The Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family were trapped inside a safe room in their house on the Israel-Gaza border when they heard gunshots outside. Tibon speaks Arabic, so he knew what was happening. Hamas terrorists had somehow made it into their Israeli village. Tibon spoke with me and my colleague Yair Rosenberg about the experience, and in this episode of Radio Atlantic we hear Tibon’s story—hiding out with his two young children, their improbable rescue—and his first, raw thoughts about why this happened to them.
Listen to the conversation here:
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Amir Tibon: Saturday, six in the morning, and we hear a very familiar sound: the sound of a mortar about to explode. It’s like a whistle. It’s almost like this [whistles].
Hanna Rosin: Amir Tibon lives in a community in Israel, right near the Gaza border. Mortars fly overhead once in a while, but the family has a routine for that. Amir, his wife, and their two young girls go to a reinforced safe room in their house, and they wait. It’s scary, but they’ve gotten used to it.
Tibon: You wait sometimes an hour. You pack your bags.
And when there is a break, a few minutes, you just shove the kids in the car and you go away from the border toward a more secure place. But this time, as we were packing, I heard the most chilling noise I’ve heard in my life: automatic gunfire in the distance.
Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. After the events this weekend, when Hamas launched an attack along the southern border of Israel, we’re bringing you this bonus episode, sharing the story of Amir and his family.
Tibon: So at first I’m hearing this gunfire from the fields. But then I hear it from the road. And then I hear it from the neighborhood. And then I hear it outside my window. And I hear shouting. And I understand Arabic; I understood exactly what was happening. Basically, I understood that Hamas has infiltrated our kibbutz, that there are terrorists outside my window, and I’m locked in my house and inside my safe room with two young girls, and I don’t know if anyone is going to come to save us.
That’s how it started.
Rosin: To reach this early conclusion, Amir would have had to ignore some hard, immovable facts. There is a 40-mile security barrier between Israel and Gaza. That barrier is patrolled by soldiers at all times, and Israel tightly controls all movement in and out.
Amir moved his family there, making what he felt was an implicit bargain with the Israeli government: We’ll populate your border, and you keep us safe. In fact, anywhere in Israel lately, a civilian face to face with a terrorist has become a rare event. So why was there one outside his door? It didn’t make sense. Now, Amir’s a journalist. So while his phone still had power, he called his colleague Amos Ariel, who covers military affairs. He told Amos what was happening in his town and asked if he knew more.
Tibon: And what Amos told me in reply was the scariest thing I heard. He said, “Yes, I know, but it’s not only in your kibbutz. It’s not only in Nachal Oz. It’s all over southern Israel. It’s all over. It’s in cities and in towns and in kibbutzim and in villages. Thousands of armed Hamas fighters have infiltrated the country. They’ve taken over military bases.”
And that was scary because I realized, if that’s the situation, it will take a very long time for the military to come and confront these terrorists and save us.
That’s where I thought, Okay, we’re going to die here. Nobody’s going to be able to come in time. And if they manage to break into the house, they will then try to break into the safe room. And if they manage to do that, we will be dead or kidnapped.
Rosin: They had no food, and the electricity had been cut off. From inside the safe room, Amir controlled what he could. He told his daughters:
Tibon: “You have to be absolutely quiet, not a word. You can’t cry, can’t talk. It’s dangerous.”
Rosin: Outside, Hamas fighters in towns along the border were killing and kidnapping soldiers and civilians alike. Parents were getting panicked phone calls from their kids. And then the phones would go dead.
There’d been a music festival in a nearby town the night before that was winding down that morning. At least 200 people were killed at the festival, and many more were missing.
The next many hours became a kind of social-media hell. Families scoured the internet for any tweets or videos, and then they were sorry for what they found. One video showed a young woman from the festival being taken away by militants on a motorcycle. In other videos, people would recognize their wife or their children or their grandmother. Now, pretty soon, parents near Gaza would get panicked phone calls from their kids because on Sunday, a day into the fighting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on Hamas.
Whenever something like this happens between Israelis and Palestinians, I want to skip straight to the end. Will this be the thing that is so bloody and so unspeakably terrible that the only option afterwards will be peace?
That’s probably because I’m thousands of miles away from the Israel-Gaza border.
Tibon: I have neighbors who are dead. I have neighbors who are injured. I have neighbors that we don’t know where they are, you know—may have been kidnapped, held by Hamas. I’m not thinking right now about, you know, the bigger implications of this in terms of our future.
Rosin: Even before this, Israel’s had intense political divisions. Even before this, Israel has intense political divisions right now. And judging by wars past, this one is likely to deepen them. Some Israelis will come to mistrust the government more, and some will rally behind the government and will it to be a focused military machine. Some people will harden their opposition to peace, and some will be desperate for it.
Even with Amir, he seems to be processing, maybe not the future, but the political present. You can already hear it in the way that he's making meaning from how he and his family escaped kidnapping or death.
Before his phone died, Amir made another call. This one was to his father, a retired general who lives in Tel Aviv, which is about an hour and a half north.
