Remembering October 7: CPL Shoshi's Story

So, we'll start from the beginning. On October 4th (Wednesday), all of us spotters completed our training, and we had a graduation ceremony. On that very day, just minutes before the ceremony began, we were informed that eight other girls and I would be closing the upcoming Sabbath. What we didn’t know at that moment, the events that would unfold in the following days.

The day after, early in the morning, we arrived at out battalion's main base and from there, those of us closing Shabbat were put in observation rooms on specific bases including Kerem Shalom, Kisufim, Nahal Oz, Re'im, and Yiftach.

The girls were just waiting to arrive at their bases to start a new chapter in their life (an army service) and worked really hard to get to their positions.

And this is how the transition into our new role started, we did the first test, happy and excited about our new environment. On Friday we even sat for Shabbat dinner on the base, some were surprised about how small our base was and how little people were there.

We went to sleep, and on October 7th, Saturday morning at 6:30 AM, we woke up to deadly missile bombardments. After a few seconds, the rocket alarm sounded. The girls and I were terrified to even open the door to the room. Trembling but knowing we had no choice, we started running. We looked at the sky and saw it constantly filled with rockets exploding and falling above us. We remembered we were 700 meters from Gaza, and we had no time. We ran (to bomb shelters) in panic and didn’t even know where there was a bomb shelter in the new base. Eventually, we reached the first shelter we found with our fellow soldiers.

The rocket alarms didn't stop for a moment, and every missile that fell felt stronger and stronger, closer and closer. After a few minutes between the missiles, we heard a strange noise, which we quickly realized was gunfire. Yet it wasn't the sound we’re used to, not M16s, and not single shots. It was a spraying noise that kept getting closer to our ears. We understood something was wrong because it was not a usual occurrence at the base. After three minutes, someone hysterically yells over the base's PA system, "Anyone with a weapon, quickly run to the checkpoint!" and repeats it. At first, we couldn’t understand what she was saying, maybe we even refused to believe it.

We received a phone call from the observation room: "There are invasions throughout the country and there are terrorists at the base. Stay quiet, hide, and make sure someone armed reaches you." The girls who had previously been on the base started calling their parents to say goodbye, to tell them they loved them, and we new girls did the same, whispering to our mothers that we loved them and that there were terrorists at the base. We asked them to pass the message along, and then the communication was cut off.

Meanwhile, the PA system was shouting: "Everyone makes sure you have someone armed with you." And there we were, more than 10 unarmed girls, lying on the floor, one on top of the other, not making a sound. Without any protection and with terrorists outside, we could hear the gunfire and footsteps. The terrorist was outside the shelter behind us. We hid under rusty iron beds and didn’t make a sound, not even the slightest noise. After we heard live gunfire exchanges, we realized that the terrorist was probably neutralized or had moved away and that we were now "no longer in danger." After a few minutes, an armed soldier, a hero, came to us, doing everything he could to keep us safe in a completely exposed place with two entrances, without doors even, and full of cracks in the concrete.

During all the chaos around us, we were instructed to run to a safe room that was nearby, lock the door, and stay quiet. After many hours in the safe room, during which we heard tanks moving around the base, the rocket alarms never stopped, and gunfire kept getting closer and closer. We received another instruction to run to the rooms, grab a personal item and a helmet, and rush to the observation room as quickly as we could, knowing that terrorists were roaming the base.

After we realized we had no other choice, we did just that. At this point, we split up, and only the two of us stayed behind. We stayed in the back because that morning one of us had twisted her ankle and could barely walk. So there we were, just the two of us alone.

After two long minutes of running through all the chaos, we reached a point where we needed to cross a road to enter the observation room. Just before we got there, we heard gunfire exchanges closer than we had ever heard before. We looked at the road and saw that it involved one of our soldiers in a confrontation with a terrorist right on the road. The terrorist fired in our direction but missed, either by luck or a miracle. The soldier turned to look at us with concern and immediately turned back to start shooting again. We began to run at full speed amidst the gunfire. We could hear the bullets whizzing past us, and the dust on the ground rising, and we looked down to avoid seeing what was going on around us. There, we saw an unreasonable amount of blood on a stretcher lying on the ground.

We all arrived at the observation room and were placed in a protected hallway that was part of the observation room but outside of it. In the middle of the hallway, there is an exit door that doesn’t lock – a door through which everyone is coming in and out. We asked the question, "Who will come in this time, a soldier or a terrorist?" We were put into a back room, where we hid. Then a soldier came in with fear in his eyes and instructed us to keep quiet and make no noise, while he was given orders to shoot anyone who opened the door. During those minutes of hiding, we heard nonstop screams of the wounded, soldiers who had just lost their friends, and female soldiers who didn’t know where their friends were. We were told to turn around and not look because they were bringing injured people into the observation room since there was nowhere else to take them. We heard the terrorist, his footsteps, and his gunfire, and by that time, we could already distinguish between the sound of fire from Kalashnikov and M16s. We never thought the M16 fire would calm us, but that was the situation. We remembered that at the base, there were no battalions stationed; we were on Shabbat and holiday procedures, and there weren't any soldiers assigned to protect us.

We heard the Kalashnikov, then silence, and footsteps approaching the entrance of the hallway. In those moments, tears came down, and we were scared, trembling, and praying that God would give us a chance to become mothers, to experience more things, that it wouldn’t end now, that the terrorists wouldn’t reach us, that we would get through this. In our hearts, we felt that we wouldn’t make it out, and tears were falling, though we knew we weren’t allowed to cry. We couldn’t let the terrorist hear us crying; we couldn’t let him know we were there. The happiest moment of our lives was when the soldier came through the door, and then we understood that someone was protecting us. After a few hours of hiding, forces arrived to "clear" the base, and that’s when we realized we had survived. In the days that followed, there were several terrorist infiltrations each day, constant rocket alarms, gunfire, security incidents, and more. After four days, we were evacuated from there.

Already on Saturday, we started hearing rumors about what was happening in the country, especially about what was happening with our friends—those who finished the course with us just three days earlier. We had been happy that we were on duty that same weekend because it meant we could meet up the following weekend. Just two days before, we had said goodbye to them as we dropped them off at the bus in Nahal Oz, hugging them so tightly, as if we had some sense that something was about to happen, but we could have never guessed or believed that we would wake up to this horror movie, a script written by the devil himself. We were seeing videos of them being kidnapped to Gaza and all the terrorism happening in the country.

We pray for our friends who were kidnapped and wait for them with all our hearts. We will never stop thanking the heroic soldiers who protected us and even risked their lives so that we could be here today. We are heartbroken for our friends who were murdered by Hamas that Sabbath. May their memory be a blessing 🥀💔.