The young IDF officer who ran 8 miles to the Gaza border on Oct. 7 to fight terrorists
‘It was the hardest run I’d ever done’: 2nd Lt. Avichail Reuven tells his heroic story, which Netanyahu briefly shared with Congress last month to standing ovation, in TV interview
The Times of Israel
August 18, 2024
2nd Lt. Avichail Reuven
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the US Congress at the end of July, he named four Israeli soldiers who he said had been heroes since Hamas’s October 7 massacre. The first of the troops was young Israel Defense Forces officer 2nd Lt. Avichail Reuven, who ran 12 kilometers (8 miles) to the Gaza border on that Saturday to help fight off the terrorists.
Reuven was at his parents’ home in the southern city of Kiryat Malachi on October 7 when he was awakened by sirens. He was still in the midst of officer training at the time, but after hearing the news of a massive terrorist infiltration into the Gaza border communities in Israel, he decided he to go and help even though he had not been called up.
“I told my brother and friend that I was heading to the border. I said that if anything happened, I would just kill [the terrorists]. I felt like the guys were laughing at me a little,” he told Channel 12 News in an interview aired Friday evening.
“They told me ‘You’re crazy to go, there’s no reason for us to go with you.’ I also looked for friends with a car to drive there, but I couldn’t find anyone, so I decided that I would go to the interchange and start trying to catch a ride.”
Reuven put on his uniform, which was still damp from being laundered, and headed out with his rifle and his red paratrooper beret.
Not knowing exactly where he was going, Reuven waited at the main interchange near his home for someone to stop and give him a ride, but no one did, so he decided to start running.
“It was difficult, running in a wet uniform, with sirens all the time and rockets falling in the area,” he said in the television interview.
Twelve kilometers and one hour later, Reuven found himself back on the highway, hot and thirsty but determined to keep going.
“It was the hardest run I’d ever done. It was the longest run I’d ever done in uniform in the heat. A nightmare,” he said.
After walking a little further along the highway, Reuven finally caught a ride with a civilian whose child had been at the Supernova music festival, where Hamas terrorists murdered some 360 people and took over 40 hostages during their rampage through southern Israel.
Reuven told Channel 12 that to this day he does not know the man’s name, but the driver gave him water and dropped Reuven off at an interchange outside Ashkelon when he realized that he couldn’t get to the site of the rave and help his child without a weapon.
At the interchange, Reuven was able to catch another ride, with a police car, to a checkpoint near Zikim, the location of an IDF basic training base that was among the sites infiltrated by terrorists that day.
“I argued a little with the police officers. I told them, ‘I’m going in. If not with you, I’m going in alone,'” Reuven said, adding that as he was talking to them, a deputy commander of a search and rescue battalion based in Zikim, whom he named only as Alexander, arrived and the two entered the base together.
As they were in the midst of basic training, many of the soldiers on the Zikim base were not fully trained, so when the terrorists arrived, the commanders on base gathered all of the trainees into two bomb shelters and approached the fence to fight off the terrorists. Six commanders and one soldier in basic training were killed in the fighting.
Reuven and the other commander joined the battle as soon as they arrived.
“There was complete chaos here. Half the base was burned. A lot of shouting and you could see terrorists running all around the area,” Reuven said.
He and another commander joined forces to fight off terrorists and reached a bomb shelter where some 30 female basic training soldiers were waiting, one of whom was injured. Reuven tended to her wound.
“I said to them, ‘Listen, I need three strong girls. This is why you enlisted into a combat unit. Now is your moment to prove you’re fighters.'”
He then told the three soldiers to stand at the entrance to the bomb shelter and shoot in the head any terrorists they saw. He then made his way to a second bomb shelter to check on the male trainees, where there were more injured soldiers.
For the next couple of hours, he ran around the base fighting off terrorists and collecting stretchers and water for the soldiers in the bomb shelters.
Eventually, Reuven met Col. (res.) Erez Eshel, who had driven to Zikim from his home in Ma’ale Adumim.
“I meet a mission-driven young soldier, and I don’t understand who he is. I don’t know his name,” Eshel told Channel 12, adding that he saved Reuven’s phone number under the name “Saturday, Simchat Torah soldier.”
“He’s completely in it, he can handle his gun, he’s calm, he’s focused, and he can handle anything. He is a real super soldier,” Eshel said.
The two stayed a little longer at Zikim before heading to nearby Yiftah, Kfar Aza, and eventually, Kibbutz Be’eri, a community of around 1,000 residents of whom 101 civilians were killed on October 7, along with 31 security personnel.
All in all, terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages during Hamas’s attack on Israel that day. The IDF spent the next few days fighting the terrorists and gradually arresting or killing all those who remained in Israel.
“I won’t say he’s the only soldier I picked up, but he is the only soldier who held up through all the fighting until early Sunday morning when I connected him with his company,” Eshel said.
Eshel told the commander of the IDF’s officers school in southern Israel, known as Bahad 1, about what Reuven did on October 7, and the commander told Netanyahu.
Reuven completed his officer training with distinction and accompanied Netanyahu to the US last month, where he got a standing ovation when the prime minister shared his story during his address to the joint session of Congress.
“In the early hours of October 7th, Avichail heard the news of Hamas’s bloody rampage. He put on his uniform, grabbed his rifle, but he didn’t have a car. So he ran eight miles to the frontlines of Gaza to defend his people,” Netanyahu told the US legislators.
“You heard that right. He ran eight miles, came to the frontlines, killed many terrorists and saved many, many lives. Avichail, we all honor your remarkable heroism.”
According to Channel 12, Reuven is now a company commander for paratroopers in basic training, and he insists on including long runs in his soldiers’ training process.
Reuven is the second child of nine born to Israeli immigrants from Ethiopia. In his teens, he struggled to finish high school and was classified as an at-risk youth. Because of this, he was not qualified to be recruited into the IDF as a paratrooper, but Reuven was determined and fought for his place in the unit.
Reuven told Channel 12 that he does not intend to retire from the IDF anytime soon.
“I want to continue in the army. It’s my mission, it’s what I believe in,” he said.
1 comment:
That is truly hard core.
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