CBS’s Lesley Stahl interviewed a retired Israel major general and his wife who not only rescued their son and granddaughters during Hamas’s devastating attack on the south of the country on Oct. 7th, but also others caught up in the attack.
Noam and Gali Tibon raced in their jeep to Nahal Oz, near the Gaza border the morning of the attack, to their son Amir Tibon, his wife Miri Bernovsky-Tibon, and their two daughters, but were stopped on the way multiple times.
“We were in a situation that there is no government, there is no military, only citizens. And so who else?” said Gali.
Stahl noted that the former general was texting his son as Gali drove at top speed. “So he writes to me, What’s going on? And I reply, There are terrorists in the neighborhood. I think also inside the house,” Amir said he wrote to his father.
After his father told him to “be quiet. Don’t move. Lock everything,” Amir added, “And he asks me if the dog is in the house. And I said, ‘I don’t think he’s alive.’ I thought he was dead because they had fired so much into the house.”
Stahl then explained that Gali and Noam hit an Israeli checkpoint as they made their way south.
“And then we started to talk to the policeman and say, We have to go. You must let us go. And they were
“So we bypassed them,” Noam added, “Through the fields. We had a jeep.”
“We had the Jeep. And then on the next one, we just we just drove by,” Noam said.
“Yeah, they, they they stopped us. And I say, you know what? We are going, It’s our son. It’s our granddaughter’s. You want, you can shoot me. We are going,” Gali added.
On their way south Gali and Noam stopped twice, once to rescue two survivors of the music festival massacre whose car had been shot at and disabled by Hamas gunmen. The couple also stopped to aid wounded soldiers, with Gali leaving to take them to a hospital to stop their bleeding as Noam found an old military buddy and pressed on to his son, killing a Hamas gunman on the way.
During the interview, Amir, who is a diplomatic correspondent for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, called the Hamas attack “the biggest failure in the history of the State of Israel. Civilians by the hundreds were being massacred by terrorists and nobody came.”
Moments after an air raid siren went off and briefly interrupted the interview.
Amir recalled the moment his father finally arrived to their home and how his daughter, after hearing his voice, reassured them that “grandfather is here.”
“That’s the first time we started crying,” Amir added.
Watch the full clip above via 60 Minutes.