The Incredible Miracle That Saved the Shabi Family on Simchat Torah

Itai Shabi of Kibbutz Be’eri still struggles to find the words to describe the terror, the miracles, and the deep faith that carried his family through the unimaginable on October 7th. Speaking to Channel 2000, he shared the horrifying story of how he, his wife Moran, and their two small children survived the brutal massacre by hiding just steps away from dozens of armed terrorists.

“It was 7 in the morning when they knocked on our door,” Itai recalled. “We were already in the safe room. And I remember saying to myself, ‘What, you’re really trying to come into the house?’”

Outside, chaos had erupted. Gunfire rang out, voices shouted in Arabic, and the horror began unfolding all around them. “We were terrified. We knew they could break in at any second,” he said. “All we could do was wait and pray.”

Then the messages started coming in—heartbreaking updates from friends and neighbors. “‘She’s gone.’ ‘He was killed.’ ‘They’re in my house.’ ‘They took me.’ People actually texted us: ‘This is it. They’ve kidnapped me.’ It was too much to take in.”

When the terrorists started trying to open the safe room door, Itai knew they had no choice but to make a move. “They were fiddling with the door handle. My mind was racing. I thought, ‘I’m going to be the first one to die here.’”

With courage and quick thinkin, Itai made the split-second decision to escape through the window. “I looked out and saw the smoke was thick. I knew we couldn’t stay. Moran handed the kids out one by one. I wasn’t thinking – just acting. I knew I couldn’t leave them. We couldn’t run far. There were too many of them.”

The only hiding place they found was a palm tree in their yard—bare, stripped of its branches because Itai had recently used them to build his family’s very first sukkah.

“We laid behind the tree,” he said. “My son was lying on me, Moran lay in front of me with our daughter on her back. We covered ourselves with the leftover branches. And we didn’t move.”

Terrorists walked just inches from them—one of them even stood directly in front of Itai’s face. “His foot was 20, maybe 30 centimeters from my head. I don’t know how they didn’t see us. They passed by again and again. And somehow, somehow, we were invisible.”

That tree, which gave its branches for their sukkah, ended up shielding them in the most literal way.

“I’ve never built a sukkah before,” Itai shared. “This year I wanted my kids to feel the joy of the holiday. I went around the kibbutz collecting wood, slowly building it up. We had a palm tree near our house, and I trimmed off all the branches to use for s’chach.”

He paused, emotion thick in his voice. “That tree became our shelter. It didn’t even have its leaves anymore, but it still protected us. Somehow, they couldn’t see us behind it.”

Eventually, as smoke filled the air and breathing became impossible, the family had to make a run for it.

“We took off. Bullets were flying. I could hear them whizzing past my ears. I saw sand kicking up in front of my face. They were aiming right at us.” But by a miracle, the family made it to a nearby forest, where they dug into a pile of branches and stayed hidden for another five hours—until nightfall.

“How did we survive that day?” Itai asked quietly. “Even now, I don’t know. I had already said goodbye in my heart. I accepted that this was the end. But clearly, Hashem had other plans. Maybe there’s something I still need to do in this world.”

“After what I experienced, no one can tell me there’s no G-d,” he said firmly. “I was saved ten, maybe fifteen times that day. Not by the army. Not by the government. By Hashem. Only Hashem.”

One of the most unbelievable parts of the story? The house burned to the ground. Every structure around them, even the wooden roof was destroyed. But the sukkah? Completely untouched.

“You won’t find a single piece of our house left,” Itai said. “But the sukkah? It’s still standing. The fire stopped right where it was connected to the house. As if it was protected by something we can’t explain.”

In the midst of all the trauma and devastation, Itai holds tightly to one message: unity.

“The terrorists on the other side of the fence, they don’t care if we’re right-wing or left-wing. They hate us just the same. And we’re busy fighting each other over nonsense.”

He smiled gently. “You know why I wear mismatched socks—one black, one white? To remind myself: we need both legs to walk. We can’t move forward without each other. We’re one people, all children of Hashem. That’s what matters.”