Only this week, almost two months after Black Sabbath, Israel opened his correspondence from that morning with his wife, Yifat, or as it is stored on his cellphone: Yifati. There are hundreds of messages there, from early morning to late evening. She writes a lot, he answers a little. She's worried, he tries to reassure. She asks, he doesn't have all the answers.
Intertwined in this lengthy correspondence is the question that was asked that morning by every family in every kibbutz near Gaza: Where is the army? The guard had no answers. For long hours he alone was the entire army. A brigadier general in sports clothes, with a knife in his hand, who is trying to stop the terrorists' onslaught on his kibbutz, Kfar Gaza, with his wife and three children locked in the safe room in the background, and his neighbors and friends crying out to him to save them.
Gaza village two weeks after fighting began | Shmuel Buchris
This is an untold story, presented here for the first time. When we got to his home in Gaza this week, I realized how close everything was. The terrorists entered the kibbutz from three points, one of them less than 50 meters from his house. Only on Monday of this week did they close the breach, but the terrorists were a step away from the big prize: a division commander in the IDF. All they had to do was run forward and enter the second house on the right, whose entrance says "guard."
During this long day they were with him several times, and also at his house. The signs of the fighting are still visible: the bomb thrown at the window on the back porch, thinking it was the safe room; the grenade that exploded on the balcony, leaving a small crater; The bullet marks on the living room window, as well as inside it, and the bullet stuck in the refrigerator. And the blood stain still left on the bedroom floor. "We were lucky," he says.
This is only the second time he has returned to the house since then. He wanders around the rooms, looking at the mess in disbelief. In clothes scattered around. In the car keys that are placed in exactly the same place where they left them then. In flowers bought for the holiday, and dried in a vase. In the family magnet pictures left on the fridge. On bicycles bought shortly before the disaster, standing broken at the entrance to the house. And a parasol that crashed into the hot tub in the garden. A jumble of destruction and memories, a silent testimony to what happened here.
Charging without weapons
Shomer (46) was born in Ashdod, and spent most of his military service in the Nahal Brigade. He commanded the brigade sabotage company, the training base and the reconnaissance battalion, was commander of the Ramallah Brigade and the division officer of the Southern Command, commanded the Nahal Brigade, was head of the operations department of the General Staff, and last September was appointed to command the 146th Division (the Bang Formation). In Nahal he met Yifat, a girl from Kfar Gaza, and moved to the kibbutz following her. They have three children: Maayan, 15, and twins Gili and Omri, 12.
Reservists in the tank battery in the Upper Galilee practice battery operation 15 November 2023 Photo: Eyal Margolin - Ginny15/11/2023Photo: Eyal Margolin - Ginny,
Paragliding photographed by Shomer outside his home, photo: Israel Shomer
He begins our conversation with a warning: "This is the first time I've spoken. I haven't done any research yet, and there are many things I don't know. I tell only my personal angle, of what I saw and experienced, but there are also other angles. I'm not really the story. The heroes are not the soldiers. We did our job. The heroes are the civilians, who held the safe room door in their hands for hours, to the point of gangrene, and some were also killed and wounded. I didn't manage to reach everyone, including Yifat's brother, Yuval Solomon, who was murdered."
Book.
"He was murdered in the youth's neighborhood. He fought with a knife and managed to stab one of the terrorists. He called me after that, I spoke to him on the phone, and then they came back and he didn't survive. He was 29 years old. On 6 October, he organized his first birthday party, in Nir Am, with all his friends. It seems that's where he separated."
I asked him to start from the end. On the question that concerns every resident of the envelope, whether to return home. He says that this question has occupied him constantly since October 7, but he did not dare to ask Yifat and the children. "Then they said to me, 'Dad, we hope you don't hesitate, we're coming back.' They ordered me to do it."
That Saturday, he got up at 6:10 a.m. to go for a run. "Saturday morning is the long MDS, usually quietly. I got ready and stood next to Tammy 4 to get a glass of water before running, and at 6:29 the crazy volleys started." After two minutes it was quiet for a few seconds, and he took the opportunity to peek out the front door. Above him, he saw two paragliders and understood immediately. "I told Yafat, 'Fly into the safe room, lock the safe room, it's a raid.' I saw them coming down 90-100 meters from the house, and I told Omri to get me a knife."
Didn't you have weapons?
"During the Sukkot vacation, I left my weapon in the division – a big mistake of mine. I took the knife and went out through the neighbors' house." He managed to photograph the parachutes, and then made several phone calls to senior IDF officials, including IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. It was a rallying cry to the system that this was not just rocket fire, but a Hamas ground offensive. A guard called the kibbutz's security coordinator and told him there was a raid, and asked him to prepare weapons for him. "I ended up not getting to the armory that whole day. At some point I also stopped trying."
