The ambulance shook as it made its way along the road. The patient, an IDF officer, felt the constant bumping up and down in every part of his body. “I told the driver to keep going.” He knew the road was swarming with terrorists. He was still in danger.
Bumping up and down, up and down. Seven months later, he tells me he thought, “I’ll die here.”
He tells of the long jarring drive. It seemed to go on and on but was really much shorter than he remembered. The ambulance had been shot at by terrorists while extracting him from the war zone to a waiting helicopter. The patient was loaded on. He recalls it as a blur.
“Where are we going?” he asked. He was being taken to Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. “Why Hadassah?” he remembered thinking, and asking. As the helicopter continued on in its night flight, someone explained the situation to him. “You don’t understand what is happening; there are 2,000 wounded at Soroka [hospital].”
Now the officer wonders whether it was all a dream. Was he really back home? Had everything he experienced on the front lines on Oct. 7 been real? “Did I go through this? I felt it’s odd… How did this happen to us? Where were we? Why did it happen?”
After the helicopter ride, the patient was taken to the hospital. He wanted to call his wife and parents to tell them where he was.
He knew, from long years of experience as an officer in an IDF armored brigade, that when soldiers are wounded their families often get a call from the army. He wanted to avoid that shock, calling them himself.
“I didn’t want anyone to tell my family [that I was wounded] ... I wanted to tell them.”
Once in the operating room, he refused treatment until he could speak with them. “Finally, I got the phone [from one of the medics] and called my dad.”
He was able to tell his family that he was wounded. “I told him [my father] to come to Hadassah. I spoke to my wife, she asked what was happening; she understood everything.” He told her he was going to the operating room.
The day of: October 7
Twenty-four hours before the patient ended up in the operating room, demanding to use the phone to call home so someone knew where he was, he had gone to bed like so many millions of Israelis, on Friday night, October 6.
Lt.-Col. Karm Nbwani was in his hometown of Julis, a Druze village in northern Israel. He has served in the IDF for many years and is deputy commander of the 7th Armored Brigade, one of Israel’s most storied tank units.
On Oct. 7, the 7th Brigade had a tank battalion stationed on the Gaza border. The 77th Battalion was one of the units, along with Golani infantry and others, to guard the border that night. The deputy commander was at home in the North. At 7:30 a.m. on Oct. 7, he awoke to the images of horror so many Israelis witnessed that morning.
“We understood what was happening, we called up everyone,” he remembers. He had an army jeep with him, which, as an officer, he was allowed to take home. When he saw the unfolding emergency, he called his unit to action, including the reservists. “I told them all: ‘If you have a weapon, come.’”
I meet the deputy commander near Kibbutz Be’eri, at a table under a large tent that provides shade to a coffee shop and a bike shop near the entrance to the kibbutz. Before we meet, I don’t know his story, although I have been here before, a few days after Oct. 7. I have already seen the destruction at Be’eri, where so many people were massacred by Hamas.
Nbwani is a quiet, modest man. A soldier and officer who has served for many years, he wears the confidence and strength of someone who has seen many wars, and the calmness one would want from an officer in the closed quarters of a tank, where four soldiers often live together for days, under the pressure of combat.
On Oct. 7, Nbwani drove south without a tank. He came to fight Hamas with his men, but without the armored vehicles they were used to. “We tried to understand what was unfolding.” As a Druze Israeli, he is a native Arabic speaker, so he could easily understand the videos appearing on social media and chat groups showing the Hamas attack; he saw the videos on Telegram.
“I understood that it was a huge war. It was clear to me. I tried to bring everyone from home; I have officers that were on courses,” he says, referring to his unit.
The arriving soldiers didn’t know how far the terrorists had penetrated. They chambered their rifles while on Route 6 heading south, expecting to run into the enemy at any minute. They entered through the junction at Beit Kama near Rahat, then headed toward the Gaza border.
By 10 a.m., a dozen men from the unit had assembled. They had their rifles and some gear. They had heard that the area of Mefalsim and the Black Arrow site near Gaza needed support, so they headed there. Mefalsim is a Gaza-border community between Sderot and Kfar Aza. The Black Arrow site is along the border road, facing Jabalya in Gaza.
As the men drove toward the border, they saw the road strewn with cars and dozens of dead bodies. It was then that they began to comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy.
“We saw dead children, we saw a dead pregnant woman. I have kids and a pregnant wife, so everything you see you imagine it’s your family,” the officer recounts.
