IDF report reveals Ofakim was rescued by its own police and residents – not army

The fifteen Hamas terrorists who invaded October 7 murdered 33 people, including eight security personnel, before being eliminated.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The IDF report on the Hamas invasion of Ofakim, released Tuesday, said the heroic actions of local police, their counter-terror unit, and ordinary residents eliminated the terrorists rather than the army, on October 7, 2023.

Fifteen Nukhba terrorists entered the southern town in two pickup trucks at 7:08 AM.

The report said they specifically targeted the Hagefen neighborhood because it was an old one whose homes lacked fortified safe rooms.

They knew that this meant that when their operatives began launching thousands of rockets from Gaza a half hour earlier at southern and central Israel as cover for the invasion, the residents would have to run to public shelters, making them more vulnerable to attack.

The elite Hamas unit, which was heavily armed, first moved as one and gunned down twelve civilians.

A police officer, an armed civilian, and a resident who was in the IDF’s officer’s training school engaged the terrorists as one team about seven minutes into the start of the massacre.

The police officer and civilian were killed and the officer cadet was wounded as they fought.

The terrorists then split up, with four entering Rachel and David Edry’s home on Tamar Street, taking them hostage.

Rachel became famous for her calm in handling the terrorists over the course of the next 17 hours, speaking to them in Arabic as if they were her children, making them cookies, and doing everything in her power to make them hesitate to kill her and her husband.

The rest of the terrorists meanwhile moved down two other streets, murdering residents as they went.

They were then confronted by several police officers and other civilians who bravely joined them.

Two police officers were killed in those firefights, which took place at approximately 7:30.

Various members of this impromptu Israeli response team then killed eight terrorists on different streets over the course of the next fifteen minutes.

Another hostage situation developed as the remaining terrorists broke into a home on Hachita Street.

Police officers rescued the family about an hour and a half later, killing two of the terrorists around 9:30.

It took another hour and a quarter to find and kill the third one.

At 12:45 the elite police Yamam unit took over control of the hostage situation on Tamar Street, and periodically assessed the situation with Rachel’s help in signaling them from the house as much as she could.

At 2:25AM, the Yamam forces broke in and killed all four terrorists while rescuing the Edris, unharmed.

The report noted that Ofakim had neither a trained emergency response squad nor a command center that could receive and decipher reports from panicked residents and coordinate the response efforts between the municipal authorities, police and IDF.

The first IDF units only arrived in the town at 9:10, after “the battle had effectively ended,” a military source told Ynet. “The terrorists were either dead or entrenched. The soldiers were no longer relevant to the fight.”

“This was a battle that could have ended in hundreds of deaths,” said a senior IDF official. “It was the determination of police officers, civilians and [individual] soldiers that stopped the massacre.”

In all, the Hamas force murdered 33 people in Ofakim in 45 minutes, including eight security personnel.