He left the house, in his sports clothes and knife, and a few meters later he encountered him for the first time. The terrorist was in IDF uniform, and a guard clung to the civilian with a gun ("Excuse me for not going into names, but there are many friends here who were hurt") and they shoot the terrorist. "The terrorist comes to his senses, and we retreat to cover and split up. He went home to his wife and little girl, and I was left alone."
For almost three hours he was alone. At one point, he identifies guys who came from Kibbutz Sa'ed, one of whom was injured. Schumer takes his weapon, an M-16 rifle with one magazine, and moves on. He moves slowly and stops whenever he identifies terrorists. "I fired two bullets at a time."
And did you see that you were hurting?
"Yes, I saw that I was hurting."
How many terrorists?
"I estimate that at this point I killed at least six terrorists."
Constantly on the move?
"Searching, skipping, firing two bullets, and skipping on. All the time movement and fire, movement and fire."
What's going through your mind at this time?
"I took my time both because I was alone and because I only had one cartridge, and also because there were phones and messages, and I also tried to activate the system, and I started getting calls and messages from people on the kibbutz who wanted help."
You didn't mention the words home and family.
"They sent me messages, and at one point my son directed me to all kinds of friends of his who called. I spoke to some of them and told them to keep the safe room closed, not to go outside, to be quiet."
And what do you see around?
"I see quartets of terrorists and many pick-up vehicles, and I quickly realize that this is an event of different magnitude, that there are dozens of terrorists on the kibbutz."
"Paratroopers and Golani fight together"
At 8:30 a.m., amidst all the fighting, he calls his division's division operations officer. He says in a whisper that he is fighting on the kibbutz, and orders him to jump the entire division into war. "I must have understood something. All that sat in my head was that what was happening here, in the south, would not happen there, in the north. I think that's where my instinct came from to jump the division from fast to the north."
At this point, Schumer is convinced that the incident takes place only in the village of Gaza. A few minutes later, he talks to a friend from the SWAT team, who tells him about a shooting in Sderot, and he realizes that it is a much bigger event. At 9:47 A.M., he identifies an APC of the 13th Battalion in Golani. "They came from Nahal Oz. The company commander, Bonnie, made an amazing decision to come to the village of Gaza to save residents. I signal to them not to shoot me, and then join them. At this stage, we have no contact with other forces, we are alone, and I put them under cover behind the bins. We do a short briefing to reset and start moving between the houses."
Photo: Yossi Zeliger
They leave the APC with two fighters and start advancing on foot. A guard leads them, still in sports clothes and without a vest or helmet, toward the locators the family sent him from home. At this point, he realizes that terrorists are right next to his house and decides to move in that direction. On the way, they cross the kibbutz soccer field, encounter terrorists on motorcycles and eliminate them, and move on.
"We're already coming close to my house, but I tell him, 'Let's not go down the road because it's an extermination zone, let's go back upstairs and flank and come through the neighborhood.' We flank, reach the beginning of my street from the other side, and there we have a significant encounter with fighting, in which we had two casualties of the force, one was relatively seriously wounded. We decide to evacuate them to a nearby house, and continue to fight, killing at least six more terrorists."
The fighting continues for at least two more hours, against dozens of terrorists, some of whom are running right next to his house. "At some point, around 12, we pretty much run out of ammunition, and I decide to evacuate the wounded to my house because it's close to the perimeter road and from there it will be easier to evacuate them."
And all this time what do you see?
"Not simple sights. People I know, neighbors and friends of mine. Some I also talked to, corresponded, unfortunately some I couldn't reach and some did. It's half the glass full. You see the kibbutz all smoke, explosions. And I also think about the family, that's for sure, but I knew they were okay and that gave me the strength to fight and function."
At that point, he didn't know that kibbutz residents had been kidnapped to Gaza. He only learned about it in the late afternoon, and in the meantime he tried to "kambatz" the fighting. "There were guys in the neighborhood talking to me. We divided house numbers. In the meantime, the first forces from the army had already arrived at the kibbutz – Magellan, Duvdevan – and I tried to join them. We distributed decrees a bit over the phone, but everything was very complex, with small forces that were not coordinated between them and had to be explained to them by the surnames on the houses."
And you're without ammunition.