“We came across terrorists.” They were fighting for their lives now. “We fought there for several hours. We were three cars – the two jeeps and a private vehicle – and we had three men in each car.”
The officer, who had awakened a few hours earlier, was now in the thick of the battle for Israel’s survival.
The battle
“I saw what the [Hamas] Nukhba had done, killing everyone, and we wanted to fight with all our strength. We fought there on the road. And then we returned to Kfar Aza; at the entrance there were more people arriving from the 7th Brigade. At that point, our commander told us there were a lot of terrorists in Be’eri.”
The men decided to move several kilometers down the road to support the operation of saving Be’eri. It was a chaotic situation.
The kibbutz entrance, where I met Nbwani seven months later, was where the men had met up with other IDF units who scrambled to come and confront the terrorists on Oct. 7. They were told there were civilians inside the kibbutz.
The organized battle structure that an IDF unit would usually adhere to had broken down. The men of the 7th Brigade, a tank unit, were thrust into a war to save civilians alongside other units cobbled together to do their best under the circumstances. They didn’t have all their gear, either. It was going to get dark, and they didn’t have night vision equipment.
They proceeded into the kibbutz. At first, the houses they came upon appeared deserted. The soldiers tried opening the doors and calling out, but it seemed no one was present.
“We went into houses that weren’t burned and saw no terrorists, and they seemed normal. We would knock on the door and knock on the safe rooms.” Eventually, the soldiers realized there were people inside, but they had been there for many hours and were afraid to reply.
“Then we would try to speak to those inside; we went to the window,” the officer recounts. They didn’t trust that the men coming to save them were really IDF soldiers. “Finally they agreed to open [the doors].”
“I could see [in one woman’s] eyes that she has been in there 14 hours or so.” It was almost 8:00 in the evening. The kibbutz had been under siege since 6:30 a.m.
Further into Be’eri
Nbwani and his men helped rescue 40 civilians, he estimates, most of them young people. One of the civilians told him about another place in Be’eri where one of the sisters of those rescued was sheltering. But he had only 10 men with him, how would he save more people?
The place they needed to get to now was only 300 meters away. Nbwani divided his force and took several soldiers with him to another part of the kibbutz to save more people.
“We were shot at. We got on the ground. All that time we had been under fire. We had been killing terrorists on the way, dozens of terrorists. One of us was wounded.
“When we got to the sister’s place, she opened the door and said there were other civilians, and we began to help people, just us three soldiers – and there were another 30 civilians with us.”
The officer was holding his M-16 rifle and had a sidearm. He gave his pistol to one of the civilians, and they made their way out to safety. They rescued approximately 80 people. It took about an hour.
The commander of the 36th Division, Brig.-Gen. Dado Bar Kalifa, was on the scene now. He had encouraged the men of the 7th Brigade to come to this site to help free people from the terrorists’ grip. There was a tank inside Be’eri, and the men went back inside to help rescue more people.
“We understood there were other civilians in the buildings. There were terrorists and civilians,” the officer says.
It was a chaotic situation. They returned with members of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit. They divided a street between the fighters, so each would secure a part of it. They came upon a kindergarten and began to move down the street. There was a lot of shooting, and terrorists had occupied areas on both sides of the street.
Wounded in body, strong in spirit
Nbwani was wounded, and two members of his unit were killed.
“With my rifle, I continued to shoot. We were shooting at them and they at us. It was an ongoing battle. I didn’t know I was wounded. I had been hit in the stomach and leg,” he recalls.
He only realized he had been wounded when he tried to stand up. His body gave way. He had on gloves and his vest, which holds ammunition. He had to take his glove off and find the wound on his body.
“I understood then that I was wounded, and I took off my shirt and looked at my leg. I put my finger in the bullet hole and understood I had a hole in my stomach and put my finger in my mouth [and tasted blood].”
Now this man, who had fought for so many hours, began to feel his spirit breaking. He looked to his left, and there was a tank next to him. As an armored corps officer and tank commander, the immediate danger became clear to him. He was on sloping ground, and those in the tank couldn’t see him. His fear was that he would be run over. But because of his wounds, he couldn’t get up. The tank was inching closer, a meter away now. He assumed he would be run over.
“I knew I was wounded, but if I got run over that would be it. I used all my strength to get off the ground and fired in the direction of the terrorists.” He hauled himself 20 meters up the road to where other soldiers were positioned.
He grabbed one and told the man to look him in the eyes. “I’m wounded, don’t leave me here, and don’t let me be taken hostage,” he remembers saying.
