6.35am: Around the time Shari Mendes got her Order 8, Nimrod Palmach, who was staying near Tel Aviv, received an order from his company commander to report to army HQ near Jerusalem. Former special forces, Nimrod was now a reservist in the search and rescue team. He disobeyed the order, arguing that his brigade should head south to the Gazan border, although he’s still not quite sure why. He told his commander something didn’t feel right. “A hunch. I felt it was much worse than we were being told. There were two voices; one was telling me to trust my instincts, the second was saying, ‘Be modest, trust the IDF, who do you think you are?’”
Choosing the former, Palmach, who runs an NGO that involves networking and outreach for young Israelis across the Arab world, drove south trying to build a picture of what had happened along the way. The only weapon he had was a pistol which contained nine bullets.
Nimrod, 39, got a call from his ex-wife who was sobbing. Her new husband was from Kibbutz Nir Oz – it was under attack from hundreds of terrorists. “I had already heard about the attack on Sderot [the closest Israeli city to the Gaza border, where more than 50 residents were killed]. So now I understand. Israel has been invaded and the Gaza division has been overwhelmed. Hamas took down intelligence, they took down antennae, even my phone was scrambled. No one [in the hierarchy] knew what was going on. The radio is supposed to give members of the IDF a secret password to tell them go, go! Red alert, it’s a war. But they couldn’t even do that. No radio. Three thousand rockets in the first 20 minutes; we were overwhelmed, the entire system is crippled.”
He says he suddenly had “the most crushing realisation that I’m about to die. There are thousands of them.” He paused briefly by the side of the road to record a video saying goodbye to his two kids so when the army found his body his children would have something to remember. “I said, ‘Daddy loves you and he will be proud of you the rest of your lives.’” Then, he texted army mates telling them to get down there asap. “If you have a gun come here now, you’ll save lives.”
He was stopped at a special forces checkpoint near Netivot around 9am, and they prevented him going any further. So he hopped on a pick-up truck, which was allowed through, and soon found himself fighting alongside a collection of random soldiers and ordinary Israelis outside Kibbutz Alumim. He managed to pick up a dead terrorist’s gun. “I was one of the first responders, the only one who survived the whole day, I think. There wasn’t time to communicate with people. It was the fight of our lives, a handful of us against hundreds and hundreds of terrorists. You’re outgunned, outnumbered. I saw many examples of bravery, even civilians. We gave everything we had to try to stop it.”
Everyone he came across until 7.30pm that night was dead. At the Alumim junction, he counted 23 bodies. “All of them were kids, like young adults. I didn’t know about the Nova festival. I was asking ‘Why are they dressed like that?’” Near the roadside, he found the body of a young woman, “her trousers pulled down, her underwear, blood on her backside.” Instinctively, Nimrod started to dress her.
“Of course they raped women,” Nimrod almost shouts. On one terrorist’s body, he found a detailed map of the kibbutzim and a list of Hebrew phrases. “Pull your pants down” was one of them. It was hard to preserve evidence, he says, because everyone was picking up the bodies as fast as possible. Hamas was still kidnapping the dead and taking them over the border.
Palmach believes that Hamas was unaware the Nova festival was taking place. He thinks they could have made serious progress towards Tel Aviv, but conversations the terrorists had on video suggest the lure of raping beautiful young girls at the desert party was too tempting. “Suddenly, after all those years, the monster was released. A lot of them left their tasks. They were supposed to go to Israeli air force bases. Imagine the humiliation of a bunch of jihadists wearing their sandals standing next to an F35!”
He will never forget the carnage he witnessed in places like Kibbutz Be’eri. “I saw it all – women raped, dead kids in cars, families burned, some with body parts, some without. And the damage to the buildings, like a tornado passed. I saw the Holocaust,” he says. “So many dead bodies, many mutilated. The creativity of the deaths was overwhelming. A head speared on a rake. Hamas terrorists took their time. We didn’t have an army that day. I’ve seen what happens to the Jewish people without an army.”
Palmach, who spent five years in the special forces, says he wanted to go into Gaza. “I wanted to go not for revenge, but to see the Israeli army in a strong position. Our army was caught by surprise that day. I want to see the strength and power of the IDF again.”
Militarily, he thinks Israel has been doing the right thing. “We’ve moved slowly, taken our time. You can’t clean Gaza in a week. We’re not shooting then checking, we’re checking then shooting. That’s what we do. We’re obligated in our moral fabric to bring the hostages back. We can strike Hamas to the point where it’s no longer a threat. I think we are 90 per cent of the way there.”
Like many survivors, Nimrod Palach is haunted by What Ifs. There is a desperately sad video, unbearable actually, of two girls being pursued by a terrorist. He shoots the first one, then the other drops to her knees and begs for her life. There is a brief pause before he shoots her in the head.
Nimrod thought he recognised the place where it happened. It was a few feet away from where he was at the Alumim junction. Why couldn’t he have saved her? Recently, he couldn’t sleep and he got in the car and drove to the spot. When he got there, he knelt down and said a prayer. In the dirt, he spotted the young woman’s credit card. “I saw her name, I called her mother. She answered. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ We both cried.”
Earlier this week, as Iranian missiles were launched against Israel, I texted Nimrod to check he and the family were OK. It took a second before he texted back, “WE WILL WIN!” With people like him, of course they will.
nationalpost.com
www.telegraph.co.uk
