Today as well Osama Abu Assa is dead. On October Seventh, he stood at the entrance to what would become “the death shelter” at the Re’im junction in the south of Israel, wearing a white T-shirt and a black baseball cap, with Aner Shapira, a soldier on leave, beside him. Behind them, young people who had fled from the Nova festival pressed together. “Everyone was suspicious of Osama at first”, El-Ya Cohen told the Mako news site. “I remember people saying, ‘Listen, there’s a Muslim guy here. Maybe he’s one of them’. At some point, when the attackers arrived, I understood that he was with us”.

The terrorist shouted at Osama: “Stop there, sit on the floor. Who’s inside? Are there Jews inside? Are those Jews?”

The Hamas terrorists intended to kill or drag out everyone inside. They fired and shrieked frantically. And then, at seven-fifty-four A.M., Osama made an extraordinary decision. He announced, “I’ll go out and talk to them”. He left the shelter and walked into the hell outside. “He thought that if he went out he could talk to them and maybe, I don’t know, negotiate with them. Maybe help us somehow”, said Eitan Halley, who survived the attack.

What happened in the minutes that followed was captured by Osama’s car camera, parked outside, and by recordings found on the phone of the journalist Ayelet Arnin, who was trapped and killed inside (The meticulous reconstruction is laid out in full in the masterly episode of the investigating program “Zman Emet” about “the death shelter”.) A terrorist shouts, “Hands up! Hands up!”, and Osama answers him, “I’m a Muslim! Stop, stop! I’m a Muslim, man!” The terrorist: “Stop there, sit on the floor. Who’s inside? Are there Jews inside? Are those Jews?” Osama: “I swear on my father’s life I don’t know them”.

In the video, a wounded Osama can be seen leaning against the shelter’s wall. He is stripped of his shirt, and crazed terrorists beat him and point their weapons at him. A few minutes later, Osama Abu Assa was no longer among the living. According to Itamar Shapira, who survived the shelter, “He didn’t think about himself at all – he went out first. A very brave and noble act. I felt that he went out to them and tried to protect us”.

Osama Abu Assa, thirty-six, of the Bedouin town of Tel Sheva, married and a father of two, worked as a guard at a solar farm and served as a security guard at the Nova festival. People who worked with him eulogized “a man with a large and pure heart who always helped and gave to everyone”. Before he was murdered, he had managed to broker a reconciliation in a feud between his family and another. After he was murdered, his family swore vengeance and offered a million dollars for information about the killers.

A few months ago, Jawad Abu Assa paid his respects at his brother’s grave. On the way back, police officers with drawn weapons stopped him. Then Itamar Ben-Gvir, the extreme-right Minister of National Security, stuck his head through the car window. He began to puff himself up, as part of his ongoing campaign of self-promotion through Bedouin intimidation. “My brother died in the war”, Jawad told him. “Well, good fo…” Ben-Gvir began, then thought better of it. “May God avenge his blood”. Jawad only wondered, “You – who died on you? You just come here to inflame things”. The minister tossed back, “I had fifteen hundred brothers die on me”, and continued to dispense his usual empty threats. All for a few more likes on TikTok.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)