I met Z’ and D’, members of the Yahalom special operations forces unit at 21:10 on the Saturday night of that terrible Shabbat. They were getting out of an armored vehicle, holding two small children who I was to hand over - from the hell they’d been through - to their awaiting extended family. Amalia (6) and Michael (8) Edan. Their eyes were gaping and their hair was blood-sodden. Her face was speckled with dried blood and, as they were loaded into the vehicle, she was holding gummy candy and blankets. D’ had brought wipes from the gas station outside Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
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He explained that they were to clean her face before she met her family. “They came by hot air balloon, shot Mommy, shot Daddy and Abigail,” she explained. Mommy and Daddy are Smadar and Roy Idan, a Ynet photographer who went out to document Hamas’s invasion of the kibbutz. The journey to safety seemed long and she talked continuously about what had happened and was worried about who would take care of them now. I told her that there are a lot of people who love her father and will always take care of her and her brother, like her uncle, Amit who sent them Z’ and D’. I made my way to them because Roy had been my best friend.
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Yahalom special operations forces unit saved Amalia and Michael
(Photo: Gadi Kabalo)
Z’ and D’ saved Amalia and Michael, but by 21:10, they’d also saved so many more people. They saw so much on October 7th: The besieged police station in Sderot; the festival of blood at Re’im; the army base that the terrorists had marked out as their main target; the kibbutzim that turned into killing fields. They went from site to site, fighting, killing, saving. In real-time, they had no idea of the extent of the destruction. They just did what they knew how to do: fight.
Yahalom is the Special Operations Forces Unit of the Engineering Corps, considered a commando unit. Major D’ and CWO (Res.) Z’, along with further fighters, hold engineering break-ins, offensive sabotage, bomb and mine disposal and tunnel warfare skills. D’ is a career soldier. Z’ was serving several months reserve duty training soldiers. They’re both in their 40’s, married with families. There’s a dynamic of a veteran team, reading one another with few words. This brotherhood of soldiers served them well on October 7th, the day the Gates of Hell slowly opened before their very eyes.
This is their war diary.
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Palestinian tractor breaks through Israeli border
(Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa)
7:00
“When I was called to action at 7:30, we realized it was something big. Almost the whole unit showed up one way or another, and we started calling the reservists. I met my support team at Yad Mordechai. I met a couple running toward the team telling us that their car had been shot at. We realized there were terrorists very close. We were surprised. We took the civilians and evacuated them to the gas station. We met a policeman, policewoman and an officer. I took command and said we should advance towards Sderot to prepare. I tried contacting various units we usually work with, to formulate precise Situational Awareness. A vehicle tried to pass, explaining that they must carry on as there are terrorists at Nahal Oz, and his granddaughter’s there.”
They saw so much on October 7th: The besieged police station in Sderot; the festival of blood at Re’im; the army base that the terrorists had marked out as their main target; the kibbutzim that turned into killing fields. They went from site to site, fighting, killing, saving
8:00
D’: "We continued toward Sderot Junction. We saw police at the junction shouting that there were wounded and terrorists. We saw vehicles at the bus stop. We got into the mobile shelters with freshly wounded people. I asked them if they could walk and they asked whether it was safe to walk. I said ‘Yes, the IDF is here. We’re here’. They ran toward the police and about 100 feet later, we saw terrorists. This was our first encounter with two of them. They had pistols and they threw a grenade at us. We killed them. We were now beginning to understand. We advance towards 232, to Kibbutz Mefalsim. I saw a car with a female civilian lying on the seat, on her stomach, killed. 15 feet on, we saw another car with a little girl – a baby – outside the car, shot dead. I realized this was serious.’
Z’: “We got to the junction toward Mefalsim-Sa’ad and we saw a van of terrorists. We didn’t yet understand that it was a van of terrorists. It was a white Toyota. I saw three wounded people. By their equipment, I knew which unit they were from. We tried to perform resuscitation on the wounded people, while shooting at the junction. A paramedic from Special Tactics Rescue Unit 669 joined us and, under fire, we evacuated the wounded. We took them to the Gvar'am area where there were ambulances, and then went back in.”
9:15
“Did we understand that this was an all-out attack on the Gaza Envelope communities? No. We didn’t ask ourselves that question. There was no time for questions. I report to the unit sending recorded WhatsApp messages. The first encounter, the second, evacuating the wounded. We rushed to Mefalsim and joined guys from other units. We said we should continue to Nahal Oz, where the incident is.“
D': “We manage to drive a few hundred feet more and we see two terrorists, one killed, a second wounded. We tie up the wounded one, drop him off with the police and return. We still see no IDF forces at this stage. We advance, to the Black Arrow Memorial in Sderot, where we find more guys from my unit, along with a small Egoz force.”
