‘I saw my friends writing goodbye messages, but I couldn’t do it’

On October 7, as Ariel Ein-Gal hid in bushes as bullets being fired by Hamas terrorists flew past him, one particular thought preoccupied him. “My only regret was that the last time I had seen my girlfriend, I fought with her.” The computer scienc and linguistic student said that at that moment, he had “accepted” his death. Addressing an audience in Hampstead garden Suburb, north-west London, as part of October 7 commemorative events organised by Stand With Us, Ariel said: “I saw my friends writing goodbye messages to their parents. I, however, couldn’t do it.” He did not want to worry his family in case he survived and, if he was killed, at least his family would have had a few more hours of ignorance, believing him to be alive. Ariel had been asleep on Zikim Beach, the southernmost beach in Israel, after a party with friends when terrorists arrived from the sea, shooting AK-47s at the group. As they started to run, “it looked like a movie, bullets bouncing off the sand in all directions”. The group hid in the bushes next to a military base, all the while hearing bullets being fired close by. Later that day, he and some of his friends managed to get into a car and travel at high speed to escape. When they came across a police vehicle, they saw what they thought was an officer lying on the floor and slowed down. “Should we stop and try to help him?” Ariel recalled. “But suddenly, the ‘dead body’ woke up, holding an AK-47, and started shooting at us. At the same time, people from the bushes on either side also started shooting, and we found ourselves in the middle of a Hamas ambush.” Sitting in the backseat of the car, Ariel lowered his head as far as he could and began reciting the Shema. “I am not a religious person, but we needed all the help we could get.” After three or four seconds, the shooting stopped, “so I peeked to see what was going on. The second I looked, a bullet came straight through the windshield and towards my ear, I could feel the heat and I saw the windshield cracking.” The bullet had missed Ariel’s head by a fraction. “They shot around 50 rounds. Someone saved us because only five bullets hit the car.” Ariel had been at the Zikim Beach for a party with a group of 21 friends. By the end of October 7, the group had become 20, with one of the friends killed by Hamas. The Israeli student now has a tattoo of “20/21” on his arm to represent this loss. “The missing friend tattoo,” he calls it. “It reminds me of my great-grandmother’s numbers on her arm from Auschwitz,” he said. On October 7, 19 civilians, including children, were killed on Zikim Beach and between 20 and 30 people survived.

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