He had his sidearm cocked, and he was ready now in case anyone came upon him to try to kidnap him. The battle continued. He lay there with his pistol, trying to breathe, he tells me.
He made a decision. He wouldn’t shout out in pain. “I was silent, I didn’t want them to be focused on me, let them fight the terrorists. I decided I would stay awake.
“That’s what saved me. I stayed alert, aware of what was going on around me, and I didn’t shout out or ask for help.”
Time passed. Eventually, a paramedic came to his assistance. By then, he could barely speak. The paramedic cut him a bit, puncturing the area where air had entered his body, and suddenly he felt he could breathe again. He could see again.
“I realized I was in a bad way… I tried to understand what was happening around me. I didn’t know if I was dying or dreaming,” he recounts.
Eventually, he was taken to a vehicle and then to an ambulance. But this wasn’t the end. The ambulance had to brave the roads near Be’eri, where lurking terrorists shot at it.
New mission
Days later in the hospital, after the helicopter ride and the call to his family, it dawned on the officer that he had a new mission.
“At that point, I made the decision,” he says. He would get out of the hospital and visit the families of the wounded members of his brigade. “I understood someone needed to deal with the wounded. There were the officers from the 77th; there were also the hostages; we had wounded and dead [soldiers].
“We had something like 30 killed, mostly from the 77th Battalion,” he notes. “I decided I would work with the families of the unit. Since then, I have been going to all the funerals. I came out of the hospital in a wheelchair with a tube running out of my belly where I was wounded.”
Despite his condition, he had a goal. He would meet the families of the fallen and of the hostages from the unit. He would meet the wounded and speak to them eye to eye. He would speak to those whose family members had been taken hostage and tell them the IDF would do everything to bring them back home.
“From that point, I was always going out to funerals because each day there were killed and wounded,” he says. “As a commander, I couldn’t sit on the sidelines. I was able to get to most of the families of the hostages, wounded, and fallen. As I had been wounded, I needed to keep going back to the hospital.”
“The meetings were difficult,” he says. But “each time I met a family, it gave me motivation to go to the next family.
“We have families of hostages who don’t know where their sons are, or their sons are fallen and they don’t know where the body is, or they saw their son on a Hamas video.
“It was important to me personally; I knew what it was to be wounded.” He took upon himself the burden of standing with the unit’s families.
There are now 70 families who have been affected.
The 7th Brigade has been fighting since Oct. 7. It has been on the front lines in battles in Khan Yunis and Jabalya and in other operations in Jabalya.
“The 7th Brigade has never come out [of Gaza]. It was in the first ground operation, then Khan Yunis, and then in Jabalya; just when they came out, they went to Jabalya. This is the brigade that is a regular army unit that has fought the most,” he says.
Nbwani went through months of rehabilitation. Recently he returned to the army to fight in Jabalya with his men.
When I meet him, he has just returned.
He has spent 18 years in the IDF and is experienced in this type of war, having fought in 2006, 2009, and 2014. He knows Gaza and this kind of battle. He doesn’t think this war will be the end.
“We need to continue, we have more than 100 to 130 hostages there,” he asserts. “We can’t sit on the side. We didn’t choose this war. They chose this war, and we need to pay the price. The price for the war, it is always to lose; everyone loses in war.”
The men are clear on what they are fighting for. “We are the 7th Brigade and [will] continue to fight as long as we need to until there is quiet and the hostages are home.”
A special bond
Nbwani gets up from the table. We walk to his car, and he drives me inside the kibbutz. This is where he was on Oct. 7.
We retrace his steps up one street and through a line of houses to where he was wounded. It’s a small street with a kindergarten on one side and a jumble of destroyed buildings on the other. The top part of the street, where a tank once stood, has been destroyed.
He shows me where his comrades fell. The fallen include: Maj. Benjamin Trekinsky, 32, operations officer in the 7th Brigade, from Tel Aviv; Capt. Itay Yehoshua, 36, member of the IDF General Staff’s personal protection detail, from Hadid; and First Sgt. Neria Ben David, 22, squad leader in the 603 Battalion, from Haifa.
Small candles mark the area where they were killed. Their families have left the candles to commemorate them. He picks up the extinguished candles.
This is where he was wounded. Here he was taken up the road to be saved.
One of the men who helped him on Oct. 7 is here today too, unplanned. They speak briefly. They share a special bond.
I step back a bit. I was not in this battle. I am an observer.
They, who fought here, need space and a moment of quiet to reflect on what they experienced. Perhaps they are closing a circle today.