The Hamas brutal war started on October 7, 2023. The attack was on the Jewish Shabbat. It was one of the most tragic days in Israel’s history. Many hundreds of Hamas terrorist fighters attacked Israel’s homes along the Gaza border with Israel.

Ignoring basic morality, the Hamas fighters savagely killed 1,200 people: Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis, Americans, and people from other countries visiting or working in Israel. It made no difference to them whether their victim was young or old, male or female, able-bodied or disabled. They even killed babies. Not only did they kill people, but they also brutalized them before killing them. They raped women and young girls before murdering them.

They also took 250 hostages with them when they returned to Gaza. They treated them badly and even murdered some of them without any sensible reason while they were imprisoned.

Israel’s response to the savagery was more moral than that of any other nation.

The Toby Press 2024 English translation of Israel’s number one Hebrew bestseller, One Day in October, tells the stories of forty heroes who performed remarkable acts on that bloody Shabbat. The stories are dramatic and inspiring. The heroes usually tell them, but a surviving relative or friend narrates the tale when they are killed during their heroism.

We read about people such as the following:

A husband stands at a window shooting at the terrorists and does not run, knowing he will soon be killed, giving up his life so that his wife, holding their baby, has time to run and live. His wife tells how he died and how she misses him.

A young husband and wife talked about the forty-five hundred people at the Nova festival when it was attacked; how they lost friends they had watched dancing, how the husband, a medic, saved lives, and the miracle that occurred that day with a jar of Vaseline, somewhat similar to the miracle of Hannukah. A month after the horror, they started a non-profit called “For the Survivors and the Wounded.”

A 48-year-old retired kindergarten teacher rushed in her car to the battle several times and evacuated a total of twelve casualties, including her son, who survived.

An 85-year-old man, the opposite of all the other heroes, was very gentle. He loved acting. When his wife and her caretaker rushed to the shelter and called for him to come, he refused to go. He sat on a chair and waited for the butchers, acting as if he was the only person in the home. The killers destroyed the door, came in, and found the old man sitting alone and were fooled. His niece tells how he saved the people in the shelter when they were content to murder the old man.

A soldier, age 19, gave up his life when a grenade was tossed into his tank. He picked up the grenade, pressed it to his chest, turned his back to his friends in the tank, and the grenade exploded. It took eight painful minutes for him to die. His dad told his story. He said his son’s friends told him: In the future, people will talk about the heroes such as your son. They saved our country. It doesn’t matter to them whether they’re right-wing, left-wing, Arab, or religious.

There are more stories, such as a black Jew married to a white woman who died heroically to save others, ambulance drivers who drove back and forth to bring the wounded out of harm’s way until they were killed themselves, and strictly Orthodox Jews who went to the battle to save people on that Shabbat even though generally unless it was a matter of life and death, as it was that day, it was prohibited. There is also the tale of a non-Jewish Philippine caretaker of an old woman who saved the old woman from the terrorists. She was scheduled to return to her homeland the next day, but after her experience, she decided to stay in Israel.