One of Israel’s Most Extraordinary Survival Stories from September 11: Video Shows the Moment Hamas Gunmen Raked Muslim Father’s Car and Killed His Wife… But That Was Just the Beginning of His Seven-Hour Epic Ordeal to Save His Baby Son

Hamid Abu Ar’ara takes out his mobile phone and wants to show us a short video and then a photo. It’s not going to make it easy for any of us to watch it.

The film was made with a traffic camera at a rural T-junction, not far from the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip. It is 7:05 a.m. on the morning of October 7 – or “Black Saturday” as Hamid and so many other Israelis describe the day.

As the footage begins, a black Hyundai appears from the side road. He dutifully stops, because four motorcycles are approaching from the left. A fatal mistake.

There are two men on each motorcycle, and as they turn onto the road the Hyundai came from, each passenger shoots the stationary car with automatic gunfire.

We see the windows dissolve into a haze of glass, bullets bounce on the road. The car stands still, forever.

Hamid continues browsing through his phone’s photo library and finds another image. It is a photo of a middle-aged woman. She is wearing a hijab and covered in blood, slumped lifelessly over the steering wheel of that same Hyundai.

Hamid, a tough Bedouin farmer, starts to cry softly. This is his “beloved” wife Fatima, who had taken him to work, as she did every day, until they met Hamas.

Fatima’s murder was just the start of an epic seven-hour ordeal as Hamid strove to save himself, their injured eight-month-old son Elias and another Bedouin after they were captured at the epicenter of the bloodshed.

Their story is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary survival stories to emerge from the October 7 massacres. But it also serves to shed light on an underexposed aspect of the atrocities; how Hamas gunmen did not hesitate to execute or kidnap fellow Muslims they encountered during their two-day rampage.

Yesterday, Mail photographer Jamie Wiseman and I traveled to the Negev Desert in southern Israel, where some 200,000 members of Israel’s Bedouin Arab community live in run-down towns or villages and more traditional nomadic camps.

We spoke to Bedouin families whose members had been killed or taken hostage by Hamas. Because their tribal culture largely transcends national boundaries, their people primarily inhabit the physical, economic, and social margins of Israeli society. But not marginal enough for Hamas terrorists.

They have Israeli citizenship and although they are not drafted into the army like Israeli Jews or Druze, approximately 1,500 Bedouin volunteers serve with their own light infantry regiment, or as specialized trackers for other IDF units.

Hamid and Fatima had seven sons and two daughters. The youngest is Elias and on Black Saturday at 6.40am Fatima drove them – her husband has no permit – from their home in Rahat to the greenhouse tomato company that Hamid ran in Mivtahim, less than five miles from the Gaza border.

Two Bedouins in the field, a father and a son, sat on either side of Elias, who sat in a high chair in the backseat.

‘After the motorcycles passed us, I tried to lift Fatima from the spot where she had fallen. And then I saw that she had been hit 20 times,” Hamid, 47, recalled. He says the gunmen must have known they had their own faith.

‘We are a religious Muslim family and she wore the traditional headdress of a pious woman. It’s inconceivable that they couldn’t see who was inside. They were five meters away when they passed and the window had been rolled down.

‘She said she couldn’t feel her legs. Her head was open and I could see her brain. I knew she was close to death. As a devout Muslim, I asked her to say the shahada prayer, which you say before you die. She said it four times and for the fifth time she was dead.

“That wasn’t the end,” says Hamid. ‘I got out of the car, opened Fatima’s door and closed her eyes. Then I called the police, who answered but said they were overwhelmed. They said they would contact me as soon as possible.’

The survivors were on their own.

Hamid heard the young worker who had been sitting behind Fatima calling for help. He also bore the brunt of the attack.

‘We pulled him out of the car and put him under a tree. He said the last prayer and a few minutes later he too died.”

Baby Elias was also hit by a bullet fragment between his shoulder blades. ‘My son was in shock, unnaturally quiet. I shook him and he started crying. Then we had to look for a hiding place.’

The only refuge was an abandoned hut along the road. “We closed the door and waited for rescue.”

It would be a long and terrifying vigil. Hamas was everywhere and the temperature soared.

