Maj.-Gen. (retired) Noam Tibon, 62, described to NBC News how he raced an hour and a half from Tel Aviv to save his son Amir’s family under terrorist attack in Kibbutz Nahal Oz near Gaza on October 7.
“I told Amir, ‘You have to be quiet, you have to be locked [up in the safe room]. Trust me, I will come,’ and he knew that I will come. This is my profession. Nobody, nobody can stop me.”
Amir Tibon, a journalist, stayed in his home’s fortified safe room with his wife, Miri, and daughters Galia, 3, and Carmel, 1. He knew that his father, the retired commander of the IDF’s West Bank Division and the Northern Formation, would come to their rescue.
Amir told The New York Post that he instructed his daughters to remain calm and quiet, to trust their parents and their grandfather .
“I have to do the same thing right now. I have to trust my father, who is a trustworthy man, that if he said he will come here and save us, he will do it,” he recalled thinking to himself.
The general and his wife jumped in their car and drove down, stopping along the way to aid panicked survivors of the Nova music festival massacre earlier that morning.
Upon reaching Nahal Oz, the elder Tibon “went house by house searching for terrorists. There were bodies of terrorists in the kibbutz [and we saw] paratroopers killed another six. When we came to the area of my son’s house, we saw at least five bodies of terrorists and that of an Israeli soldier.”
When he reached his son’s house, he knocked on the armored window of the safe room. “I said, ‘Amir, it’s me, Abba, you can open.’”
Over the span of several hours, the retired general joined troops in their fight to eliminate the remaining terrorists and free the rest of the residents on his son’s kibbutz.