Gunfire awoke residents of the Nir Am kibbutz in southern Israel at 6:30am Saturday. A former special forces member who gave his name only as Adam jumped out of bed, the BBC reports, to lead the effort to fight off the Hamas attack. "I took my pistol, my clothes, my bulletproof vest and the other thing was cigarettes," he said. "We started to kill everyone who came to the fence." The gunbattle raged for hours. Some 1,300 people in Israel were killed in the attack, and another 150 were taken prisoner. None of them lost their lives in the Nir Am siege, though one young resident was slain in the Hamas attack on a nearby music festival.
"I took the walkie-talkie and I said this line again and again: 'No-one will enter Nir Am, no-one will enter Nir Am,'" Adam said. Had the volunteers failed to stop the attack, he said, the terrorists would "run to the houses and kill the women and the kids." Instead, no one got in, and no one inside was hurt. Nir Am's 400 residents are staying in a hotel in Tel Aviv, unsure when or whether they'll return. "All of Israel has sent us clothes and food," Adam said. He's been praised as a hero, per the BBC, but he shares the credit with the other fighters— "civilians who don't know how to fight but have got a lot of heart." A couple of them also have special forces training, but others work in IT, he said: "Regular men, but very, very special." (More Israel-Hamas war stories.)
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