The Roundabout
The Fellowship | January 8, 2025
Our media partner Alice Lobo recently visited Israel and sent us this moving and harrowing report on her reflections of October 7, 2023. Lobo is the Executive Producer of The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, a nationally syndicated radio show in that airs weekdays from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET on nearly 500 stations in the United States.
A six-year-old girl cowers in the backseat of a car clutching her three-year-old sister. Both are covered in their parents’ blood. It’s the morning of October 7th and the family was in the process of fleeing Sderot, a town in Southern Israel, when they were stopped by Hamas terrorists at a roundabout.
I’m passing through that same roundabout now with my colleagues as our guide describes the chaos that unfolded as 3,000 terrorists crossed the border with Gaza and unleashed the deadliest rampage on the Jewish State since the Holocaust, killing 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 254.
CCTV captures the moment this young family is abruptly stopped. They jump out of the car and start running with their kids. The mom goes one way and the father goes another, each with a child. The family dog jumps out too. The father is immediately shot and falls to the side of the road. The terrorists seemingly don’t notice the three-year-old next to him and speed away.
The little girl starts walking in the direction of her mom and sister but keeps looking back at her dad, hesitating. The dog is frantically running back and forth. It looks small, like a miniature schnauzer or perhaps a yorkie. A couple more cars speed through the roundabout but no one stops.
Then one does. A man in a uniform, a security officer, gets out and tries to help the family. Another car stops and the severely wounded father hobbles over to it and gets in. They drive off. The officer then waves down a pickup truck. That man gets out to drive the mom and two kids. The dog is left behind, still wildly running back and forth.
There’s an art sculpture in the center of the roundabout, a modern depiction of a person playing a bass cello. It’s a haunting image contrasted against the unfolding events, a painful soundtrack of loss and devastation. As my team passes through town I notice other art installations in roundabouts, which are also accompanied by photographs of hostages. Dozens and dozens of them.
None of the adults survive. I come to learn that the father dies in the car and the officer is shot too. The man who took the mom and kids, an Israeli Bedouin, drives to a police station. But it has already been taken over by terrorists. He and the mom are shot as they pull up, but the terrorists don’t notice the two girls crouched in the backseat and walk away.
A powerful aspect of this story – and many stories from that day – is that the Bedouin was coming off his night shift as a security guard on a construction site. He was also a young father with two sons, roughly the same age as the girls. Is that what compelled him to stop and help versus the other cars that sped by the harrowing scene? We will never know, but he saved their lives and sacrificed his own, an Arab helping Jews.
The girls hide in the car until a police officer opens the door. Bodycam footage captures the moment the terrified six-year-old yells in a panicked voice, “Are you with Israel?” The officer tells her yes, and she cries out, “Take us!”
Those words have since become emblematic of the entire conflict. Are you with Israel? The number of university students protesting Israel in the year following October 7th is a sobering reminder that many are not. People in my own life, upon learning I recently visited the country, questioned whether I also visited Gaza to “get both sides of the story.” I tell them no, I did not risk my life to enter Gaza. It is my belief that the atrocities that occurred on October 7th were terrorism acts of Hamas and its propagation of antisemitism, not the Palestinian civilian population.
The suffering of the Palestinian people is incomprehensible, and I have not met anyone who thinks otherwise, but consider this: “If Israel laid down their weapons today, they would be obliterated tomorrow. If the Middle East laid down their weapons today, there would be peace tomorrow.” The individual who made this point reminded me that most Americans don’t know what it’s like to be surrounded by enemies constantly attacking you from all sides. They are not accustomed to air raid sirens and evacuating to bomb shelters on a regular basis. The Israelis are. Those two little girls orphaned on October 7th, their names are Lia and Romi. The only glimmer of light in this story is that their dog, Simba, was also rescued and the three were eventually reunited. He is the only remanent of their life pre-October 7th and they will all become each other’s therapy.
