A retired major general for the Israeli Defense Forces raced to rescue his son and his family, who were hiding in their home near the Gaza border as Hamas terrorists destroyed their village.
Noam Tibon, 62, recalled the moment he assured his son, journalist Amir Tibon, that he would save him and his family when their small kibbutz of Nahal Oz fell under seige by Hamas on Saturday, NBC News reported.
“You have to be quiet. You have to be locked,” he told his son when he called from the home’s safe room.
“Trust me, I will come. This is my profession. Nobody, nobody, can stop me.”
Over the span of 10 hours, the determined father raced from Tel Aviv to his son’s home, where he rescued several survivors of Hamas and fought against the terrorists while on his way to save his family.
Amir Tibon, a correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper, was in his home Saturday morning when he heard mortars flying overhead at 6 a.m.
He and his wife Miri immediately raced to the home’s safe room, a space in every house along the Gaza border built to withstand rocket fire, where his two young daughters — Galia, 3, and Carmel, 1 — were sleeping.
“When you live on the border with Gaza, attacks like this happen from time to time,” Amir Tibon told The Atlantic. “You wait sometimes an hour, you pack your bags meanwhile, and when there is a break of a few minutes, you just shove the kids in the car and you go away from the border toward a more secure place.”
Unfortunately, the break never came.
Instead, Amir Tibon and his family could hear nothing but relentless gunfire come closer and closer until they could hear men shouting in Arabic, confirming their worst fears: “Hamas has infiltrated our kibbutz.”
“We’re going to die here,” he remembered thinking.
But after being reassured that his father would come for them, Amir Tibon said he tried to keep his daughters calm and quiet, telling them to trust their parents.
“I have to do the same thing right now. I have to trust my father, who is a trustworthy man, that if he said he will come here and save us, he will do it,” he said.
Noam Tibon and his wife raced from Tel Aviv to Nahal Oz, about an hour and a half away, stopping along the way to help survivors of the Nova music festival massacre who were running away barefoot.
After delivering as many people as they could to a safe location away from the border, Tibon went back and arrived at the outskirts of Nahal Oz, where he pulled out a pistol to join IDF fighters chasing away Hamas forces.
Spotting injured soldiers, Tibon once again opted to put his personal mission on hold to help the wounded retreat to a hospital before going back to look for his son.
Although he gave up his car to help transport the wounded, Tibon enlisted the help of another retired general, Israel Ziv, with the two men driving into Nahal Oz.
There, the men joined the IDF in fighting Hamas terrorists in order to free the families barricaded inside their homes.
“When I came to the area of my son’s house, there were at least five bodies of terrorists and Israeli soldiers killed,” Tibon said of the aftermath.
It was one of Amir Tibon’s daughters who first recognized the former general’s voice on the other side of the armored window, alerting them that he had finally arrived.
“’Grandfather is here,’” he said his daughter shouted. “And that’s when we all just start crying. And that’s when we knew that we were safe.”
Once they were rescued, Amir Tibon said his father filled him in on the violent terror attack unfolding in the country.