"Yes, and we go to my house, and on the way we see the bodies of terrorists and make sure they are killed, and they are full of ammunition, but we do not touch it for fear that they are booby-trapped. We got home and treated the wounded, while Yifat's sister Ortal and her family came to our house. It was a crazy thing. Terrorists entered their home, took Guy, my brother-in-law, out of the safe room, asked for food and sat down in the living room to eat. The terrorists did not touch him or Ortal and the three children, and they took advantage of the opportunity when the terrorists ate and fled through the safe room window and hid. A guy named Portal from Sderot, who came to save his daughter, saw them, put them in the car and dropped them off near our house."
At this point, he also realizes that his young brother-in-law has been killed. He takes the opportunity to be at home and puts on a uniform, puts on the blood-soaked vest of Sheila, the severely wounded Golani fighter, leaves the Golanchiks to gather strength at home and goes outside. A few meters later, he meets a group of fighters from the 202nd Paratroopers Battalion and joins them. "They were led by a deputy named Veron. He was later wounded in the fighting in Gaza. I've talked to him and he's fine."
He continues to fight, this time with the paratroopers. Later, the Golani force joins it, and they skip from point to point, eliminate terrorists and move on. He tries to get to the neighborhood where his wife's parents live because he has received many calls for help from there, and decides to pass through a relatively open area and not through shelters as he has done all day. "It was a mistake. We came under serious fire and fought for more than an hour. We killed quite a few terrorists, and we had one dead and two wounded. It took us a long time to evacuate them, until we joined a new force and moved on. On the way, Golani's force joins us – paratroopers and Golani together – and we decide to return to the neighborhood I was in in the morning because crazy fighting continues there."
, Photo: Isorel Shomer
Schumer continues to fight for hours. At this time, additional forces arrive at the kibbutz, including a Givati force under the command of the brigade commander. "It was fierce fighting. The terrorists fought. We fought with a lot of encounters. We killed quite a few terrorists, we distributed sectors, everything was crowded, between the houses, but there I felt for the first time on this day that we were turning the bowl, even though the battle took another two days."
At 6:<> P.M., Yifat tells him that they have terrorists in their house again. "She heard them talking, and of course the gunshots. I only realized it now, when we came here, how close it was. What a miracle we had. In addition to the shooting from outside, there was also shooting inside the house, in the living room, and shooting in Omri's room opposite the safe room. The children functioned with amazing coolness, like a basic training ward."
Around 8 p.m., he arrives home for the second time. He gathers in his living room the commanders of the forces that came to the kibbutz, and they divide sectors and tasks. "Yifat and the children come out of the safe room again, and then I realize that the wounded are no longer there. I have no idea when or where they were evacuated." Sheila's vest, the Golanchik, is still in his division. "He's fine. Yifat and the children had already met him. I'll get to him after the war."
At a quarter to 10, he decides to cut off contact. "I looked at the clock and said that's it. It was not an easy decision because there were other terrorists on the kibbutz and the family there, but I knew that there were already many forces and commanders, and that I had better join my division." He got into his car, which was completely riddled with gunfire, with his uniform still hanging in the back ("The terrorists may have seen them and therefore entered our house").
He puts on a helmet, a bullet in the barrel, sticks a barrel out through the open window—and starts driving north. The road was strewn with destroyed cars and bodies and weapons, and he galloped to the division. Towards midnight he entered, with his helmet and weapon and vest with blood, and his crew was sure he was injured and rushed to call a doctor. "I told them everything was fine, that it wasn't my blood. I disarmed myself and only then did I realize I needed to breathe."
Eyes North
His family left the kibbutz late at night, walking three kilometers to the nearby gas station, and from there by truck to Netivot, and then to Shfayim, where members of Kibbutz Kfar Azza have been concentrated ever since. Schumer has visited only twice since, at his brother-in-law's funeral and on the 30th anniversary of his death. He postpones the rest until after the war. Even the WhatsApp messages he didn't stop to look at: there were quite a few messages from friends calling for help and he couldn't save.
Since then it has been in the north. His division, with all its reserve forces, is on the border with Lebanon, holding a strong defense against Hezbollah. Just like in the Gaza envelope, everyone came here immediately, because they understood the magnitude of the hour and the challenge. "It's a huge division, six brigades, tens of thousands of reservists, tremendous power. I deploy them in the field and tell them that Nahariya and Shlomi and Ma'a lot will not be Sderot and Ofakim, and Hanita and Zarit and Netua will not be Kfar Gaza, Be'eri and Nir Oz. With those words."
