Among the Israel Defense Forces’ many blunders on the black Sabbath of October 7, the battles at Zikim Beach and three nearby IDF bases can be considered a rare victory, according to IDF Maj. Avi Yofef – one of the heroes who fought there for five days until the last of the Nukhba unit terrorists were eliminated.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Yofef – who had been on holiday during Sukkot with his wife and two children – gave a personal account of the fighting at Israel’s most southernmost Mediterranean beach and the nearby bases.
“The price was heavy. Our soldiers performed well. They knew what to do,” he said. They prevented the terrorists from storming Ashkelon’s Rutenberg Power Station and Shikma Prison. If either had been reached, the consequences would have been disastrous.
The Battle of Zikim Beach: Fending off a Hamas naval assault
Amid Hamas’s sunrise rocket barrage on October 7, which also targeted naval facilities, four dinghies with an estimated 35 heavily armed Hamas combatants were detected entering Israel’s coastal waters from the Gaza Strip fishing zone. Col. Eitan Paz, commander of the Ashdod naval base, ordered the forces under his command to defend the border and maritime positions immediately north of the Gaza Strip.
Three of the Hamas boats were sunk by the Navy’s 916th Patrol Squadron. Using gunfire and depth charges, sailors of the Snapir unit – the Navy’s harbor security force – neutralized the survivors, as well as the Hamas frogmen they discovered.
However, one boat with 11 terrorists on board got through to Zikim Beach.
Noting communication had all but collapsed, Yofef reached the war zone at 9 a.m. Picking up a rifle from an IDF casualty, he engaged the Nukhba fighters. Together with some 300-500 defenders who were caught unprepared with limited ammunition and equipment, they mounted a fierce defense. Some soldiers were still dressed in their pajamas, he recalled.
“I was in Tzuk Eitan (Operation Protective Edge in 2014),” he said. “I was unprepared for the scale of the attack.”
The first order of the day was to evacuate patients from Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital.
Fighting took place outside Kibbutz Zikim, and at three military bases. The garrison of the Bahad 4 training base south of Ashkelon staved off the attackers, but the understaffed Yiftach and Erez outposts were overrun. As well, Kibbutz Zikim’s civilian security team fended off a murderous incursion into their settlement.
Nineteen civilians were killed during Hamas’s amphibious assault on the normally bucolic beach. The deceased included fishermen, teenagers on a camping trip, and a group that had held a beach party the previous night.
Yofef explained that 90 newly drafted soldiers who had joined the army in August were stationed at Bahad 4. They were ill-prepared to fight the Gazan terrorists, who had trained for months for their deadly mission.
THE SURPRISE rocket bombardment began at 6:30 a.m. Within six minutes, the recruits on patrol duty at Bahad 4 were sequestered in safe areas and replaced by junior officers. The base’s garrison began hearing gunfire from the direction of nearby military bases at 6:45 a.m.
Observers at the Yiftach outpost witnessed scores of Hamas fighters breaching the supposedly impregnable Gaza border fence. Armed with RPGs, they sped on motorcycles, trucks, and tractors toward the outpost. By 7 a.m., they had arrived outside Yiftach’s gate.
Na’ama Boni, 19, the only sentinel, called for reinforcements. She was met by three soldiers who rushed to the gate without uniforms and a member of the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion. The remainder of the garrison sheltered in place.
The five defenders were quickly overwhelmed by the numerically superior Hamas force. Inside the outpost, two soldiers were killed and several injured in intermittent clashes that lasted for 12 hours, though Hamas never breached the base’s command post.
Combat at Bahad 4 began at 7:30 a.m. when two patrol teams spotted terrorists and reported incoming fire. The highest-ranking officers on the training base at the time of the assault, company commander Capt. Adir Abudi, 23, and deputy company commander First Lt. Or Moses, 20, fell in combat. A sentry post at the base’s firing range was overrun once its defenders ran out of ammunition after 45 minutes of clashes; four officers were killed and two wounded in its defense.
THE FALL OF the firing range marked Hamas’s first successful incursion into the training base, though they did not go on to attempt to take over other positions, which base commander Lt. Col. Shay ascribed to casualties and exhaustion. A single Hamas fighter managed to breach one of the “safe areas” where recruits were sheltering, killing an 18-year-old private who had been drafted two months prior before being killed by another recruit.
Shay, who was at home in Sderot at the time of the attack, requested support from nearby military camps but realized that there was “no one to talk to” as they, too, were under assault. The other two bases in the area were eventually overrun amid serious losses of life.
Of the estimated 11 Hamas fighters who landed on the beach, two or three were killed by naval gunfire shortly after landing. The surviving terrorists began randomly targeting civilians on the beach.
Hearing the shooting, four soldiers of the Golani Brigade’s 51st battalion stationed at the Erez base set out in an IDF vehicle to investigate. Realizing they were outnumbered, three of them retreated abandoning their vehicle. Cpl. Dvir Lisha engaged the enemy fighters and was killed. Some 20-30 civilians fled the beach and took refuge in Bahad 4, where they were kept in a secure area with the recruits.
Reinforcements from the Nahal Brigade were then deployed to the beach in Eitan AFVs, which raced down Highway 6 at 120 km/h. The soldiers killed the remaining terrorists there before moving to support other units.
The bulk of the remaining Hamas fighters were eventually slain while attempting to enter Kibbutz Zikim. The civilian emergency response team there had been alerted to the infiltration by the Navy, and preemptively positioned its members along the kibbutz’s perimeter fence. A squad of six Hamas terrorists arrived at the kibbutz gate driving the IDF vehicle that had been abandoned on the beach. A firefight ensued. The terrorists were eliminated after an hour of intense combat.
The security team remained at their positions until 2:30 the next morning, assisting in the evacuation of civilians. The IDF reinforcements never arrived.
After the assaults on the military bases, Sayeret Maglan and Shayetet 13 commandos secured the area, deployed along the ruptured Gaza border fence, and assisted in the evacuation of civilians and recruits.
The battle continued for five more days.
On October 8, the 916th Patrol Squadron killed the last five Hamas terrorists hiding on Zikim Beach.
On October 10, the IDF’s Twitter account noted troops from the Bislamach Brigade’s 17th Battalion had shot four Hamas fighters nearby.
On October 11, the IDF killed a further eight Hamas militants in the area of Kibbutz Zikim. Two days later, the IDF neutralized a terrorist on the beach. And on October 16, two Gazans who infiltrated the coastline west of Zikim were killed by an IDF helicopter.
THE BATTLE at Zikim Beach on October 7 involved the first-ever use of the Eitan AFV in combat. The successful use of the vehicle there prompted Tamir Yadai, head of IDF Ground Forces Command, to integrate the Eitan into plans for the assault on the Gaza Strip.
On November 10, Ahmed Musa, a company commander in the Nukhba unit who was among the leaders of the attack on Zikim, was killed in a raid by IDF ground forces in Jabaliya.
Yofef credited the resistance at Bahad 4 with preventing massacres in Kibbutz Zikim, Karmia, and Ashkelon. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant similarly noted the Yiftach garrison “secured life for the civilians who live a bit further away.” ■