We survived the Hamas terror attack – 24 hours later, we reported for duty

When explosions echoed through the dawn sky at the Nova Festival in southern Israel, a young couple, Zohar and Liron, craned their necks to watch what they assumed were fireworks.

It soon became apparent that it was rockets fired from the Gaza Strip that were raining down toward them.

“Immediately, I understood,” said 24-year-old Liron, as he recalled looking up at the sky following a night of dancing with the love of his life.

Within 24 hours, the pair would both be reporting for reserve duty and fighting for their country in a war that has the potential to change the face of the Middle East.

“I was a soldier in this area years ago and when I did my military service there. I never saw so many rockets at the same time launched from Gaza into Israel,” Liron told The Telegraph.

“We understood that the party was over,” he said. “We had to get home as soon as possible.”

The couple sprinted to their car and raced toward the road that would take them back to the centre of Israel but were almost immediately stopped. It was not just rockets; a Hamas fighter was on the road, just a few metres away from then – with his gun trained on Zohar.

“They’re shooting at us!,” the 23-year-old screamed to her boyfriend. Liron quickly realised that the fighter was on his right, and if he sped forward, his girlfriend would get the spray of bullets.

He yanked the car to the left and sped across fields until they reached Kfar Maimoun, a small village where a family let them take shelter in their house.

At least 260 of their friends and fellow partygoers would later be found dead at the site.

Until that fateful day on Oct 7, the young couple had lived perfectly normal lives. They had met in middle school through a mutual friend, Liron explained over the phone, but they had lost contact for a while, as many teenagers do after school. “And now we are going to marry!” Zohar chimes in.

Liron hestitates for a second as he remembers how they reconnected two years ago. Zohar laughs, quick to remind him that it was him who had slid into her DMs on her Instagram.

“We went on a date and we’ve been together since,” he said. “He has to propose to me now that he’s saved my life!” Zohar chimes in again. Subtle hints are firmly off the table at this point.

They are the epitome of young love. Both of their Instagram accounts packed full of photos of them on holidays across the world, partying, and enjoying what they portray to the world as the ideal care-free life of two people in their early twenties. A world away from the nightmarish ordeal of that Saturday morning, less than two weeks ago.

‘I’ll have to kill the love of my life’

As they holed up inside a stranger’s home in Kfar Maimoun hiding from Hamas, the reality of what was happening started to become clear.

What they had first thought was unusually heavy rocket fire accompanied by a few Hamas gunmen, had actually been an unprecedented multi-front attack that would take Israeli forces days to repel.

“From second to second, we started getting more information from our friends, the news … and we start to understand that it’s not one terrorist or two, this is hundreds,” said Liron.

At this point, Zohar says, she turned to Liron and told him: “If they come here, you have to shoot me in the head. You can’t let them catch me alive. I don’t want to know what they would do.”

“Minute after minute, I started to understand that maybe they could actually come here and maybe I’ll have to kill the love of my life because I don’t want Hamas to catch her: the things they would do to her would be much worse than to die,” Loran says.

While the couple are hiding in Kfar Maimoun, hearing every gunshot of a massacre happening just a few fields across, they started to hear about the killings and the kidnappings; then they had the call asking them to report for reserve duty. It was clear Israel was going to war.

The parents of the young couple had no idea they had been at the festival, but by the time they arrived home they had already decided that they were going to report for duty.

“Every picture you saw on the news, we saw with our eyes,” Liron, who overnight went from owning a delivery company to being a combat fighter, said. Despite their parents’ objections – who were frantically worried about them – the pair felt they had no other option.

Their friends had been killed, they had seen others taken as hostages to Gaza on TikTok and their country had been devastated.

“We did it for our friends. To help bring those that we can home safe.”