“After you go through a few houses there, or after you get to a safe room just a few seconds late and see what was left behind there, you realize you’re in a race against time.”

– Menahem Kalmanson

The Elhanan Team had three members: Elhanan Kalmanson, his brother Menachem, and his nephew Itiel. On the afternoon of October 7th, Elhanan and Menachem set out from Otniel. Elhanan was a Mossad operative and had spent Shabbat with his family in Otniel. Menachem was in the village of Retamim. When the rocket fire, explosions and interceptions began, his initial instinct was to stay close to his family. In contrast, Elhanan was called to command the rapid response team that he had established. Menachem was called up to assist.

At 8:20 a.m., Elhanan woke his children and informed them of the situation. His son, Shay, described that morning in Otniel: “He told us that many terrorists had broken through, paragliders, trucks, and they had breached the fence.” Elhanan was agitated, painting a grim picture of what was happening. “This is disaster on a national scale, there will be more casualties than during the Yom Kippur War,” he predicted.

When Menachem arrived in Otniel, he received a thorough briefing from his brother. “There has been a massive infiltration into towns in the area, entire villages have been captured,” he said. He stood watch until 04:00 PM, when Elhanan texted him: “I’m packing and heading south.” After a moment of brief hesitation, Menachem decided to join him. Meanwhile, Elhanan was hearing from friends, including IDF commanders, that their children were trapped in the area and needed rescue.

As they approached the Gaza envelope, a new challenge arose: military roadblocks intended to prevent terrorists from moving northward and civilians from heading south. Utilizing ingenuity, Elhanan managed to deceive the soldiers and convinced them to let them through. At the same time, he was texting with friends from the army and realized that the place where they were most needed was Be’eri.

On the way, they first witnessed the horror: an overturned truck, with the bodies of terrorists nearby, their weapons by their side, RPG launchers scattered on the road, loaded with rockets, ready to fire. The fact that no one had collected the weapons made them realize the intensity of the fighting. By this point, Elhanan understood that there had been a complete collapse.

At the entrance to their destination, Kibbutz Be’eri, they encountered chaos. Dozens of soldiers were idling outside the kibbutz, waiting for instructions. Officers were assigning sectors. Civilians, whose relatives were trapped in houses in the kibbutz, were crying out for help, but the army was still trying to get organized. Near the gate, senior officers were dividing sectors, with many units sent to rescue the kibbutz. Inside the kibbutz, it was war: “light gunfire, heavy gunfire, grenade explosions, RPGs, shell fire, rocket sirens, smoke rising from every house.”  

Despite the abundance of forces, Elhanan realized that no one had taken on the mission of rescuing the civilians trapped inside the kibbutz. They went in to rescue a 12-year-old girl, a 90-year-old grandmother, and anyone else they could. Throughout the night, they continued to rescue trapped civilians, even when they were exhausted and terrified of what was to come. The overriding principle they adhered to was that “people should not leave like refugees.” They tried to distract those they rescued from the horrors. They insisted that even in this most terrible of moments, they would leave with their heads held high, not in shame: a woman wearing only a bra and underwear was given a moment of grace to find clothes, or special efforts were made to locate hearing aids and shoes for an elderly woman.

At the last house they reached, they were exhausted. Even the batteries in their flashlights had run out. They took shelter inside a house as daylight broke. Elhanan was the first to enter, opened the door, and shouted, “I’ve been hit!” A burst of gunfire knocked him to the ground. He was pronounced dead at the gate of Be’eri, where he had rescued more than a hundred of the kibbutz’s residents.

“I said to them: ‘I can’t get there right now; it’s swarming with terrorists. But give me a few minutes and I’ll get you out, you have nothing to worry about.”

For Rami Davidian, the morning of Simchat Torah started at home. He woke up early to prepare to go to the synagogue. At 6:45, his plans changed. Alongside the incessant gunfire, Rami’s phone kept ringing. On the other end was his friend Amir, who was extremely worried. A friend’s son was on a farm outside of Patish and needed assistance. “I didn’t ask many questions. A friend asks for something, so I go,” Rami explains.

Upon arriving at the entrance to the village of Patish, he noticed that something was different. Two bicycles were lying on the road. At first, he thought it was a traffic collision, but then he spotted three severed fingers scattered on the road. He placed them on the guardrail and continued toward the young man he was supposed to rescue. He then came across a truck filled with bullet-riddled bodies, with more gunfire in the background. He realized something was going on, but still couldn’t piece together the full picture.

As he got closer to the farm, he encountered a swarm of young people, or “children,” as he described them, terrified and running in all directions. He said it looked “like the Exodus from Egypt.” There were about 300 young people fleeing for their lives from the Nova Festival. He tried to calm them down and direct them towards the village. At the same time, he called his sons-in-law and instructed them to come quickly to rescue the young people.

When he finally reached the location of the young man he had initially set out to find, he discovered not just one, but fifteen. He took them all to his home. Before unloading them, one of the youths told him there was another girl who needed rescuing. He gave him her phone number and requested her location. While driving back, it became clear that Rami’s number had spread like wildfire. Parents of children from the festival began messaging and calling him, asking for help, sending locations, and providing detailed descriptions of the young people who required rescue.

Davidian described rescue after rescue, from the avocado orchards, through the valleys of Be’eri, Magen Junction, and the Nova Festival. In one case, he saw terrorists patrolling and instructed the girls on how to escape without being noticed. In another instance, he convinced the terrorists to release a young woman they were holding, promising them in Arabic that he would “take care” of her. In other cases, he arrived too late.

Although he knew that the rescues endangered his own life, the messages and calls he received convinced him to continue.

In one case, he realized that the parents were directing him to a specific shelter. There, he found the tragic fate of the young people he was searching for: a river of blood and young people matching the descriptions their parents had given him.

The Nova Festival looked like a battlefield. Along the entrance, he saw young people who had been shot, and as he progressed toward the center of the party, he witnessed further atrocities and decided then and there to take care of the bodies. Because of the thick smoke, the terrorists didn’t see how he lowered them from the trees, untied them, and covered them. With the blessing of Shema Yisrael, he wept bitterly for every person he couldn’t save alive. All that night and into the next morning, he continued his personal rescue mission.

It was only on Sunday afternoon that Rami began to encounter soldiers in the field. “I explain to them that I’m a Jew, and they ask me to leave the area as quickly as possible because it’s dangerous. I started laughing and said to them, ‘Now you’re telling me it’s dangerous? I’ve been here for two days.’”