‘There Were Terrorists Inside’: How Hamas’s Attack on Israel Unfolded
Palestinian militants from Gaza raided Israel on Saturday, killing and abducting hundreds. Survivors have begun to recount the most complex attack on their territory in half a century.
The militants gunned down more than 100 ravers and abducted others, according to two senior Israeli officials, as they sprinted through the open fields. Video verified by The New York Times showed militants driving off on a motorcycle with an Israeli woman squeezed between them, screaming as her boyfriend was marched off on foot, his arm wrenched behind his back.
Those who survived often did so by hiding in nearby bushes, some of them for hours.
Bullets whistled overhead and shots resounded all around, said Andrey Peairie, 35, one of the survivors. He described crawling up to the top of a nearby hill to get a better sense of what was happening.
“Smoke and flames and gunfire,” said Mr. Peairie, a tech worker. “I have a military background, but I never was in a situation like this.”
So began one of the bloodiest weekends in Israeli and Palestinian history, the full details of which started to emerge on Sunday as survivors recounted the most complex and brazen attack on their nation since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
About 700 Israelis were killed and at least 150 taken hostage by Palestinian militants, according to a preliminary assessment shared by a senior Israeli military official. Videos circulated of children and grandparents abducted from their homes in Israel and roadsides strewn with dead bodies. A National Security Council spokesperson said later Sunday that “several” American citizens had been killed in the fighting.
The assault, staggering in its scale, prompted a fierce counterattack from Israel that has killed at least 413 Gazans in missile strikes and gun battles, according to Gazan health officials.
The violence began familiarly enough — with rocket fire from Gaza, just after dawn.
Amir Tibon and his neighbors in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a village that stands a few hundred yards from Gaza, have become accustomed to frequent rocket fire from militants.
Bomb shelters are installed in every home in the kibbutz, and residents are used to rushing inside them every few weeks.
But soon after Mr. Tibon, 35, took shelter on Saturday with his wife and two young daughters, he knew that there was something very different about this attack.
The sound of gunfire.
Then came a morbid realization.
“There were terrorists inside the kibbutz, inside our neighborhood and — at some point — outside our window,” Mr. Tibon recalled. “We could hear them talk. We could hear them run. We could hear them shooting their guns at our house, at our windows.”
On the village WhatsApp group, neighbors were posting frantic messages. “People were saying, ‘They are in my house, they are trying to break into the safe room!’” recalled Mr. Tibon, a journalist for Haaretz, one of the country’s most prominent news outlets.
Messages from fellow reporters revealed even more terrifying news. They said that Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, had infiltrated scores of Israeli border towns, and that it would take time for the Israeli Army to reach the village.
Not long afterward, Mr. Tibon’s cell reception started to break up.
Thirteen miles to the east, deep inside Israeli territory, Meitav Hadad and her brother Itamar had no idea that Israel had been invaded.
The siblings had switched their phones off for the Jewish Sabbath.
Suddenly, shots rang out in their neighborhood of Ofakim, a small city of 33,000 residents in southern Israel.
Mr. Hadad, 22, an off-duty soldier, grabbed his rifle and rushed into the street. Ms. Hadad, 18, a student at a religious seminary, followed him.
They expected perhaps a single shooter, the kind of lone-wolf attacker that frequently targets Israeli civilians, Ms. Hadad said.
But what they found was far more shocking: A squad of Palestinian militants, armed with rifles and a shoulder-borne rocket launcher, had infiltrated their quiet neighborhood, miles from the border with Gaza.
“We didn’t understand what was happening,” Ms. Hadad said.
Terrified, she hid in a playground.
But her brother pressed on, joining forces with two other armed residents, cellphone video showed. He began firing on the militants, hitting two, before his gun jammed, forcing him to take cover, he said.
As he retreated, the militants shot him three times — once in the liver, once in the leg and the third time in the back.
He was losing blood fast, with nowhere to hide.
Desperate for shelter, he began hobbling from house to house, trying to persuade residents to take him inside, Mr. Hadad said. No one dared to open up, fearing he was himself a Palestinian fighter.
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