How a farmer saved 120 lives on Oct. 7

Oz Davidian, a farmer in southern Israel, saved some 120 revelers from the doomed Supernova festival.

By David Issac, JNS

Oz Davidian, a farmer from southern Israel, saved 120 young people from the Supernova Music Festival, the nature party that Hamas terrorists burst upon with bloodthirsty savagery on Oct. 7, killing some 350 unarmed revelers.

Dashcam footage from his jeep captured each moment of the 20 or so trips he made from the site of the outdoor party to his moshav, Maslul, and another community, Moshav Patish, to rescue survivors and bring them to safety.

The footage was published by Channel 13 on Tuesday.

Davidian relates how a young woman he had taken in his jeep asked, “Tell me, who are you?” He answers, “I’m just a moshavnik that came to extricate you.”

“No, no, it can’t be,” she says. “What special person are you? Someone from the Shin Bet?”

When he asks why she says that, she answers, “Look, there’s no one here. We’ve been stuck here for hours. There’s no one here. It can’t be there’s no one here [and that] you’re the only one who comes.”

That theme, that the victims were left to fend for themselves, with the IDF and other security forces nowhere to be seen, runs like a current through all the stories of rescue and survival that day.

“It’s difficult to see again and again and again. They were in the area for hours. He rescues many people. [But] there are no [security] forces,” comments the Channel 13 anchor after the report.

Hamas controlled Route 232 and the rural area where the music festival was held for six hours, according to the report.

Yossi Eli, the Channel 13 journalist who put together the news segment, posted on X, formerly Twitter: “What I take from the recordings is that … even when the camera showed the time 12:30—six hours(!)—after the Hamas invasion, the damned terrorists were alone in the region of [Kibbutz] Re’im doing what they wanted: raping and murdering women (I spared you the pictures), looting the bodies of soldiers, and no one bothered them.”

Alone in hell: from the entire article, and the courage Oz showed, what I take from the documentation is his "alone" in the field: even when the camera showed the time 12:30 pm, six hours! After the Hamas invasion on 7th of October, the damned terrorists were alone in “Re’im”… pic.twitter.com/yd1pe3OXUK

— Yossi Eli יוסי אלי (@Yossi_eli) November 16, 2023

Eli described Davidian as “The only point of light among hundreds of terrorists trying to save [people] from the inferno.”

The farmer’s dashcam records him driving past burnt-out cars, corpses and terrorists. Davidian describes at one point seeing two men near the body of a soldier. At first, he thought they were Israeli forces, but then it hit him they might be terrorists. He pulls alongside and asks in Arabic if the soldier is dead. One terrorist answers in the affirmative.

“Then it hit both of us. I understand that he’s a terrorist and he understands that I’m a Jew,” Davidian says, who then hits the gas and speeds away. The terrorists can be seen in the jeep’s backup camera standing up and turning towards the vehicle.

“In the flight, you can hear them shooting at us. By a miracle the bullets didn’t hit the car,” Davidian says.

He saw a woman raped by a terrorist as his comrades stand by and shoot. “You see his friend rape there. They guard him and continue to fire.

“You see piles of bodies, one on top of the other. … Apparently, they slaughtered them and they fell one on top of the other in the gunfire.”

He saw the faces of those killed and it saddened him that he wasn’t able to take the bodies out of there. “Because you have wounded and survivors still hiding and terrorists that are still shooting at them,” he says.

The entire time he was carrying out his self-assigned rescue mission his wife and four daughters were hiding in a safe room at their home.

“You worry. There are terrorists in the entire area. They’re simply spraying [bullets] in every place possible. It’s inconceivable—this evil. … They shot at everything that moved.”

Davidian says it helped that he was familiar with the area and knew “where all the pits were,” so he could drive at full speed. On each of his trips to the nature party, he took a different route.

Oz Davidian’s trips to the nature party as documented by Channel 13. Source: Screenshot.

During one of his trips, one of his daughters, Uriah, calls. He tells her he can’t talk at the moment as he’s “just at the moment rescuing people from the party, from the mess.”

Uriah, in a later interview, tells the reporter as she hugs her father, “He was always my hero.”

Acts of courage continue to filter out from the horrific attack on that first Saturday in October, now known in Israel as “Black Sabbath.”

Earlier this week, a video from the Oct. 7 massacre showed the final heroic act of an off-duty soldier, Staff Sgt. Aner Elyakim Shapiro, protected a packed public bomb shelter by throwing out Hamas grenades as the terrorists tossed them in.

The video, which was taken from the dashcam of a nearby car and posted to the South First Responders group on Telegram, shows how Shapiro managed to throw out seven grenades before the eighth fatally wounded him.

The shelter was full of partygoers who were attending the music festival and who entered for protection from the rocket barrage from Gaza that morning.

HamasOct 7thOz DavidianSuper Nova Festival