard the first barrage. The ones on duty had been reporting infiltrations since the first rockets began. That’s 19-year-old Roni Eshel reporting a breach, her voice increasingly desperate.
But there was no one to save her.
They took shelter in the migunit, defended by the handful of fighters who met the invaders with guns at the ready. They defended the mobile shelter and command center, where the tatzpetaniyot were hiding.
This is the testimony of one of the fighters, First Lt. Nimrod.
“Kharuba and I were covering the door, then me and Duhan, then Itai and Duhan, and then Kharuba and Duhan. We shifted positions, and two of them just kept on coming and coming. At around 9, I started to realize that we’re done for. So we said, ok, we will die fighting. I said, they will tell war stories about us. Each time we went out to a different location. The office, the synagogue, the canteen, where we saw two of them eating. We killed them”.
Every time they came back, the soldiers would update the tatzpetaniyot. But they rarely had good news. The base was surrounded. There was nowhere to run. All the soldiers holed up in the command center.
And then Hamas set it on fire, using a toxic flammable gas.
“Smoke started engulfing the room. I said, we have to get out of here. I opened the door. I told them I can’t see anything because of the smoke. People were suffocating, coughing. We knew we didn’t have much time. I tried to stay with Yohai and Itai. The last thing I heard Yohai say was they are burning down the command center. After that, I never saw him again”.
They fought to the last bullet. But the ammunition eventually ran out. Some managed to fight with their bare hands, teaming up to strangle the stragglers who forced their way through the door.
But they were vastly outnumbered and outarmed.
Hamas began throwing grenades into the command center, luring the soldiers out. An Arabic-speaking soldier, Kharuba, shouted out “we will not surrender. We will not give up.”
The next grenade killed him.
And the remaining soldiers knew they had to get out – even if it meant running straight into Hamas’ trap.
“You need to understand – everything is exploding around you, and you say if I get out through the window I will be shot. If I stay here, I will suffocate. Which is better?”
Though they were engulfed in smoke, half-blinded, they managed to find the tiny window above the toilet. One of the soldiers smashed it and climbed out, dropping to the ground. Another six followed.
These seven were the only ones to survive. Eighteen of their fellow soldiers died, burned or gassed alive. Seven were snatched into Gaza.
Agam Berger, age 20.
Noa Marciano, age 19.
Naama Levy, age 19.
Daniella Gilboa, age 19.
Karina Ariev, age 19.
Liri Albag, age 18.
Ori Megidish, age 18.
In May of 2024, their parents agreed to release the footage of their abduction, taken from Hamas’ bodycams. I wish I had never watched it. Even edited, cleaned up and sanitized and blurred, it’s horrible. The terrorists, threatening. You dogs, we will step on you.
You hear the girls pleading.
Na’ama, blood running down her face, saying I have friends in Palestine. Liri, begging for someone who speaks English as the terrorists scream at them to be quiet. Agam, telling the men shouting at her that she’s from Tel Aviv. All seven of the girls have their hands bound behind their backs. At their feet lies a body. I don’t know whose.
Most horribly of all, in the background a Hamas member points to them and says these are the girls that can get pregnant. One tells a crying woman, You’re so beautiful.
It’s not a compliment. They all know what that means. They all know what can happen to them now.
The next segment of the video shows Na’ama, face and arms and ankles bloody, the seat of her sweatpants soaked in blood, as she is dragged into the backseat of a Jeep. Like the rest of the soldiers, she is barefoot. One of the girls cuts her foot on a rock and limps the rest of the way to the Jeep. The final frame of the video shows the girls in Gaza, surrounded.
To this day, five of these soldiers remain in captivity.
Ori Megidish was rescued, alone, from a tunnel in Gaza a few weeks after the start of the war. When she returned to Israel, there was dancing in the streets. We don’t know many of the details of her rescue, or what she endured. Amazingly, she has returned to active service.
Noa Marciano was murdered in the early weeks of the war. The IDF discovered her body across the street from the al-Shifa hospital, riddled with bullets. They say she looks like she fell or was pushed from a great height.
Released hostages reported meeting some of the remaining soldiers during captivity. We know that Na’ama and Agam braided the hair of the little girls who were released in November. We know Liri and Agam were used for a time as domestic slaves for a Gazan family, forced to cook and clean but denied food. We know some of the girls were held in a tiny tunnel with no room to stand up. We know they aren’t being given food. And we know they are being sexually abused.
This is Agam Goldstein-Almog. (Yes, a different Agam. It’s a common name in Israel.) She was 17 on October 7th, when Hamas burst into their home in Kfar Aza, murdering her father and older sister. She, her mother, and her two younger siblings were marched into Gaza, where they met some of the other female hostages.
