‘Be Absolutely Quiet. Not a Word.’
The Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family were trapped inside a safe room in their house on the Israel-Gaza border when they heard gunshots outside. Tibon speaks Arabic, so he knew what was happening. Hamas terrorists had somehow made it into their Israeli village. Tibon spoke with me and my colleague Yair Rosenberg about the experience, and in this episode of Radio Atlantic we hear Tibon’s story—hiding out with his two young children, their improbable rescue—and his first, raw thoughts about why this happened to them.
Listen to the conversation here:
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
Amir Tibon: Saturday, six in the morning, and we hear a very familiar sound: the sound of a mortar about to explode. It’s like a whistle. It’s almost like this [whistles].
Hanna Rosin: Amir Tibon lives in a community in Israel, right near the Gaza border. Mortars fly overhead once in a while, but the family has a routine for that. Amir, his wife, and their two young girls go to a reinforced safe room in their house, and they wait. It’s scary, but they’ve gotten used to it.
Tibon: You wait sometimes an hour. You pack your bags.
And when there is a break, a few minutes, you just shove the kids in the car and you go
