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ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER: 6.28am on October 7, 19-year-old surveillance soldier Roni Eshel, at the Nahal Oz border outpost, sees the beginning of the Hamas attack.ADAM HARVEY: Roni broadcasts the codeword for an assault on Israel.ADAM HARVEY: The fence is breached by explosives in at least 29 places.Some break off for the border outposts including Nahal Oz, where Roni Eshel is stationed, along with 24 other unarmed female surveillance soldiers.
But at 6.45AM, with the kibbutz’s speakers blaring “tseva adom” – red alert - Rami calls a friend on the squad, Hagi.ADAM HARVEY: Like almost everybody else in Be’eri, Gold has no idea that more than 20 attackers are already inside the sprawling kibbutz, hunting its residents. Like all Be’eri houses it has a thick-walled bomb shelter known as a ‘safe room’, although it has no lock.
They started to say, okay, so what are we going to do now? What's going to happen now? What are we going to do? And people said, oh, wait, the army will come, probably 20 minutes, 10 minutes. Stay, stay in your safe room and wait until the army comes.AYELET HAKIM: On that Saturday, it was quiet. There was no sound at all, no drones, no airplanes, no helicopters. It was so quiet.
NILI BAR SINAI: These people, they were wild, they were wild. They were shooting around just for fun. They would come to the house and take whatever they could. And then they would just shoot around, just for the joy of it. ADAM HARVEY: Ziv runs into two Hamas squads. Border police take care of the first one. The second wasn’t so simple.
He managed to call his wife, tell her he loves her and he's dying, and she didn't believe him, either and I reached him. He got choked from the bullet in the chest, and he died. AYELET HAKIM: I told her listen, there are very bad people in our house, and if we, if mom or dad will go out, we might not come back. So we can't go out right now. So we have to stay and we have to stay really, really quiet.
ADAM HARVEY: As civilians were being murdered and kidnapped and fighting for their lives, where was the Israeli Army? YOSSI KUPERWASSER: They were convinced that Hamas is deterred and unable to carry out such an operation. This was the reason they ignored the information and decided to keep, to delay the decision making. It's a terrible mistake.
And for the third time, I was very nervous, you know, coming back to him and say, “You know, we need to move. We don't have time, and it's going to be dark like anytime soon.”ISRAEL ZIV: The whole point was misconcept of the situation, because what, what was supposed to be in place is taking over the kibbutz massively, and not deal as a first stage with each house or each rescue.
AYELET HAKIM’S DAUGHTER: I don't think he’s Superman. I think he's our hero. Without him I don’t know where I would be now.
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