“The baby was still breastfeeding,” says Hamid. ‘We had one bottle of formula that Fatima had prepared for the trip. That quickly ran out and my son became very unhappy. He was crying and that became very dangerous for us.’

Around noon, while hiding in a hut, Hamid looked through a crack in the metal door and saw that Hamas terrorists had returned to the intersection. Their location appeared to have become a meeting point for groups of armed men who took off on bicycles, pickup trucks and stolen cars to attack nearby communities.

‘For five hours I watched them come and go secretly, shoot and kill somewhere and come back. Then a group left and returned almost immediately, and I became even more concerned.

‘It looked like they wanted to set up an ambush at the intersection. And so four of them hid behind our cabin. I heard them talking about the situation. They were just inches away from us.”

At that moment Elias started to cry again.

‘I heard them talking and saying they heard baby. I heard them [cocking] their guns. They came to kill me. But then I heard Hebrew from the other side. I heard that the army had come.

‘Then the firefight started, with us in the middle of it.

‘At first the soldiers were confused. I think Hamas’ first shot hit one of them. Then everyone was shooting. I lay down and covered my son. The soldiers shot at the hut.’

I asked him what would have happened if he had come out and tried to talk to the Hamas gunman, pleading that he was a Muslim citizen.

‘Are you crazy?’ Hamid reacts in disbelief. ‘Are you having heat stroke? First of all, don’t be impressed by any humanitarian gestures from Hamas. They are only calculated for the foreign press. They are killing machines.

‘The reason that, as a Muslim, I could not appeal to them is that they have already killed my wife. While I was in the hut, I also heard and saw them stopping two other Bedouin boys in a car at the intersection. The boys said we are Arabs, Bedouins. Hamas put their weapons in their car and killed them at point blank range.”

He says: ‘I had to make a decision quickly. I was blessed by Allah with a strong heart. At that moment I had to choose how we would die. There was a lull in the firefight and I thought that the soldiers would now prepare to throw grenades at the hut. I’d rather die by bullets.’

He took off his shirt to show that he was not wearing a suicide vest, hugged Elias to his chest and opened the door of the hut that faced the IDF.

‘They shot at me straight away. They missed but hit the metal doors and I got shrapnel in my back.

‘Then I heard a commander shout ‘truce’ and ‘this must be the man who sent us the reports from the crossroads’. There were lots of hugs. The officers were grateful.”

What Hamid says next is unexpected amid the polarized and toxic narrative of the current war.

“The soldiers said I was a hero,” says Hamid. “I told them, ‘I am a citizen of this country [Israel] and I was only doing my duty.’

But what about the Hamas gunmen who were behind the hut? “The proper work has been done,” he nods, implying that they were killed in the shootout.

As we talk, an unexpected figure comes through the door. He is a huge, heavily bearded, Jewish volunteer doctor, wearing a yarmulke and carrying a basket of fruit as a gift. “I finally found you again,” he says to Hamid. This is Arial, the first paramedic on the scene when Hamid and his son were rescued.

‘Hamid shouted all the way to the hospital: ‘They killed my wife!’ Arial remembers. ‘The baby was in complete shock. I bandaged his wound.”

The Bedouin and the Jews embrace each other.

Night has fallen over the Negev. On a nearby street we visit the house of Dr. Tarek Abu Arara, who on October 7 had parked his car on the road near Sderot to help what appeared to be an accident victim.

The ‘victim’ was in fact a Hamas gunman who gestured for the Bedouin to come closer and then shot him in the chest from ten meters away.

Dr. Tarek sleeps and recovers from his ordeal. But he remembers that after he was shot, Hamas interrogated him about his knowledge of Islam and used him as a human shield against Israeli airstrikes for two hours as they slaughtered the passengers of passing cars.

During this time, one of the gunmen shot the doctor in the leg to prevent him from escaping and signaled with his hand that the next bullet would be in his head.

“I started bleeding quite a bit,” Dr. Tarek recalls. ‘I prayed for a miracle. I was convinced I was going to die.’

He was eventually rescued by Israeli security forces after another fatal shooting.

Dr. Tarek says: ‘I have dedicated my whole life to helping others and I had to involuntarily witness this terrible massacre carried out in front of my eyes and I could do nothing.

“It was horrible.”