The Battle for Kibbutz Re’im, Saturday October 7, 2023.

Harel Oren and Ilan Cohen spent a week in Toronto recently, giving testimony of their experience protecting Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel on Saturday October 7, 2023.

They are good friends who live and serve on the Kibbutz Security Committee. Ilan runs the Emergency Response Team.

Harel – sitting on the left in the video – and Ilan, to his right, were awakened at around 6:30 am that morning by a barrage of rockets. Living along the border with the Gaza Strip, they were accustomed to the sound of incoming rockets. But this was different. More like an invasion. An intensity they had not experienced previously. They immediately leaped into action.

Ilan sent out a message to all 432 kibbutz residents to go into their safe rooms and shelter in place. Meanwhile, Harel got his five members of the security team to grab their very basic weapons – a few rifles and pistols – and they went to the west side (and most exposed) of the kibbutz. Over the next few hours, they were joined by additional people – a friend of Harel’s, a few police officers. But the number of Hamas terrorists they were up against, their pick-up trucks stocked with all manner of terrorists and weapons, spelled disaster. They were massively outnumbered and thought only moment to moment, hoping, of course, that the IDF would show up soon. That, tragically, took hours. 

This is the story of Kibbutz Re’im. October 7, 2023.

(We learned of the availability of Harel and Ilan at the last minute and scrambled to meet them at the appointed time. So, our AV quality may not be the best but this is really about the story. Nor was I “dressed” for the occasion. Again. The priority was to obtain their testimony. Everything else was secondary.)

Ilan and Harel told me about a succession of Hamas pick-up trucks that showed up at the front gate of the Kibbutz. Each transported between five and ten terrorists. They were relaxed, well-organized and very familiar with the kibbutz entrance; all of which reflects a high degree of planning.

The Hamas terrorists were very methodical. They began their carnage in a group of houses close to a small forested area. Harel and Ilan describe how each person in a group of terrorists had an assigned task, which they executed, calmly. House by house.

Eventually, a few police officers came in to support the five Re’im men who had been managing the impossible. And then a friend of Harel’s.

By mid-afternoon, Re’im was in the control of friendly forces. As you heard the men describe, what is extraordinary is the enormous difference so few men could make in holding off the terrorists and disrupting their savagery. Each terrorist shot by a Re’im defender created panic and disrupted the well-laid plans; sufficiently so that the numbers of dead, injured and those taken hostage from that Kibbutz were much smaller than in other locations that had been attacked. The heroism of these men saved so many lives.

When I return to Israel I have promised to meet with Harel and Ilan – and their displaced Kibbutz members – and to follow their journey over the next year. The trauma of October 7 will define them for the rest of their lives. Ilan will never let go of those children sitting with their murdered parents, for hours, because he had to make an impossible decision. But because of their immediate responsiveness, the number of dead, injured and those taken hostage in Re’im was dramatically lower than it would have been otherwise. On every kibbutz and moshav where the security team kept weapons in their homes (and not in a storage shed) and sprung into action at the first signs of the unprecedented barrage, the results were much less severe. So many lessons, sadly, learned.

Thank you. To the heroes of Kibbutz Re’im. And thank you to our viewers and listeners for your support of these extraordinary people and stories.