When Hamas terrorists came to murder a 22-year-old woman and her boyfriend in southern Israel Saturday, she turned to the only person she knew could save her — her estranged father whom she had not seen or spoken to in six years.
Shimon Portal, an Israeli police officer, was responding to armed gunmen rampaging in the nearby city of Sderot when he got a text message from his daughter, Neta, telling him: “they are close.”
The father and daughter had not communicated since she was a teenager after her parents’ divorce.
Shimon texted bac,k instructing Neta Portal to “lock the doors.”
Neta and her boyfriend, Santiago, were at their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza when Hamas militants overran the small agricultural community, indiscriminately massacring men, women and children — including babies who were beheaded and burned, according to Israeli authorities.
Neta and Santiago, along with other residents, raced to a safe room, but the invaders forced their way inside and opened fire, with some of the bullets striking the 22-year-old in the legs.
“They were shooting people. They were shooting the kids,” Neta recalled, talking to BBC News through sobs from her hospital bed in Tel-Aviv. “And the people were shouting, ‘Please no, please no.’ I tried to wake myself because I didn’t want to die.”
Santiago urged Neta to jump out of a window to try to get away.
“I started to open the window and I saw 10 or 15 terrorists,” Neta recalled. “They were standing on a car with a big machine gun, smoking cigarettes and laughing like they were on vacation.”
Neta said she was scared to jump, but when a terrorist hurled a grenade into the safe room, Santiago grabbed her hand and they leaped out of the window together.
The gunmen positioned downstairs opened fire on the couple, striking them in the legs.
“Santiago screamed at me: ‘Please stand up, start to run. If you don’t stand up, we’re going to die. We’re going to die,'” Neta said.
Despite being himself injured, the boyfriend carried the bullet-riddled Neta in his arms to safety, and the two found refuge under a pile of trash.
While Santiago was trying to stop his girlfriend from bleeding out from the 6 gunshot wounds to her legs, she frantically texted her father again, saying: “They shot me. Help.”
“I’m coming,” Shimon replied.
Shimon raced to the besieged kibbutz in his unmarked car and was met by terrorists who opened fire on him.
With bullets flying, the cop managed to put his car in reverse and speed away.
Later, when things in Kfar Aza quieted down, Shimon called out for Neta in Hebrew. Instead of his daughter, he said three Israeli children came running towards his car.
As the girls were climbing into the officer’s car, terrorists spotted them and opened fire, but Shimon said he was able to escape with the children unharmed.
Shimon then continued looking for his daughter, and eventually tracked her to her hiding spot.
He loaded the wounded 22-year-old and her boyfriend, who was also shot in the leg, into the back of his car and rushed them to the nearest hospital.
“My beautiful daughter. I have got her back,” said Shimon while looking at Neta in her hospital bed.
Others were less fortunate: entire families living in the once-idyllic kibbutz, located just a couple of miles from the Gaza border, were wiped out by roving bands of terrorists. In all, at least 1,300 Israelis have been killed and a further 3,000 people have been wounded.
In Gaza, close to 1,800 people have been killed as a result of Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes, according to the Palestinian health ministry.