Tibon: My parents said, “We’re coming. We’re coming to get you.” Now, this goes against all logic, but I told myself, okay, right now I’m asking my two young daughters to put complete faith in me and my wife, in their parents. To do what we’re telling them in order to save their lives, which is to be very, very, very quiet and understand that we cannot get out of the room, we cannot go get food, we cannot go to the bathroom, we cannot go out to play.
And I’m asking them to put their faith in me completely. And I told myself, I have to do the same thing right now. I have to trust my father, who is a trustworthy man, that if he said he will come here and save us, he will do it.
Rosin: So Amir’s parents started driving south. As they got closer, they saw young people walking on the side of the road barefoot. These were escapees from the music festival. They kept driving until they got to the main town near the border.
Tibon: They get out of the car. My father has a pistol. And he and this other soldier join the soldiers who are fighting the Hamas cell. They help kill them. And now they’re very close to my kibbutz. They’re like five minutes from the entrance to my kibbutz. But two of the soldiers are wounded.
Rosin: So, Amir’s mother decides to take these wounded soldiers, put them in the car, and turn back around to go to the hospital, which means that his father now has no car.
And then, his father sees another retired former general he knows, who’s around his age, also a grandfather on a mission to help his family. He asks him for a ride.
Tibon: So these two guys, over the age of 60, are driving in a regular car. It’s not even a jeep or something. It’s not an armored vehicle. It’s just a car. Like They’re driving now on the road where half an hour earlier there was a deadly ambush of soldiers. And they reach the entrance to the kibbutz and when they get there they meet a group of soldiers from special forces who are about to begin the very dangerous process of going from house to house in our community, to try to engage the terrorists and release the people who are barricaded.
And by that point, I have no idea that all of this is happening. We are in the safe room. The terrorists are still outside. And we have no cell reception. We’re just waiting in the dark. But we start hearing gunfire again. And this time, it’s—we hear it’s two kinds of guns. And we realize there is a battle. We realize that there is an exchange of fire. And I tell my wife, “He’s coming. My father is coming. They’re fighting. He’s with the soldiers.”
They didn’t come immediately to our house. They went from house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, inside our community. I don’t remember how long it took, I have to say. We were just hearing that the gunfire were getting closer and closer. And the girls had fallen asleep, but now they woke up. It’s, I think, maybe 2 p.m. They haven’t had anything to eat since last night. They don’t see us at this point. There’s no light and we don’t have cellphones anymore.
And there’s one sentence that is keeping them from falling apart and starting to cry. I’m telling them, “Grandfather is coming.” I tell them, “If we stay quiet, your grandfather will come and get us out of here.” And at 4 p.m., after 10 hours like this, we hear a large bang on the window. And we hear the voice of my father and Galia, my oldest daughter, says, “Saba Hegia.” Grandfather arrived. And that’s when we all just start crying. And that’s when we knew that we were safe.
Rosin: It’s an unbelievable story of heroism and love. And yet telling it makes Amir angry.
Tibon: You live in a place like Nachal Oz, you wake up every morning, and you know there are people on the other side of the border who want to kill you and your children, basically. And so we were there all these years. And the contract was, again, we protect the border and the state protects us. And this government, which is the worst government in the history of the state of Israel, led by a corrupt, dysfunctional, and egoistic man who sees only himself, Benjamin Netanyahu, failed us.
The way that the events of the day unfolded are the worst failure in the history of the state of Israel. I mean, people like my father, like other retired officers, coming down to save citizens, to try to save their own families and others, and meanwhile, the military is falling apart. And all the civilian infrastructure that is supposed to support the military and the society in such an event is also not functioning.
Listen, right now we have to win this war. We have to destroy Hamas. We have to make it impossible for them to ever, ever again conduct anything that is even close to what happened on Saturday. No country in the world can allow something like this to happen to its citizens and just go to business as usual. And I feel bad for the people of Gaza, I have to say. I feel very, very bad for the people of Gaza. I’m sad; I’m heartbroken. But the response Israel will have to take will be completely disproportionate to anything we’ve seen in the past because this was a disproportionate event. This was our 9/11.
And after we win the war and we, you know, eradicate Hamas, there will be time also to throw into the dustbin of history any politician, starting with the prime minister, who had anything to do with this failure.
And there is a new reality between Israel and Gaza. That reality, it can be, you know, the result of a disastrous military operation. It can be a result of some diplomatic maneuvers as well, but it cannot remain the same situation.
Rosin: I asked Amir, what is this new reality? What does it look like?
Tibon: It cannot include Hamas. I don’t know what it will be, but Hamas, which in the past people considered as perhaps, you know, maybe we can talk to them, maybe we can do—it cannot include Hamas. I don’t know what it looks like but Hamas lost any shred of possibility of ever becoming a normal partner for anything.
It’s true that Gaza is also home to more than 2 million people, and they’re going to stay there. And we’re going to have to think about what that means, and how in the long run there could be a better future for them as well and a future that will also make it better for us.
But that’s a conversation for tomorrow. It’s not the conversation for today.
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudina Ebeid. Claudine is also the executive producer of Atlantic Audio. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak and our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. Special thanks to Yair Rosenberg for arranging this interview.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.