SDEROT, Israel—“Are you with Israel?” the terrified 6-year-old girl asked the police officer from the back seat of the car where she was sitting huddled next to her 3-year-old sister, moments after Palestinian terrorists gunned down their parents.
The harrowing scene from theHamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which was captured on CCTV video, came back to life last week when the girls’ grandmother met the father of the Bedouin passerby who died trying to save the young Jewish family.
“There is no mental preparation for this moment,” Eliana Swissa, 66, said, her eyes welling up in tears, as she embraced Odeh Abu Sabila, 49, whose 24-year-old son, Amer, was killed in the shootout while trying to drive the girls and their mother to the safety of the Sderot police station.
(Neither Amer nor the Ethiopian-born police officer who escorted them, Sgt.-Maj. Shmuel Smatzo Golima, who was killed fighting terrorists at the station that day, knew that it had been taken by Hamas terrorists. Golima, 48, left behind a wife and three children.)
“Do you know I pass by here almost every day?” Abu Sabila, from Abu Talul, a village about six miles southeast of Beersheva, responded, gesturing toward the city memorial to Oct. 7 that has been erected outside the demolished police station.
United in grief and destiny, the pair, one Jewish, one Muslim—both citizens of Israel—clasped hands in silence.
Daughter of Holocaust survivors
“I am the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and a Holocaust was done to me,” Swissa said in an interview with JNS from her Sderot home, where the smiling pictures of her murdered son Dolev, 33, and daughter-in-law Odaya, 32, are omnipresent alongside still-lit memorial candles. “If my mother were alive, she would have died that very day.”
Swissa was 6 when her parents immigrated to Israel from Transylvania in the 1960s, choosing the Gaza border town popular with Sephardic immigrants because friends had recommended it. She recalled the slip of paper on which her mother had scribbled “Sderot,” which she showed an immigration officer upon their arrival at Haifa Port.
An only child, Swissa quickly fell in love with the warmth of the community, and went on to marry and have four children.
As Sderot became a target for Gaza rocket fire over the last two decades, most of her children studied outside of the city, but her youngest, Dolev, insisted on coming back because he worried about her, she said.
He had met Odaya during his military service, and after living with his mother for a while, the couple settled into a new complex in the western part of the city months before Oct. 7.
Failed escape
When the sirens went off that fateful morning, Dolev and Odaya set out by car with their daughters, Romi, 6, and Lia, 3, trying to escape what they—and nearly everyone else in Israel—thought was a heavy rocket attack. The parents grabbed a suitcase, and the girls went barefoot as they rushed into their vehicle.
No sooner than they set out than the air raid sirens again wailed. Dolev pulled over to the side of the road and scurried in search of safety with Lia, only to be killed by a Palestinian terrorist. The 3-year-old ran back to the car, joining her mother and sister, who were in shock.
At that very moment, Amer Abu Sabila, who worked in construction in central Israel and happened to be in Sderot, passed by. A police officer asked him to drive Odaya and her daughters in their vehicle to the nearby police station because she was traumatized.
Amer was just then telling his father by phone that sirens had gone off, and rockets were falling. He said that he would drop off the woman at the police station and then head out of the city, his father recounted.
“He did what anyone naturally would do in such a situation,” Odeh Abu Sabila said.
When they got to the police station, the car was immediately met by a hail of bullets. The terrorists in the station killed Odaya and Amer, who left behind two young children, and a third who was born after he was slain.
The girls were still in the back seat.
Are you with Israel?
“Daddy, help us!” Romi can be heard screaming in the harrowing video as gunfire riddles the black vehicle.
“No, please no,” the terrified 6-year-old shouts as a police officer approaches, fearing that he is a terrorist.
“Are you police? Are you with Israel?” she asks. “Take us. I am here with a baby,” she says.
All this time, Eliana was trying to reach her son and daughter-in-law as she and her husband lay huddled in their sealed room, with terrorists knocking on their door. With intermittent electrical and cellphone service, she called a neighbor in her son’s building and was initially misinformed that he, as well as his wife and children, were in the building’s bomb shelter. The neighbor, who was new in the apartment house, mistook him for a different Dolev.
“All the while I kept pushing back what I didn’t want to hear,” Eliana recounted, as news reports began to come in of terrorists in Sderot.
Her daughter, who lives in nearby Ashkelon, and then a son went to the city hospital to check if their loved ones were among the wounded.
Then, with terrorists still roaming in Sderot, a neighbor’s son knocked on Eliana’s door with the phone number of someone who urgently wanted to talk to her, someone who had her grandchildren. She quickly connected with Romi.
“She told me in the language of a 6-year-old who had grown up dozens of years that they had tried to escape and that her father was taken away, another man drove them, and then there was ‘boom, boom, boom,’ and that her mother was bleeding from the head and she thinks she is dead,” Eliana said.
The girls, who had been whisked away from the car by police and then brought to a family for safety until their grandmother could get them, are now in the care of their aunt in Ashkelon, who was granted custody.
Amid the mayhem and uncertainty over who was who in the days after the Oct. 7 attack, Amer Abu Sabila’s body was given to his family for burial 17 days later, his father said. Months later, his widowed wife gave birth to their third child.
Closing a circle
It took Eliana Swissa two years to come back to Sderot.
As she walks along the memorial with Odeh Abu Sabila, whose story is now forever intertwined with her family’s, they pause at the words of her granddaughter etched in stone: “Are you with Israel?”
