‘I told my family that we would not surrender, that it would be better to die than be a prisoner in Gaza’
JERUSALEM, Israel: Incredible stories of survival and bravery are emerging in Israel, just one week after a brutal terrorist attack by Hamas. This attack tragically resulted in the loss of over 1,300 lives, with an additional 120 individuals, including U.S. citizens, now reported as missing and likely being held hostage in the Gaza Strip.
These stories of survival span various locations in Israel, from the forest where a large crowd had gathered for a music festival to the agricultural communities along Israel’s border with Gaza. Among these areas, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Israelis, now coming forward to share remarkable accounts of how they managed to escape the clutches of certain death at the hands of well-armed and determined Palestinian terrorists.
Noa Ben Artzi, 25
On Saturday, Nova Ben Artzi, 25, started firing a rocket with her friends at the Nova Music Festival in Kibbutz Reim, southern Israel.
“I was in my tent and thought it was fireworks, but when I went outside, there was chaos, hundreds of people running towards me, to the parking lot behind me,” she recalled to Fox News Digital on Friday. “We started gathering our things and headed towards the car.”
But the group, including Ben Artzi’s best friend Norel, couldn’t cross the parking lot because traffic was at a standstill. Jumping out of their cars, they ran into a nearby bomb shelter, a small concrete structure with an entrance and no windows, used for protection in open spaces.
“At first, we were at the entrance, but then about 25 or 30 people crowded into this small space and the people in the back started suffocating,” Ben Artzi said. She agrees to switch places with people further back, and when one of her friends begins to panic, Nova suggests that they sit on the floor, where the air is higher. When another woman also started hyperventilating, Nova suggested she join them.
“I hugged her and asked her name, and she said it was Michelle,” Ben Artzi recounted. “We sat there for about 25 minutes, and the next thing I heard was, ‘They’re coming, they’re coming’.”
Ben Artzi doesn’t remember what happened next, except that gunshots pierced the air and a grenade was mercilessly thrown into their shelter. Her senses returned when she awoke to a nightmare buried beneath a pile of suffocated bodies.
“At that point, I was lying on my back and there were three or four lifeless figures on top of me. One of the bodies stretched across my abdomen, and pressed his head against my throat,” she explained. “My head was resting on someone else’s chest, and then it dawned on me, it was Michelle – she was miraculously clinging to life.”
For the next three solemn hours, the two women endured the darkness, weighed down by the weight of their dead, as Hamas militants continued their relentless onslaught. They fired ammunition into the shelter, threw grenades, and even lit fires outside. As the heavy smoke sets in, their newfound friendship is their only source of comfort, and words of encouragement are exchanged between them.
Then, amid the confusion, they perceived Hebrew voices and the sound of water quenching the fire. The beam of a police officer’s flashlight pierces the darkness inside the shelter, and Ben Artzi desperately tries to get attention, but her entrapment beneath the lifeless bodies proves insurmountable.
“The police officer repeatedly went in and came out due to suffocating smoke,” she explained. “My efforts to shift the lifeless bodies were in vain; my arm continued to suffer the terrible consequences of the explosion.”
Finally, police officers located Ben Artzi meticulously lifted her trapped lifeless form, and dragged her to safety.
“I couldn’t stand up because my legs had no circulation and it was very difficult to breathe amidst the thick smoke,” she recalls.
“Later, I learned that Michelle suffered a gunshot wound on her back, which escaped us during our examination. Thank God she survived,” Artji marveled. “This is nothing short of a miraculous event.”
However, on Friday, the heartbreaking news reached her that her dear friend Norelle had been found among the dead.
Yonatan Ben Reim, 56
When Yonatan Ben Reim heard the Iron Dome missile defense system spring into action near his home Saturday morning, he felt something was wrong.
“It was firing fast, almost like a machine gun, because there were so many rockets,” said Ben Reem, a retired police officer who lives in the Prigon community near the Gaza border. “I turned to my son Yuval and said, ‘Listen, if they’re releasing a barrage like that into the sky, they don’t want us looking at the ground’.”