Agam has recounted that most of the hostages she met described physical and sexual abuse.
They aren’t alone.
And even though I understand that this entire episode has been horrifying, the next minute or so will be particularly hard. Feel free to skip ahead if you need to. You’re about to hear graphic descriptions of sexual abuse that took place on that Black Shabbat, from the documentary Screams Before Silence.
“After one hour that we were in the trailer, I started to hear yelling of women. I heard a girl that started to yell for a long time, it was – please, don’t, no, stop, stop, stop, no no no. She was asking someone to stop. What can they stop? Someone is abusing her. Someone touching her. Someone is doing something…”
Sheryl: “How do you know that?”
“I know how it sounds. Like, I can understand how it sounds. There’s no way that women would will scream that loud for so long if it’s not for asking for help because someone is doing something sexually to her”.
“I remember there was a kind of semi-circle around her. One of them raped her. I remember her pants were halfway down and he was behind her and it was like… When you see someone being raped you know it’s rape. They did whatever they wanted. They didn’t… there were no rules. Shoham was next to me and he said, he’s stabbing her, he’s slaughtering her, and I didn’t want to look. And when I went back, I could see she was dead, and he was still raping her, after he had slaughtered her. That means that it’s possible that he raped her when she was already dead”.
Most of the victims were murdered after. They can’t offer any testimony. A few have come forward, including one man, who chose to remain anonymous.
Mostly, it’s up to the eyewitnesses and first responders to tell the world about the horrors they saw. But their stories have been mocked and denied. Even after the UN released a report documenting some of the crimes, much of the world refuses to believe that Hamas perpetrated sexual assaults that day, and worse.
Hamas didn’t just rape their victims. They disfigured and mutilated them, too. And then they left them there, for the first responders to find.
Again, I’ll warn you to skip ahead by a few minutes.
“We are trained to collect parts or even bodies in hard situations. Now, we go around the world to help. There’s hundreds of bodies I dealt with. I don’t have words to explain what we saw… The bodies were cut to pieces. Cut to pieces. You couldn’t identify if it’s a man or a woman. Everything was ripped…”
“You can see that after they were shot once, someone came by and sprayed them with another 30 bullets. Crazy things. Ears cut off. You’re walking and suddenly you see a hand. 100 meters down, you see the person. You ask yourself, how did his hand get 100 meters from here? Someone took the hand and played with it”.
Why am I telling you this? Why am I describing such horrors in such detail?
Believe me, I didn’t want to. Truly, I feel sick right now, really sick. Our pain and our horror is not for public consumption. I shouldn’t know any of this. And all of these victims are so much more than what happened to them that day. I don’t want to define them by their deaths.
And yet, you have to know. You have to know what happened. The blood of our brothers is screaming to us from the ground.
So I’m sharing the details I wish I didn’t know. And in the show notes, I’ll share the sources we used, some of which are exceptionally graphic. We’ve labeled the ones that are particularly difficult. Please, use your discretion.
We know that many of the terrorists were high on Captagon, aka fenethylline, aka “the poor man’s cocaine.” Technically, it’s a lot closer to meth. It’s used all over the Middle East, both as a party drug and as a weapon of war.
A 2015 article in the Washington Post calls it “The tiny pill fueling Syria’s war and turning fighters into superhuman soldiers.” They quote users who say things like “I felt like I own the world high… Like I have power nobody has. A really nice feeling.” “There was no fear anymore after I took Captagon.”
Captagon might produce euphoria and conquer fear, but it doesn’t make people into monsters. They have to have that intent first.
And according to Hamas fighters who have been interrogated, as well as materials found on the bodies of terrorists, they had that intent in spades. They were ordered to kill, torture, abduct, and rape. They were given explicit directions as to how.
And that “how” included the psychological warfare of filming and releasing their crimes. They cannot erase the eyewitness accounts or the gruesome memories. They cannot erase the pain.
But they also can’t erase the heroism of ordinary people who met them with bravery and resolve.
And so we’ll close out this episode with our final story, of a fully ordinary guy. Ordinary in the best sense. In the salt-of-the-earth, humble, family-oriented kind of way. A 29-year-old who loved soccer, and traveling, and having a drink at the local pub.
He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t a raver. He was just a guy who had been born and raised in Kfar Aza, who lived just yards away from his parents and siblings and nieces and nephews.
But when Hamas invaded his little apartment, he ceased to be an ordinary guy, and became something else instead.
This is the story of Yuval Salomon.
