In the late afternoon on 7 October, an Israeli software engineer in his mid-30s found himself driving down a deserted road parallel to the perimeter fence that separated Gaza from Israel. He had been fighting for hours with an AK-47 taken from a dead Hamas militant. Now he and three friends were headed to the town of Ohad to search for relatives who had gone missing.
“Only when we set off south did we understand how big this was. It was like an apocalypse,” the engineer, who did not want to be named, said last week. “There were hundreds of bodies of civilians inside their cars or on the road, hundreds of dead terrorists with their pickup trucks or motorbikes. There were dead police, army vehicles on fire. We were alone.”
