Living Ready

At 6:30am on October 7th, just two days before her twenty-sixth birthday, Inbal Rabin-Lieberman woke to air-raid sirens.

Residents of the Nir-Am Kibbutz, which borders the Gaza Strip, immediately began moving their families into nearby bomb shelters. They were prepared, simply and unfortunately, because rocket attacks from Gaza are an all-too-common occurrence.

But to Inbal, who was at the time serving as the volunteer security coordinator for the community, something about this attack felt different. The sounds outside the Kibbutz were unusual, and someone on her team had received a report that the Palestinian agricultural workers who worked in the Kibbutz's orange grove were being shot at.

Inbal had a feeling that something far worse than a rocket attack was underway.

Trusting her intuition, she raced to the secured armory where weapons were kept in case of emergency and quickly called for the twelve residents who made up the "quick response group" for the community. Inbal distributed rifles to the group, and then strategically positioned them in small teams to provide security for the Kibbutz.

Moments later, they came under attack by dozens of heavily armed Hamas terrorists, who we now know were on a mission to murder, rape, torture, and kidnap as many civilians in the Kibbutz as possible—just like the 1,500 other terrorists who'd infiltrated southern Israel that morning, in a stunningly well planned and executed attack intentionally targeting residential communities.

But the Hamas attackers did not anticipate such a ready and coordinated response from Inbal's Kibbutz. .....