Chapter 3: The Civilian
I don’t know if Yuval Salomon was hungover on the morning of October 7th. True, he was a regular at the local pub in Nir Am, which has since named a drink in his honor. But even by his standards, the night before had been intense. He and 300 guests had shut down the pub, in honor of his 29th birthday. I don’t know what time he finally got to bed, but I know he was running on very little sleep when the first siren sounded.
Though his entire family lived in Kfar Aza, Yuval had a home to himself, in the “young people” area of the kibbutz – and yes, that’s a real designation. So he was alone when the first terrorists entered his home at 8:30.
He was alone when he fought them off, sending one packing with a knife between the eyes. He was alone when he was wounded, a long nasty laceration on the thigh. And he was alone when the terrorists returned, this time with an RPG.
His last words to the family WhatsApp:
I’m going to fight. I love you.
It would take more than a week to learn exactly what happened to Yuval. There was so much chaos, so much carnage. But eventually, an army spokesperson contacted the Salomons.
How do you do that job without collapsing? How do you ruin someone’s entire life with one gentle line: “I’m so sorry to tell you this, but…”
But the Salomons are strong. And Yuval’s father, Doron, has a message for the Jewish people – both in Israel and in the diaspora.
“Let’s love, let’s love. Let’s live love, life, and peace. Let others live, you live too, be good people. That’s the message. I have nothing else to say except to live life. Live it well, with love. With unconditional love.”
By all accounts, Yuval had done just that. He had packed so much life into his 29 years. So many friends. So many parties and soccer games and trips abroad. So much time with his family. So much love.
But when the time came, he didn’t hesitate. He fought – for his life, for his country, for his kibbutz. He fought for the right to live, peacefully, in a border community full of peaceniks and farmers.
He lost his life in the attempt.
But Yuval has two parents and three siblings and a handful of nieces and nephews, all eager to go back to their homes. To work their lands, to till their fields, and to rebuild their wounded country.
And the country is wounded. The Jewish people are wounded.
We’ll explore those wounds in greater detail next week. The trauma. The grief. The war. The hostage deals. The denials and the protests and the seeming lack of a plan for what comes next.
But for now, before we close this difficult episode, I’m going to ask you to take a moment. Close your eyes. Hold these beautiful souls in your mind. I’m going to recite Psalm 23, Tehillim kaf gimmel, in their memory. If you know it, say it with me. I’ll read it in Hebrew first, and then in English.
If you don’t know this psalm, or you don’t believe in this kind of prayer, that’s okay. Just take a moment to honor the memories of those who aren’t with us, to wish for the physical and emotional healing of those who are, and to plead for the safe and immediate return of all of our hostages.
Aner, Youssef, Sahar, Na’ama, Liri, Daniella, Karina, Agam, and Yuval: this prayer is for you.
מִזְמ֥וֹר לְדָוִ֑ד יְהֹוָ֥ה רֹ֝עִ֗י לֹ֣א אֶחְסָֽר׃
בִּנְא֣וֹת דֶּ֭שֶׁא יַרְבִּיצֵ֑נִי עַל־מֵ֖י מְנֻח֣וֹת יְנַהֲלֵֽנִי׃
נַפְשִׁ֥י יְשׁוֹבֵ֑ב יַֽנְחֵ֥נִי בְמַעְגְּלֵי־צֶ֝֗דֶק לְמַ֣עַן שְׁמֽוֹ׃
גַּ֤ם כִּֽי־אֵלֵ֨ךְ בְּגֵ֪יא צַלְמָ֡וֶת לֹא־אִ֘ירָ֤א רָ֗ע כִּי־אַתָּ֥ה עִמָּדִ֑י שִׁבְטְךָ֥ וּ֝מִשְׁעַנְתֶּ֗ךָ הֵ֣מָּה יְנַֽחֲמֻֽנִי׃
תַּעֲרֹ֬ךְ לְפָנַ֨י ׀ שֻׁלְחָ֗ן נֶ֥גֶד צֹרְרָ֑י דִּשַּׁ֥נְתָּ בַשֶּׁ֥מֶן רֹ֝אשִׁ֗י כּוֹסִ֥י רְוָיָֽה׃
אַ֤ךְ ט֤וֹב וָחֶ֣סֶד יִ֭רְדְּפוּנִי כׇּל־יְמֵ֣י חַיָּ֑י וְשַׁבְתִּ֥י בְּבֵית־יְ֝הֹוָ֗ה לְאֹ֣רֶךְ יָמִֽים
A psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me to water in places of repose; He renews my life; He guides me in right paths as befits His name.
Though I walk through a valley of deepest darkness, I fear no harm, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff—they comfort me. You spread a table for me in full view of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my drink is abundant.
Only goodness and steadfast love shall pursue me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD for many long years.
Amen.