“We try to gauge Situational Awareness. There are constantly vans and motorbikes. We sent up an observation drone and they shot at it. There’s ongoing gunfire. A Yamam Counter Terror Unit is assembled. Duvdevan forces show up as Sayeret Matkal General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, along with the air force’s Shaldag Unit drive toward Nahal Oz. We try telling them it’s staked out down there. They go in and are met by terrorists. Some get by, and then a van with five terrorists with machine guns attempts to break onto the main road. It looked like we’d got there too early and put a spanner in their plans. We stop the van, killing all its terrorists. Some of our men are wounded. We evacuate them.”
10:00
Z’: “We receive a report about fighting inside Re’im base. I receive an order to get there as quickly as possible. By now, I have a relatively large force with me. Inside the base, we engage in combat with the terrorists. We try obtaining a Situational Awareness reading. If Re’im falls because there’s no fighting force there, it can cause other things to collapse too. The terrorists know this too. This off-balances a lot of stuff. We drive towards Sa’ad Junction. There’s a traffic jam and we’re told there’s a team of terrorists there. We join the attacking force and later realize that the terrorists have been killed and the shooting stops. At the entrance to Sa’ar Junction, a Golani tank shows up with wounded people. We treat the wounded at the junction and carry on. An armored jeep arrives. We’re now much stronger and we go into Re’im.”
"Some get by, and then a van with five terrorists with machine guns attempts to break onto the main road. It looked like we’d got there too early and put a spanner in their plans. We stop the van, killing all its terrorists"
12:00
“On the way, we pass the festival. No one could have imagined it like this. Someone threw out the number of 40 people abducted from the festival. These numbers turned out to be too low. What we saw was horrific. There were bodies strewn on the road and in the fields. It’s unfathomable. We saw policemen at the entrance to the festival who hadn’t managed to respond. They’d been shot. Pistols are no good against heavy machine guns. You just can’t respond to that.”
Z’: “There were burnt bodies, some lying on the road. There were forces at Be’eri, but we received a report saying there were no forces in Re’im. We’re constantly being urged to come. ‘You’re the force. There’s no one else here. Just come’."
D’: “In the Be’eri area, they captured four terrorists alive. They didn’t have guns. One had a knife. They held out when we interrogated them. I can’t say they were tough. They were as soft as margarine. From what we saw, they weren’t good fighters, but it was their sheer quantity and evil. That’s all there was there. A lot of people had been told to do whatever they wanted. Go enjoy yourselves. Enjoy the murder. And you can loot, too.”
12:30
“We get close to the community of Re’im. There’s fighting going on. In the parking lot, there’s a black Silverado van with a bull bar and heavy machine guns, like ISIS, surrounded by vehicles it had sprayed with bullets. It had just got stuck amongst the cars and was abandoned.”
“We saw burnt-out cars. I later learned that one of my friends was killed there, in one of the cars. We carry on towards the division and what we see is surreal: Four soldiers walking on the road toward the division, in front of the junction. We stop, open the door and say ‘How’s it going?’ I see that they’re from the Armored Corps. I say ‘Just for laughs… tell me… where’s the tank? What are you doing here without the tank?’ He answers ‘The tank was hit. It’s non-operational.’ I ask ‘What? Where was there a tank?’ He says ‘at the junction’. I look and I see a tank at the junction, in the middle of the road. So I ask ‘Where are you going?’. He says he’s going north. I thought to myself: OK, it’s looking like Yom Kippur. I wasn’t there during the Yom Kippur War, but it looks like Yom Kippur. A guy from the Armored Corps, an abandoned tank, he’s going north. I said ‘OK, be careful’. We saw Magav Border Police advancing towards them. We drove a few dozen feet more and then we saw a kind of figure in the field, a few hundred feet away.”