A few minutes later, Ben Ream recognized the ominous sound of gunfire, and a sense of foreboding washed over him. “I told Yuval, ‘Listen, we’re not hearing Israeli guns; they’re Arab guns,'” he explained to Fox News Digital. “I instructed Yuval to get everyone into the bomb shelter while I stayed in the room.”
After a while, Ben Reem heard people outside speaking Arabic. He pointed a revolver at them and started firing. Then, “All Hell Break Loose . . . It’s like a Hollywood movie.”
“There were eight terrorists outside, I ran for shelter and closed the door when they entered my house,” he said. “They called out in Arabic, ‘Put your hands up, it’s the police.’
Ben Reem described how the terrorists moved from room to room, throwing grenades and firing AK-47 rifles. He handed Yuval, 22, another handgun and told him to stand by the window while the door was covered.
“We could not close it completely, and they started firing at us from the window. We fired back 150 rounds at them and started praying,” he said.
The family, Ben Reim, Yuval, his wife, his other two sons, and a young daughter stayed inside the shelter for more than two hours as the terrorists went through his neighbors’ houses and tried to convince the residents to show themselves, threatening to shoot them. Shooting through houses and windows.
“We will not surrender, I told my family that it is better to die than to be a prisoner in Gaza,” said Ben Reim, who eventually managed to contact the local civil security forces, who came and confronted the terrorists, taking them away. out Two people belonging to the civil force were killed in the firing.
Ben Ream said he acted like a robot throughout the ordeal as the rest of his family quietly followed his orders.
We all spoke in whispers and were very calm even though we didn’t think we would make it out alive.
Yonit Kedar, 42
Yonit Kedar, 42, said he was still in shock after surviving the attack at the Nova festival.
“I didn’t know until that evening that we had escaped a massacre,” she told Fox News Digital. “When I was driving the car and saw people running through the fields, I didn’t realize we were running for our lives.”
A site of hundreds of partygoers, some walking barefoot, Kedar says it will stay with her for a long time. “My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, so it was really motivating, but I’m glad I didn’t see anything worse than that.”
Indeed, Kedar’s story is borderline surreal. The 42-year-old mother of two, who said she had no idea terrorists had infiltrated Israel, said she and her friends fled the party as rockets rang out.
“My story is very calm and collected,” she explained. “I have two young children, and I didn’t see the possibility of me not coming home. It didn’t even count in my mind.”
She and her friends, also mothers of young children, were the first to pack their things and leave the festival, but after getting stuck in a line of cars, Kedar explained, they jumped out and hid under a bridge as rocket fire continued.
“We didn’t see or hear any gunshots. We were sure the danger was only coming from the sky,” she explained. “We didn’t know the traffic jam was caused by terrorists shooting people in their cars.”
While Kedar’s team was hiding under the bridge, the terrorists accidentally walked past them. As she and her friends ran back to their car, they were told to head east across the nearby fields.
“My car wasn’t a jeep or even a 4×4. It wasn’t meant to go across the fields, but I kept driving, driving, and keeping my head forward,” she said.
That’s when she started hearing gunshots.
“We were surrounded by people on foot, and we told them to get in the car,” she said, describing how a group of 20-year-olds jumped in. “They were gasping and screaming. A lot of people were on drugs or psychedelics, and it was terrifying to hear them cry.”
At one point, Kedar said, she was driving with the doors open and people were jumping in and out. Eventually, she reached a road, and out of nowhere, she said, a soldier was driving with his tires blown. He told me to go to the nearest military base.
With eight people in her car now, Kedar made for the base, despite the gunfire behind her. She stayed at the base for a few hours and flew back home to Tel Aviv. It was only in the evening that she realized what had happened in southern Israel last Saturday.
“I really can’t believe we survived,” Kedar said.