JERUSALEM, Israel — Nimrod Palmach, 39, is a father of two and the CEO of a non-governmental organization. He is also a hero. On October 7, when he learned about the Hamas terror attacks, he raced south, armed only with a pistol, to join the fight.
Nimrod, a military reservist like so many Israelis, spoke to Breitbart News and recalled the story of how he had been called up to his search-and-rescue unit in Jerusalem shortly after the attack began on that fateful Saturday morning.
But as he began seeing posts on social media about the gruesome attack, he decided to go south instead, defying orders from his commanding officer.
Nimrod had a close connection to the communities around the Gaza Strip — what Israelis call the “Gaza envelope.” He developed a leadership program on a kibbutz (collective farm) called Nahal Oz, training young people so that people would not leave the area, which was threatened by occasional Palestinian rockets and infiltration. His approach worked, and young families moved in.
He received a desperate phone call from his ex-wife, telling him that her boyfriend and his children were trapped at Kibbutz Nir Oz, near the Gaza Strip, trying to hold the door of their “safe room” closed while Hamas terrorists raked it with bullets and tossed grenades.
He called a friend to help; both were armed only with their own pistols. Each only had one magazine — with just ten bullets for the fight.
His hope, he told Breitbart News, was to kill as many terrorists as possible, then perhaps to ake an AK-47 off a dead terrorist and keep going.
While he waited at the southern town of Netivot to meet his friend, Nimrod recorded a final message to his fiancée and his children:
My beautiful Guni and Alumah, I love you. Daddy thinks about you all the time. I worry about you, and I know that you are the most, most wonderful kids in the world.
Baby, I love you. We’re here in a battle. I’ll come back to you later. I hope everything will be good.
He would continue to take video and photos throughout the battle: if he was going to die, he reasoned, he wanted people to know what had happened — not just to him, but to Israel.
Nimrod and his friends raced through police roadblocks until they were stopped at a roadblock set up by the special forces of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). When another reservist with a pickup truck drove past, Nimrod and his friend hopped in and sped onward. The special forces troops followed.
Soon they encountered the carnage of the attack. Several civilian vehicles had been attacked by terrorists; their bodies were strewn about the road. Soldiers, too, had been killed.
Nimrod and his friends came under fire and they jumped out. He grabbed a Negev heavy machine gun from a fallen soldier and began returning fire: “Now it’s a fair fight,” he recalled thinking.
Nimrod and the special forces had choices to make: Hamas terrorists controlled the roads, which had become a death trap. But if they found a way to outflank the terrorists by taking side roads, or even walking through fields — familiar terrain for Nimrod and some of the other soldiers — then they could engage them more easily.
Reinforcements began to arrive — though under heavy fire. One helicopter, full of elite paratroopers, was hit by a terrorist missile and crashed. Miraculously, everyone on board jumped out — moments before another missile hit the chopper, destroying it.
Soon, they found themselves near the kibbutz of Alumim, where the terrorists had found several Thai farmworkers, and executed them. The fighting was fierce, and Nimrod was shot in the chest — but a bulletproof vest, lent to him by an injured soldier, saved him.
Nimrod, the special forces unit, and the paratroopers advanced under heavy gunfire and killed 27 terrorists, halting the Hamas attack on Alumim.
But the man in the pickup truck kept pleading with them to go to Kibbutz Be’eri, where there were reports of a massacre.
It was too dangerous to take the roads, Nimrod recalled, so they had to make a plan to approach Be’eri by a circuitous route, across farmland. They reached Be’eri just as other soldiers began to arrive. Soon, tanks arrived as well, and the battle to liberate Be’eri began in earnest.
Nimrod and fellow soldiers began evacuating the families. But he will never forget what he saw at Be’eri, both on the streets outside the kibbutz and in the kibbutz itself.
Women laying naked, and dead, in the streets where they had been raped. Piles of bodies inside roadside bomb shelters, where the terrorists had thrown grenades to kill terrified civilians. Garden rakes with the scalps of male victims impaled on the prongs.
Nimrod only left at midnight, escorting one more family out of Be’eri before driving back north. The family told him that one of their friends had been taken hostage. It was only then, he realized, that Hamas had taken hundreds of people to Gaza.
He is ready to join the fight again, he says, and expects to do so once the ground invasion of Gaza begins in earnest.
His organization links young Israelis with their peers all over the globe — including the Arab world.
But Nimrod says that after Oct. 7, the Arab world must make a clear choice: to follow the path of Hamas and ISIS, and bring death and destruction; or to follow a path of peace with Israel, and build a more prosperous future.
There will be time for going back to work. There will be time for analyzing what went wrong on Oct. 7. There will be time for rebuilding the southern communities that Nimrod cares about so much.
For now, there is war — and it is a fight for which Nimrod, and his “startup” generation of Israelis, are ready.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