"There were bodies strewn on the road and in the fields. It’s unfathomable. We saw policemen at the entrance to the festival who hadn’t managed to respond. They’d been shot. Pistols are no good against heavy machine guns"
“He has a ponytail and is presumably from the festival. I asked him what his name was. He shouted back ‘Andi from Ramleh’. I say to him ‘Andi, do you want to live?’ He answers ‘Yes’. I say ‘Start crawling’. He shouts back ‘My leg’s wounded’. I said ‘I didn’t tell you to walk. Start crawling’. He starts walking. I say to him ‘Crawl! crawl!’ I thought it made no sense that a person should be in the middle of a field. He’d been shot in the leg and had improvised a tourniquet on his own thigh. We took him to an ambulance that gathered more wounded.“
Z’: “An officer from the trackers contacted us and said ‘You gotta get here quick’. I get to the junction. I see a tank that’s been hit, 15-20 black motorbikes, the gatemen’s bodies and the body of a terrorist in the gateman’s booth. I know the division, so I knew where to go. We go straight into Shaldag’s gunfire at a terrorist. They do battle with him as we go into the trackers’ barracks to find loads of people from the festival, all hiding. The civilians are in a state of shock. They started telling their stories. I said to them ‘Guys, we’ll hear stories later’. There was a stoner there who begged us for a gun. One of the Bedouin guys said ‘Go and bomb them. I’ll be the first on the plane’.”
D': “The terrorists were hiding in all sorts of places in the base. They had set Re’im as their target. They fought courageously there. It’s a military headquarters. The battles went on for hours. One of the guys noticed someone signaling to him from a rooftop. It was a firefighter. We communicated by sign language and told him to run to the jeep. He ran down. We get shot at and evacuate him to the trackers’ barracks. The firefighter on the roof tells us he’d been there since 6am. Then Z’ tells us that a friend sent him a message that there’s a family locked in a safe room at Kfar Aza and they need someone to come help.”
15:40
Z’: “I receive a message from Zachi (actor Zachi Halevi who, with wife, journalist Lucy Aharish, organized the rescue and aid of a family besieged in Kfar Aza) with a location a telephone number for Eyal, the guy in the safe room. We’re still in Re’im and we are tasked with driving to Sderot to the police station to help Yamam who are fighting with outstanding valor. We, once again, pass by the horror scenes and get to Sderot.”
16:50
D’: “I write to the guy in the safe room, telling him that we’re still on another mission in Sderot. We know that the whole sector is ablaze, but we don’t really understand - I just thought that there’s a guy in a safe room, we’ll get there, calm him down, get him out. We didn’t think that Kfar Aza was ablaze and that genocide was being committed there. We’re way off. We didn’t understand at all.”
Z’: “Throughout the day, I meet people from my past and ask them who’d been killed. They don’t tell me. I met a friend, who hugged me and told me that Abraham had been killed, Michel had been killed, Stas had been killed. It’s like I’m not really there. These were kids who’d come to my team. I raised them. They were fighters. How can you take in all of this in one day? When the guy in the safe room isn’t responding to my messages, I just say that we should go to Kfar Aza.”
17:10
D’: “We get to the gas station and organize ourselves. We hadn’t eaten all day. We stuffed ourselves with chocolate and drank some water. With our energy levels up, we now need to focus. There are only a few of us. We collect ammunition from the wounded and bring along some water. We’re now beginning to lose the light.“
Z’: “A guy in shorts shows up with a pistol. He’s called R’. He says ‘Listen, my family’s inside. My mother, father and brother aren’t answering. I’m with my younger brother. He’s a fighter. I said ‘Come show us.’ The younger brother arrives in uniform. He’s called Y’. I’ve no idea where he came from. There are lots of forces at the gas station. They’re bringing out bodies of soldiers and placing them aside.“
D': “We report to the unit, and are granted permission to go into Kfar Aza. We drive along the fence. I thought that it was a very strange situation, but there was no shortage of surprises that day. I’m stealing my way into a community inside Israel… suddenly, from a plastic shed outside, at the edge of a garden, Z’ hears a kind of noise. We think it’s another altercation with terrorists. We aim our guns at the shed. It’s made of plastic. If someone hiding in there shoots, we definitely get hit. We advance quietly, open the door and we see a mother with a 10-year-old son and a barefoot 7-year-old daughter in a nightdress. We were three fighters. Now there are six of us. She tells us ‘We’ve been here since the morning. Where’s my husband? Is he injured?’ I now realize that the incident is very different from what we had thought. It’s not one family sitting in a safe room, wanting us to get them out. We realize that there’s bedlam and lots of wounded. And it’s eating me away inside, because reality was the very opposite of what we were thinking.”
Z’: “There is now a mother with her two children in the jeep. I’m now concerned that terrorists will come and fire RPGs at us. In the meantime, we get to the family in the safe room. I say to Eyal ‘It’s Z! Open up. It’s me. We were exchanging messages. Your message got to Lucy and Zachi passed it on to me’. He asked for my service number and that I should sing the Hatikva.”
D': “I began singing the Hatikva.”