, Photo: Arik Sultan
He speaks with bright eyes about the reservists. Tells about the determination, about the amazing work they do, in winter and in the mud, without complaining. "It's really crazy. People are here, under fire, from the front, their businesses at home are collapsing, their families are on the home front, and they say they will remain here on the guard of the people of Israel and the State of Israel for as long as necessary - for what is needed and for as long as necessary."
North. "This is war," he says. "Right now we're doing defense. I call it lethal defense, aggressive defense. At the beginning, we paid the price of learning how to deal with the anti-tank, how to deploy the forces correctly, and I think that now we are doing an overall good job against our mission, which is to leave the north as a secondary theater in order to enable us to meet the goals of the war in the south."
Do you think the residents of the north will want to come back, after what happened to you in the south?
"We have achievements, but is it enough for the residents to return? The answer is no. I think more is needed. We are preparing for all possibilities, both for the current situation to continue, and for other possibilities."
And are you talking to the residents of the north?
"Yes. We talk, and I tell them what happened to us here. They want to know when and how we can bring them home, and I tell them, even as a resident of Kfar Gaza, that I won't tell them to go home until I feel it's time and this is the place."
In your position as head of the operations department, you sat on all the plans of the army and all the threats. Did you have something like a Hamas attack in your head?
"No, absolutely not. The simple answer is no, and the complex answer is no. And it's complicated, because I had no idea."
What happened here?
"We were in some kind of perception, which completely collapsed. We made a big mistake."
Bet on your home.
"About my house. I think that's what helped me realize very quickly at 6:30 a.m. how wrong we were. We have a lot to research and learn. The hardest questions I have are from friends, residents, family. And this is the most supportive and supportive family there is, which trusts the chief of staff and the general in command and everyone, and the hardest question they asked me all day was where was the army."
For quite a few hours you were in the army, on sportswear.
"Yes, and I also told them I was fighting, not to leave the house. And where I didn't know the answer, I said that's what it is. I tried to do my best in the situation I was in and from what I understood. I tried to do my best, and I think they appreciate it. Something great has happened to us, something difficult, and we will have to explain well to the people of Israel and to ourselves what happened to us on this day and on the way to this day. But now I firmly believe that we have to put it aside to win, and after we win we can learn from it so that we can be better."
Get up and rebuild
He may be in the north, but his heart is in Shefayim. The kibbutz suffered 79 fatalities and 18 abductees, half of whom returned this week. "The residents are the real heroes, not me. They're amazing." It is clear to him that the really difficult conversations and questions are still ahead of him, with them and at home. With the children who survived the inferno, and with Yifat, and the real-time messages he saw just this week that burn hard even in retrospect. Fear and worry and helplessness are mixed into them, and he realizes how close it was to him, too. "Maybe it's a good thing I didn't understand it that way then, because I would have run in."
How do you restore security – to the children, to the community?
"First of all, we win here. You have to start with that. Anything else won't let us come back here. And we need to unite the children and the adults and explain to everyone that we have no other choice. We have to go back, we have to build, we have to build. I estimate it will take at least two years, maybe more. Easy it won't be. It's a loss that's still unimaginable, that we're still deep in."
The destruction, the killing.
"The destruction, the killing. One of those paying the price is my former driver. I think about him a lot. He was with me for two and a half years when I was in the Southern Command. These are things that will accompany us forever, but we must start with victory, be determined, make the enemy regret what he did and show others around us that something has changed in us as well. We will never be like them, such human animals, and we will always remain with our values and our morals, but our determination must not be diminished, and now we must act with all our might."
Yuval Solomon z"l, Photo: Reproduction
The crisis that the residents and his family are going through is that he grew up in the army and believed in it that it was strong and would stop any enemy. "I'm part of it," he admits. "I was the Nahal brigade commander, and the village of Gaza is full of Nahlawim, some of whom I helped reach the brigade. I brought my brother-in-law, Yifat's brother who was killed, to Nahal, as well as her older brother. And it's not an easy feeling to know that I'm part of this thing. But I think that my personal example, if I can speak in terms of IDF values to my friends and community as well, is to return here, and out of the destruction and bereavement to get up and rebuild. So when Yafat and the children told me they were coming back, I was happy, because it was as obvious to me as possible. Will it be easy? Absolutely not."
Listen, we're hanging out here right now near the house. Everything is abandoned, and I think of you here in the morning, alone in sports clothes and with a knife, facing dozens of terrorists. It's pretty psychic.
"It's psychic, but I wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't do it. I think that the ones I did manage to save, maybe my family as well, it's because of this resourcefulness of realizing at 6:31 that there's a raid on the Gaza village, and just starting to fight with what I have."
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