It was 7:30 a.m. on October 7, in the city of Kiryat Ata near Haifa, when Eran Masas received a phone call that would change his life. On the other end was his older brother Avi, urgently telling him, “Get up because we’ve lost the country.” That warning jolted Masas awake, setting off a chain of events that would see him perform acts of incredible courage amidst the chaos and horror of one of Israel’s darkest days.
Masas, a father of four and a former lieutenant colonel who had been discharged from the Israeli army in 2020, immediately checked social media. What he saw left him stunned: a Hamas pickup truck was spotted in Sderot, a city near the Gaza border. Overcome with a powerful urge to act, Masas decided to head straight into the conflict zone, even though he wasn’t called up for duty. To explain his sudden departure, he told the first of several ‘lies’ – informing his wife that he had been called up by the army.
Dressed in his uniform and armed with only his sidearm, Masas drove 200 kilometers to Sderot. Near the city, he stumbled upon a horrifying scene: a bullet-riddled car belonging to the elite Yamam unit of the Israeli police force. Inside, all the officers were dead. For the first time, Masas felt fear as he began to grasp the scale of the terrorist attack. But he couldn’t afford to give in to that fear. Nearby, he encountered another police car with more dead officers inside. The terrorist who had killed them was sitting in a pickup truck rigged with explosives, turning it into a deadly bomb on wheels. Masas, acting on instinct and training, fired nine bullets from his sidearm, hitting the terrorist five times and neutralizing the immediate threat.
As he continued toward Sderot, Masas encountered a large group of traumatized and panicked young people near Moshav Patish. They were survivors of the Supernova rave, a music festival that had been attacked. Realizing the depth of their trauma, Masas directed them to safety in Patish, promising them buses would arrive within half an hour—a promise he knew was untrue. But, in a stroke of luck or divine intervention, three buses soon appeared on Route 241 near Patish Junction. Masas convinced the drivers, using the authority he didn’t have, to take the survivors to Beersheba. The ruse worked, and the young people were safely evacuated.
With the immediate danger to the survivors averted, Masas turned his attention to the dead. He began to collect bodies, using an abandoned pickup truck. His first recovery was a young woman he referred to as “the lady in green,” whose near-naked, lifeless body he had to move. “I thought of my daughters,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion as he described the heartbreaking scene.
While Masas was organizing the grim task of body collection, a Channel 12 reporter, Adva Dadon, arrived with her film crew. She introduced Masas on camera as the officer in charge, unaware that he was not acting under any official capacity. Fearful of being exposed as an imposter, Masas quietly asked the reporter to stop filming, explaining that his wife would be furious if she found out he had lied about being called up for duty. Dadon reassured him, saying she believed in him and that was what mattered. Her words gave him the confidence to carry on.
As the day progressed, Masas coordinated with soldiers who arrived on the scene, directing them to search the festival grounds for survivors. In one of the most chilling videos from that day, Masas can be seen moving through the aftermath of the attack, calling out, “IDF, police, are there any survivors?” His voice echoes among the dead, and he is heard saying, “Oh my god, it’s full of bodies, no one is alive, everyone’s dead.”
Eran Masas’ story is a testament to the human capacity for courage and compassion in the face of unimaginable horror. His “lies” were the lies of a man who found himself at the center of a catastrophe and chose to act, to protect, and to save. His actions that day, though taken without official orders, embody the spirit of selflessness and resilience that can emerge in the direst of circumstances.