Z’: “We open the door to the safe room and see a family, more children and a woman. He’s standing in front of us holding a schnitzel hammer. The choking look on his face was insane. Like we’d opened up a pharaoh’s tomb. There were loads of people in the safe room. We said ‘Take the women and children, get them behind us.’ I said ‘Guys, we’re going out. You don’t talk. You don’t turn on flashlights. We go from the door to the jeep. D’ has two men and children. We crammed in whoever we could.”
"We advance quietly, open the door and we see a mother with a 10-year-old son and a barefoot 7-year-old daughter in a nightdress. We were three fighters. Now there are six of us. She tells us ‘We’ve been here since the morning. Where’s my husband?"
Z’: “We open the door to the safe room and we see a family and more children. I brought them out alive. I’ve never been so scared in my whole life. Not for myself, but if I’m hit by an RPG, the children will be killed because of me. It’s as if we had a guardian angel. We got them out.“
20:00
D’: “I gave the guy with the schnitzel hammer a pistol. I told him he was now moving on from the hammer. I gave him a short lesson on how to operate the gun and it suddenly comes to me that they don’t have anything with them. I hadn’t really understood that they’d been in the safe room since 6 in the morning, but I do understand that they’re not at their sharpest. They’re not focused. We go outside and put them in the safe room at the gas station. I don’t know why there. The floor was drenched in blood – probably Shabbat morning cyclists. I told one of the guys to wash the floor because the families can’t go to the bathroom. They shouldn’t see the blood. They have small children’. Then Z’ talked to a friend.”
20:30
Z’: “I talk on the phone with a friend in the north of the country. He says ‘Listen, I have a friend here called Amit (Amit Idan, Roy’s brother) whose brother lives in Kfar Aza. His two children who have been with their mother’s corpse all day’. I said to D’, ‘We’re taking the team and going in’. R’ directs me to the house. I knock on the door and the children don’t answer. I call Amit and quietly say ‘The children aren’t answering’. He says ‘Tell them that Uncle Amit sent you’. I say that, and I’ll never forget that moment… they open the door and hug me. I want to hug them but I’m afraid that there are terrorists in the house… I just didn’t want them to surprise us. I quickly take them to the jeep. I then start searching the house, searching and searching. I get to the safe room and I find the mother. I cover her face. I just can’t believe it. The children were with her all day.
"I call Amit and tell him that Michael and Amalia are in the jeep. I found the mother, and he tells me that there’s also the father and little Abigail. We have to operate as fast as possible. The children are in the jeep and it’s dangerous. I didn’t know there was supposed be another girl. He says we have to find them. We spend another few minutes’ searching. I turn over the house: I open wardrobes, go into the safe room and look under the beds. I can’t find them. I have to get the children out. They’re in great danger. We swiftly get them out. They’re in their pajamas and it was a cold night, so we took blankets to cover them. She spoke with D’ in the back while I’m focused on driving in the dark, making sure we’re not ambushed by terrorists.”
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Foreign Minister Eli Cohen touring Kfar Aza with 28 ambassadors
(Photo: Shlomi Amsalem)
D': “When Amalia opened the door, there was a deathly silence. She said something like how good it was that we came. She’s very grown-up. She wasn’t afraid of us. Z’ and I turned to leave. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that there were two children and three bicycle helmets. I told Z’ to check. I told her to ask Amalia. I opened the door, asking ‘Amalia, where’s your sister?’ Then she says to me ‘They must have shot her outside like they shot Daddy’. My blood froze. I carried on. I said ‘Z’, let’s keep looking. We brought out another soldier. ‘Let’s find something, some proof’. That’s all she said. And then you, Ilana, show up just as we arrived. I hadn’t noticed in the house in the dark, but when we got outside, under the gas station light, I saw Amalia was covered in her mother’s blood. I told her to wait as I went into the gas station for wipes.“
Z’: “Amalia’s response knocked me out. I thought she’d say she was at the neighbors' or that she’d gone to Grandma’s. Then, she explained in great detail how they killed her father. And if they killed her father, they probably also killed her sister, and then you showed up. You must have driven very fast indeed.”
24:00
D’: “We went in again with R’ who joined us at the gas station. It was crazy. We understand the war situation. We’d been fighting since 8am. We’re four people sneaking around in a car. We can win, but it’s dangerous. We get to one of the old houses. We tell them it’s the IDF. It was an elderly couple. He suddenly answers ‘Yes, who are you?’ We answer ‘The IDF’. ‘Why have you come?’ they ask. ‘We’ve come to evacuate you’. He answers ‘No need’. I say to him ‘Can you please open the door?’. He says ‘Who are you? What’s your service number? Identify yourself’. I quietly try to persuade him to open the door. ‘Just a moment. I’ll get organized’.
