I was stopped at an army checkpoint telling that there is terrorists on this road, killing people, anyone that goes on this road. But I knew that I want to drive anyway. I knew that this point there are people dying.
So, this guy came with a pickup truck shouting from the car, "listen, people are being butchered in Be'eri. It's a small community. It's a kibbutz. And I just jumped with my friend. We jumped on the pickup truck and across through this army post stuff.
We crossed it and we fly down the road. It took us around seven minutes' drive. We saw -- we literally saw civilian cars that woke up Saturday morning weekend, you know, going out to nature to hike, to bike, to different activities -- left on the road, dead civilians, full of families, kids, mothers, babies. All of them are shot dead in their cars.
And I'm not talking about one or two. Dozens of cars all over the road.
We are stopping at outside Kibbutz Alumim. It's a small community, let's say around a thousand people are living there in a shared life. And right outside Kibbutz Alumim, we are encountering a Hamas terrorist group or a squad shooting at us. This is the first interaction I had.
I saw a dead soldier with a rifle. It's a machine gun next to him. I took the machine gun. I took some bullets and magazines from the special forces that were near me. And together, we decided to charge into, to go to a battle with these stowaways, to stop them to enter the kibbutz.
I thought we were just fighting with people that are stopping us to drive to Be'eri, not knowing that we are saving Alumim. But we had a fight outside of Alumim, right outside the fence, the perimeter fence.
We managed to kill all the terrorists that were there. We had face-to-face battles. We had grenades throwing at us. We didn't have grenades.
We came from home to defend people. We were outnumbered, outgunned, but we crushed them in that fight. We were fighting to save life. They were fighting to take life. So, I guess the first, you know, trumps the other.
We finished that around three hours of tough battle. We hopped on the jeeps and drove to Be'eri, really dangerous driving. It's a few minutes' drive from one community to another. It was surreal, it's like a movie. Smoke everywhere. Shooting everywhere, from every bush or behind the tree you can have a terrorist with an AK-47 or an RPG shooting at you.
But we are driving. We have one mission: to go to Be'eri and to save lives, keep saving lives. On the entry to Kibbutz Be'eri, we've seen horrific sights. What happened there? Hamas took time of killing, brutally killing people, torturing, raping in the most -- it's hard for me to say the word -- "creative" ways that you can imagine.
At that point, already the army started to come to get a clear picture. People came from their homes, geared up and came, but we were special forces. So a lot of them were giving first response in Be'eri, but they were waiting for us as people that are highly trained for us to go in. And we did.
We got in Be'eri. And Be'eri was a... was a piece of hell.
