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“We thought it would stop, but the rockets continued to launch towards Israel,” Lior Shitrit said.
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Lior Shitrit said when he gets married, has children, or passes through any of life’s major milestones, he’ll think of his friend Guy Simchi.
“He should still be here. He should be able to get married and have kids. He was my best friend since I was 10 years old,” Shitrit said. “He stayed outside and protected the shelter where all my friends were. He put up a really good fight, but then they doused oil and lit the room on fire where he was.”
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Shitrit and Simchi, both 20, grew up together in the small town of Gedera in Israel, south of Tel Aviv. Both attended the Supernova music festival near the border with Gaza on Oct. 7. Only Shitrit survived, after having experienced “many miracles,” he told a reporter at the Federation CJA building in Snowdon on Monday.
Shitrit and three other survivors of the attack — the worst in Israel’s history — were in Montreal telling harrowing tales of that day. Roughly 1,200 Israeli citizens were killed and 250 others were taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists who broke through security gates along the Gaza Strip.
Shitrit said he went to the festival with several of his friends around midnight. He was dancing and enjoying the music, when all of a sudden, the music stopped and thousands of missiles flew over his head in an attack that lasted more than 30 minutes.
“We were sitting next to a tree, and we didn’t know what to do,” Shitrit said. “We were listening to music on our phone, and expecting the attack to stop. People were panicking all around us, but my friends and I were calm.”
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Shitrit said he knew the area because he had hiked around there before, so he walked with his friends to Kibbutz Re’im, and found several others from the festival who were there.
“We thought it would stop, but the rockets continued to launch towards Israel,” he said. “We never dreamed that there were terrorists at the festival massacring people who just came to dance.”
Shitrit hunkered down in a bomb shelter that had a door with no lock. He and the roughly 20 people with him held the door together with all their might, as terrorists tried to pry it open. At one point, one of them got his gun into the door of the shelter and took a shot, hitting one of the men hiding with Shitrit in the leg.
He acted quickly to stem the man’s bleeding with a belt and an iPhone, which he used to create a tourniquet.
The group huddled inside the shelter for about six hours, listening to the terrorists arguing with each other, and hearing others shoot and kill people throughout the kibbutz.
At one point, the group had to crack open a window because they were running out of air. Eventually, they were saved by soldiers, but Shitrit stayed with the injured man for hours.
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“I went outside during the worst part of the attack,” he said. “I saw grenades being thrown. I saw a few people who were killed, lying on the ground, and I made it to the medic.”
Speaking for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Eta Yudin said it’s important for survivors of the attack to tell their tales, because many people are not aware of the magnitude of the attacks.
“This is a story that really has not been heard enough,” Yudin said. “I think people don’t really understand what happened on Oct. 7. The world changed in many ways, certainly for the Jewish community on that day. For many, Oct. 7 is still today, and I think part of understanding world events is hearing from people who are impacted by those events. There are still hostages being held, including a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, and we can’t allow that to (continue).
“My heart breaks for all civilians, Palestinian and Israeli alike,” she said.
jmagder@postmedia.com
twitter.com/jasonmagder
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