When Gali Eilon woke up on October 7, she could not fathom that she would become a hero for many families in her community of Kibbutz Kfar Aza. The 15-year-old with blonde hair was at her grandmother’s home on Saturday morning when the first rocket alarm sounded, a common occurrence for the Gaza border kibbutz. 

No one could have anticipated that alongside the rocket alarms, scores of Hamas terrorists were about to invade the pastoral kibbutz — on motorcycles and paragliders, armed with RPGs, Molotov cocktails, and assault rifles, ready to set homes to fire and massacre whole families. 

Gali’s parents were at home together with her younger brothers during the initial rocket alarm. Yet when Gali’s father, Tal Eilon, 46, the head of the kibbutz security squad, received the call that the kibbutz had been infiltrated, he immediately left to fight the terrorists. Tal asked his family to stay in the safe room until it was safe to leave. “Don’t be heroes,” were Tal Eilon’s parting words. 

It wasn’t even 7 a.m. 

In the meantime, Gali and her cousin hid under a bed in their grandmother’s bomb shelter. “We could hear the nonstop gunfire and battles going on right outside my grandma’s home,” Gali recounted last week in an interview aired on “Heroes,” a series on Israel’s Channel 12 TV. “The windows in the house exploded. At first we thought it was the army, but it was the terrorists who entered the house. There was a moment when we were certain they would enter the safe room.”

At about this time, the first IDF troops reached the kibbutz from the Duvdevan commando unit and found themselves battling in complete chaos. They had no knowledge of the kibbutz layout and therefore could not reach residents who most needed their help. To make matters more complex, the residents at this point trusted no one and believed that the IDF soldiers knocking on their door were Hamas terrorists. 

While the Duvdevan commando unit is trained to carry out missions in extreme situations, the brutal and bloody attack on the kibbutz was something that the soldiers had never experienced. Hamas terrorists were shooting down soldiers as they blindly attempted to save kibbutz residents. Several IDF soldiers from the unit eventually took cover in the home of Gali Eilon’s grandmother. 

“At first we heard only Arabic, but then we began hearing voices speaking Hebrew,” Gali said. The frightened family opened the door to the safe room when the IDF soldiers identified themselves as such. 

After hearing the soldiers describe the chaos, Gali slid from under the bed. “I thought to myself, why should I stay hiding under the bed when I could be helping other people?”

“I told the soldiers that there is a kibbutz WhatsApp group where residents were sending location pins of the injured along with locations of the terrorists,” Gali said. 

This was exactly the information that the Duvdevan commando soldiers needed to successfully combat the terrorists. The teenage Gali took on the role of dispatcher and began collecting the locations of the injured residents while sharing the up-to-date information from her cellphone with the soldiers. She also shared maps of the kibbutz. In addition, she texted the residents that there were IDF soldiers on hand and sent recordings of their voices so that the residents would know to open their locked doors for the commando fighters.  

Gali’s grandmother, Leora Eilon, said that her granddaughter did not stop sending messages, gathering information, and keeping the soldiers informed that day. “Gali sent troops to as many places as possible on the kibbutz and saved people,” she said. 

The IDF soldiers eventually had to leave Gali’s grandmother’s home to carry out their mission, and they did so with a much clearer picture of what was going on. Gali and her cousin, aunt, and grandmother would spend 30 hours in the safe room before they were finally rescued. In the meantime, Gali’s father, Tal, was able to shoot down three terrorists before he fell in battle. 

“There are no heroes like my dad. But the odds were against him — 12 members of the security squad facing a hundred terrorists,” Gali said. 

Tal Eilon was identified among the fallen in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, which lost 62 residents in the Hamas massacre on October 7. Hamas terrorists abducted 19 residents of the kibbutz, of whom 11 have been returned, and burned down dozens of homes. 

“I am not a hero,” Gali concluded. “I am a survivor.”