Nir Am is a kibbutz at the border with Gaza, close to the town of Sderot. It has a population of around 600 people. It has agriculture fields and a dairy farm, a cutlery factory, a country lodge and a museum. The kibbutz also employs workers from Gaza, as many of the kibbutzim on the border do (or did).

The kibbutz security team consists of twelve people, who are all men, except for their commander. The leader of this team is Inbal Rabin-Liberman, a 26 year old woman who served in a combat unit in the IDF. In 2022, she took over the task from her uncle, Ami Rabin.

On October 7, Inbal was woken up at 6:30 by sirens and alerts from the national security, telling the people of the kibbutz to go into the shelters and safe rooms. This was not an uncommon occurance in this part of the country. The missiles shot at them from Gaza were usually (but not always) diffused by the Iron Dome defense system.

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But Inbal heard noises outside that she didn’t trust. She saw trucks driving around, up to the kibbutz gate and back again. She had a gut feeling that there was something worse going on today. So she called the members of her security team and told them to come and get weapons and then stationed them around the perimeter of the kibbutz. When the electricity failed, she told them not to turn it back on again, so the electric gates of the kibbutz would not open.

Because of the defense team’s quick action, Hamas was unable to enter the kibbutz. Several terrorists trying to scale the fence were shot by the security squad. The stories of this fight vary widely. Some articles say the fight lasted 12 hours, 25 terrorists were killed and Inbal shot 5 of them herself, but others report that it lasted 3 hours and only two terrorists were killed. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. But what is certain is that Inbal’s gut feeling and quick thinking saved kibbutz Nir Am.

Hamas was not able to enter kibbutz Nir Am, thanks to the armed volunteers stationed around the kibbutz at the fence. No one was hurt or abducted. Nir Am is the only kibbutz in the Gaza Envelope that wasn’t ruined, massacred and burned. And Inbal was hailed as a hero.

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But Inbal does not want this praise. She says she didn’t do anything special, she was just one of the many. So I will just repeat Inbal’s own words on Instagram:

“I see everything you write to me, and I want to tell you that you shouldn’t believe everything that’s written. There is a lot of fake news among the reports. I’m not a hero, and I wasn’t there by myself. I still can’t make sense of everything I’m going through, and therefore I can’t tell the real story – but I promise you will hear from me. So many people are still in the field fighting for their lives, and there were a lot more, fighting next to me and around me. I would like you to share this story in order to convey a message. Let’s engage in the important things, not in bombastic headlines.”

I decided to honour Inbal’s words, and not call this article “The Heroine of Nir Am”. Because there is another story that needs to be told, too.

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The terrorists did not get inside the kibbutz iself. But the fields and the chicken hatchery that belonged to the kibbutz were unprotected. And that morning, several people were already at work there. They were from Gaza, workers with a special day pass, who went back and forth between their homes in Gaza and their jobs in Israel. A lot of Palestinians work in Israel, from both Gaza and the West Bank. Like the Thais, they often work in agriculture and construction.

Hashim and Nabil al-Birawi are two brothers who worked in the fields of Nir Am for decades. They had a good relationship with their employers. “They treated us like family there,” Nabil says in +972 magazine. On the morning of October 7, Nabil and his team were already at work in the fields, while Hashim and his workers were still on the road, in a grey van driven by an Israeli Arab driver.

Hashim called his employer, Lior Golan, and told him he and the others had been shot by a “terrorist who came from the sky in a parachute.” Golan told them to run, to hide in the fields, but they couldn’t. They were too badly hurt. Later that day, the grey van was discovered with all its occupants shot dead.

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Nabil al-Birawi and his team hid in the orchards for 11 hours. Three of the workers were hit by bullets. In the evening, Ofer Liberman, Inbal’s father, was able to reach the workers and take the wounded to the hospital.

Nabil has been stuck in Israel since, along with many other Palestinian workers. He mourns the death of his brother and is desperate to correct the initial assumption that the people in the grey van were terrorists. They were all victims of Hamas. Like the 1200 Israelis who were murdered. Hamas killed anything on its path, like a war machine, like a natural disaster.