At 6:30 in the morning, I was sleeping like the rest of Israel. All of a sudden I heard big booms. I was sure I was dreaming. We stayed in the shelter for about a quarter of an hour and the booms simply did not stop. My ears went deaf and I was already dizzy, my body was shaking and I could hardly speak. My mother called me and heard me crying into the phone without stopping, saying there are rockets. I told her that even in the last military operation it wasn’t like this. The ground is shaking, and I had lots of thoughts of what would happen now. And then we got a phone call from the War Room – there is an incursion from every direction, race to the War Room.
We were not sure what to do, whether to stay protected or to run to the War Room with only a small chance of living, or would a rocket hit us on the way. We decided to run, we couldn’t believe that this is the situation were in. We are in a movie. Even though we have prepared for an incursion all our lives, no one thought it would ever happen. I hung up on my mother on the phone and started to run, hoping that a rocket would not fall on us and blow us up. It was so close it sounded like it fell next to me or even on me. We got to the War Room and all the girls were screaming and crying. They realized that they had gotten almost all our lookouts.
I couldn’t find one of my friends, and I realized that she had stayed alone in the residence. She didn’t answer my call and I had no way of getting to her. We begged to be told what was happening and finally, they told us that the terrorists had reached the base. I saw black again and I was sure it was the end for me. I couldn’t breathe, my throat was dry, my stomach was turned upside down and my head even more so. We heard shots, people falling, screams. We prayed to God, and that’s the only thing that kept us going. Our friends who sat with us the night before entered with bullet and grenade fragments in their bodies, covered with blood.
They started coming in injured, one after the other, without pause. It was a horror movie. The War Room started to fill up with wounded, I looked and didn’t really get it. It was complete chaos. There were screams and even a woman with a baby in the War Room. The 51st Battalion fought for us with the last forces they had left after they saw their friends die in front of them. We were caught off guard.
We helped as much as we could. Our friends fell before our eyes, in our arms. Little by little we realized that our friends are not coming back from outside. Suddenly a friend of ours who stayed in the residence came in and said that exactly two minutes after we left the shelter the terrorists entered the residence. She heard everything – that they were breaking into rooms, stealing, blowing up our friends from the base with grenades and shooting at them, and even that one of them entered my room and locked himself inside. We hid under tables, some in cupboards and some helped the wounded. The power went out completely and the generator didn’t help either. The doors were opened and the terrorists were still outside. We divided the last liters of water into small sips among us.
We were told that the terrorists were on the roof above us and that there were no more forces outside. We were left with seven fighters, and we were sure that we would not get out of there alive. The fighters entered one after the other and shouted that their entire unit was gone, that there were no more soldiers, and that there was no one to help.
We begged to be taken out of there, then units started arriving and we breathed a little more. Finally, they told us that they were coming to rescue us. I will never forget those seven minutes to the bus – bodies they tried to hide from us, shots in the background, and pure darkness. We had to stay quiet, close together, and keep running.”
Anonymous.
Source: Ynet