Truck dashcam footage shows farmer dodging bullets as he saved 120 from music festival

Oz Davidian took a different route each time as he made some 20 trips to Re’im, where Hamas terrorists overran the Nova rave and slaughtered partygoers

By SUE SURKES, TOI 

Some of the young partygoers rescued by Oz Davidian (right) on October 7, 2023. (Channel 13 screenshot, used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

Extraordinary video footage was published Wednesday from the dashboard of a truck belonging to a farmer from the area near the Gaza border who rescued some 120 young people trying to escape from an open-air party on October 7, as Hamas terrorists sprayed them with bullets.

Oz Davidian, from nearby Maslul, made some 20 trips between Re’im, where an all-night party held outdoors had been overrun by gunmen, and his moshav, as well as the neighboring one, Patish.

On each one-way journey of 15 to 17 kilometers (9 to 10.5 miles), he took a different route to try to avoid the terrorists.

For much of that time, his wife and four daughters were shut inside their protected room at home.

Some 260 partygoers were murdered that day with guns and grenades. Early in the morning, Hamas terrorists had breached the Gaza border barrier and streamed into Israel on a massive killing spree that left around 1,200 dead in Israel in total, and around 240 kidnapped and taken to the Hamas-controlled enclave.

According to Channel 13, which aired the footage, Israeli security forces were absent for seven hours after the party shooting started. During this time, the terrorists held full control of Route 232.

The footage shows Davidian speeding past wrecked cars, while shots are being fired. “Terrorists! Watch out!” he tells those in the back.

One passenger says “Turn left here,” and Davidian swerves off the road at full speed onto a bumpy field.

One girl was sure he was a “special person,” perhaps from the Shin Bet security services, he later told Channel 13. “I said to her ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘Look around you, there’s nobody here, nobody, we’ve been stuck here for hours, and there’s nobody. You’re the only one who came.’”

At one stage, Davidian rescued a reserve army officer, who had been at the party and had the locations on his phone of other places where people were hiding.

The two men headed back to the area of the party, guided by black smoke. Davidian said that when they reached Route 232, they saw “hundreds of corpses all over the place, on the road and in the fields,” and “loads of cars – some burnt out, some with their lights blinking, and corpses with shotgun wounds inside cars.”

Davidian recalled seeing “two terrorists next to the corpse of a soldier and I thought great, there are paramedics and soldiers, and I asked one of them what was happening, and before he answered me, I realized that they might be terrorists. I addressed him in Arabic, and asked ‘Are they dead, are there injured,’ and he answered, and then suddenly, I understood that he was a terrorist and he understood that I was a Jew.”

Davidian stepped on the gas, as shots were fired at him. “By some miracle, none of them hit the car,” he said.

“They were spraying everywhere with bullets. You can’t get your head around that level of evil,” he went on. “They shot at everything that moved.”

They also used RPGs, he said.

“And they were raping,” he went on. “One was raping, another was shooting, protecting the former, watching him rape. You saw piles of corpses, one on top of the other, as if they’d been together and were just slaughtered and fell on top of one another in the shooting.”

He and the reserve officer recorded the name of each person they picked up and allowed each one to call home quickly to say they were okay.

Channel 13 tracked down Chen, one of the girls he had rescued, and brought her into the studio.

Davidian broke down in tears, then the two laughed about all the thorns that were in her hair that day.

Davidian told Channel 14 that he only stopped at midnight for a few moments to check that his family was alright.

He met a friend at the gate of his moshav who had two fathers in his car who had come to look for their children.

Davidian returned to the area of the party, called Supernova, to look for them, and drove around until 7 a.m. the following morning, but found no further signs of life.

He summed up, “When you see hundreds of young people, dead and wounded and fleeing into the fields and terrorists shooting in every direction, you put everything to one side, the fear, the family, and you go to get them out.”

Said daughter Oriah of her father, “He has always been my hero.”