"He opens the door and we see ammunition and realize that the terrorists had been here. They’d left behind a lot of ammunition in the course of the fighting. I told him to take the ammunition. In the distance, we hear more fighting. I ask him to let me in. He obliges. He then says ‘Why do we have to evacuate. What’s the problem?’. I just told him to get dressed and that we were now leaving. I then see he’s been wounded on his hand. His wife tells us that the terrorists shot through the safe room door and he was hit. I just thought to myself if he survived 14 hours in a safe room, we’re okay. And we’ve done this before. We told them to take their phones, ID cards and that they should get dressed. She starts walking around the house. I’ll take this, and that, a toothbrush...’ I ask if there’s anything else she needs. She says she’ll take her medication. He says ‘He’s right, take the medication. Turn on the light. I can’t see a thing’.”
"They then tell us that it’s even worse next door. She wasn’t wrong. The neighbors’ house had more unused ammunition. It was very weird. I think something must have disrupted their plan"
"We started taking them out, and then she said, ‘the terrorists left a suspicious object in the living room’. It was rather odd. They left a bag with a plethora of machine gun bullet chains and around 15 grenades. Hamas grenades aren’t the sturdiest, so this was a very dangerous situation. They then tell us that it’s even worse next door. She wasn’t wrong. The neighbors’ house had more unused ammunition. It was very weird. I think something must have disrupted their plan.”
“They had a vast amount of ammunition they hadn’t managed to use. They were unskilled. With all due respect, whenever we’ve met them in battle, we’ve defeated them very quickly. When we’ve been outnumbered in ambushes, it’s been much harder, but when we met in battle, face-to-face, it’s very clear-cut. The huge number of terrorists made all the difference, not the skill level. You can see they’d intended to use more and more ammunition but couldn’t. We kept on bringing out more and more families.“
D': “There was a house with a mother and two daughters, one a soldier. In my mind’s eye, I could just see my own daughter. There was also the 87-year-old woman. She was just lying on the bed in the safe room in her nightgown, with a candle and kitchen knife at her right-hand side. She told me she was afraid and asked me for how long should she bring her medication. Would tomorrow be enough? I asked her whether she had more than for tomorrow. She said she had enough for a week. I told her to bring it all.”
Z’: “One couple didn’t want to open up the safe room door. As we entered the house, we saw an RPG launcher with a missile ready for activation and guns scattered all over the garden.”
1:00
Z’: “At the end, we went to R’s family. We enter the house and I tell R’ not to get out of the jeep. We get to the safe room. I see the mother on the bed and the father sitting there, shot. The older brother was at the entrance. We went outside and asked D’ whether we should tell him. He says ‘Not now’. We go outside, go to another two families and take Y’ and say to him ‘We found them’. He looks at me and says ‘I knew. Don’t tell R’ ’. Keep bringing people out. I’ll tell him in the end. At around 2am, Y’ says ‘Guys, I think we’ve finished for today’.”
D’: “Y’ is a real hero. Lots of people owe him their lives. It wasn’t just us. There were others. Amalia is a hero. Michael is a hero. We did what we had to do. We simply did it well. And maybe it’s the friendship between myself and Z’ and the fighters who were with us.”
Z’: “There was a couple whose whole house was closed and they didn't want to open the safe room. Before we entered the house, we’d seen an RPG launcher with a missile ready to be activated and more weapons scattered in the garden.”
The following day, Z’ was lightly wounded fighting terrorists on Road 232. He was taken to hospital and was back in the field the same day. Z’, D’ and the rest of the fighters are still in the field. In the days following October 7th, they made sure to ask after Amalia and Michael and the rest of the Kfar Aza residents that they’d rescued. They were overjoyed to hear that 3-year-old Abigail Idan seems to be alive. She was abducted by Hamas terrorists along with Avichai Broduch’s wife and three children and is being held in Gaza.
The two seasoned fighters prefer to stay out of the limelight. “We’re telling the story so that people know there are fighters doing everything they can for the country. It’s beautiful to see the People of Israel at this hour - giving and helping one another. Z’ is retired. He wasn’t supposed to be here anyway, but when his friend, M’ had asked him to train the guys and he showed up. “I really just did a few months of miluim reserve duty because of my friendship with M’. We were just driving. We were an independent force within total chaos, carrying out orders and doing what we thought was right.“