Ilan Lorenzi saw the phone light up beside the body on the bus. “It was ringing over and over, and I decided I could not answer it because this would be for me to tell them that their father or mother or loved one was dead.”
“I decided to leave it like this. I knew they were looking for their relative because they heard about the shootings.”
Lorenzi is not a battlefield photographer. Over the last few years, the middle-aged man has traveled the world — Cuba, Morocco, Albania, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, Kyrgyzstan — covering culture and festivals.
Often, Lorenzi leads groups of amateur photographers. “It’s a business, but also I experience with them the culture, the different religions. We always respect other religions: Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. This is my goal. This is my way of thinking.” Other times, Lorenzi will take wedding photos or help with commercial shoots to make ends meet.
He’d woken early on the morning of Saturday, October 7, the only proper non-working day in the Israeli weekly schedule, and went for a walk with his wife. They live in the pastoral village of Moledet, a small community of barely 1,000 people minutes away from the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee. As they walked with their two dogs, reports of missiles fired at Israel began to emerge. “But, you know, we got used to it. The missiles weren’t a big issue.”
Suddenly, news that Palestinian terrorists had infiltrated the Gaza border began trickling in. Lorenzi remembers seeing videos of cars strewn across Israeli highways. “That was a shock,” he told National Review.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was different. “I need to go over there,” Lorenzi told his wife, implying Sderot, the epicenter of some of the worst atrocities committed by Hamas. “I need to go.”
“You are crazy. You are not allowed! You cannot go! This is very dangerous,” his wife insisted.
Lorenzi stood his ground. He apologized, grabbed his camera, some batteries, and jumped in the car, speeding off to pick up Joshua Dekel, a friend and videographer, before making the two-hour drive to Sderot.
When they arrived at the outskirts of the city in the early afternoon, it resembled a ghost town. Normally, Sderot would be bustling with the hum of observant Jews walking back and forth to synagogues for Shabbat services. But Lorenzi saw virtually nobody, apart from the odd person “brave enough to go outside” and peek around.
“It was like a horror movie,” he reflects. “Something frightening, something terrible was in the air.”
A few roads were blocked, but “it was empty. Not a single police. Nobody stopped us. It was still dangerous.”
Lorenzi and Dekel drove within 300 yards of the city center when they began to see bodies. Several cars were ripped apart by bullets. “It was terrible.” A firefight soon broke out between IDF soldiers and Hamas fighters nearby, but Lorenzi stayed put. “We just kept documenting the brutal murders of these civilians.
“I can tell you, a few of the shots were taken at 10 centimeters from the head of the person. You can tell.”
The terrorists did not discriminate. Lorenzi discovered a car of foreign workers from Asia who were killed at point-blank range. “For them [Hamas], it was like [killing] animals.”
The more Lorenzi and his friend explored, the worse it got. “Then we saw eight bodies of old people. I’m talking about 80-year-olds, 70-year-olds. Terrible. Terrible. That reminds me of the Holocaust. Seriously.”
Intense firefighting could still be heard nearby as rockets and mortar shells whizzed overhead. With the fighting in Sderot intensifying, Lorenzi and Dekel decided not to go any deeper into the city. “We are both around 60 years old, and we have children. We are brave but not stupid. You know what I mean?”
The scenes of carnage on Israeli streets were unfathomable to Lorenzi, a veteran of Israel’s war with Lebanon in 2006. “I didn’t see something like that; to see eight people together,” he says of the people shot on the bus. It reminded him of the Palestinian suicide bombing wave of the Second Intifada, when buses and pizza shops were targeted to maximize the number of Israeli civilian casualties.
“I felt like my mission is to document this, to show everybody and the world what was going on,” Lorenzi told NR. “This is a group of old people, foreign workers. This group of eight people were about to go to the sea, to relax for one day.”
The photographers drove north to the nearest hospital to donate blood, but they arrived too late. Israelis, seeing the horrifying news, had already rushed over and met the call. The hospital didn’t need any more blood donations.
Lorenzi decided not to phone his family. “I decided to show them, to tell them, face-to-face.”
One of his sons, serving in an elite unit in the army, had reported for duty earlier in the day. Another son, then traveling with his girlfriend in Seattle, flew back to Israel after hearing the news to report for duty.
“I’m really proud of them. I know something can happen. Since the Holocaust, we didn’t have something like this. This is a tragedy for our country, for the Jewish people.
“What I feel right now, is that we have to fight back. We have to be together to fight back the evil. They’re like the Nazis what they did to babies. We have to fight back in a way that everybody around us — Hezbollah, Iran — will think two times, three times, four times, before they will attack us.
“It’s not revenge. It’s like we have to do it if we want to live in this neighborhood.”