Heroic United Hatzalah volunteer Leo Horn says he expects to have nightmares for the rest of his life” but insists that saving so many lives made it “worth it”, as he prepares to mark Israel’s first national mourning day for 7 October.
UK-born Leo was praying in synagogue with his young son when he heard the sirens that day October. “Everyone turned to me because I’m the only one with a walkie talkie and cell phone. After two minutes I hear there is a war and to encourage everyone to go to the bomb shelters.” This was the beginning of a 30-hour shift that left Leo needing psychological support.
Now living in Jerusalem, Horn owns a building company but is also a first responder with volunteer-based emergency medical service United Hatzalah of Israel.
With his wife telling him to “go and save as many as you can”, he rushed to the Hatzalah base, met with an ambulance driver and together they headed down south.
Oct-7-photos-credit-United-Hatzalah
He tells Jewish News: “As we get towards Kiryat Malachi (around 11 miles from Ashkelon), I heard that about 300 people have been killed. I didn’t believe it. The whole time we were hearing different things on the radio.”
Heading into Ashkelon, a car flagged them down, a terror victim injured with missile shrapnel laying in the back.
“We stabilised her, stopped the bleed in her back, gave her oxgyen and got her to the hospital.”
En route to their next call, they saw abandoned cars but didn’t realise the people in them had been shot. Leo and his driver then rescued five people who had escaped from the Nova festival.
He says: “One was shot in the leg, another in the hand and as we’re driving towards hospital, one woman is hyperventilating; she’s having a severe panic attack. I asked her what happened. She wasn’t talking. Just crying. Her blood pressure (BP) wasn’t making any sense. Such a young lady with such high readings. She said to me that her boyfriend went out and the Israelis thought he was a terrorist. They killed him by mistake. I promised I wouldn’t leave her until we got to hospital. She asked me if I had a weapon to protect us. I said ‘no’ and her BP shot up again. She wasn’t calming down. She asked me whether I’d go back into the area to help. I promised I would save as many as I could. And then she calmed down.”
Leo Horn, at Ofakim, 7th October 2023
That day, Leo says, “I did a 30 hour shift and dropped at the end but I got all of them to the hospital alive. We kept on going back into the Nova festival ‘fire’. After a while I couldn’t take it any more ,because I’m seeing so many people injured. I turned to God and asked him to help me, and suddenly felt strength.”
He describes that day as “hell; seeing people shot and killed on the road. I didn’t realise until later on the danger we had been in. My mission was to save as many people as I can.”
There’s ambulance footage of them “having to jump out and run for cover and hide for ten minutes at a time before getting back in to continue. We did the same 8 or nine times, whilst under fire from rockets. But our ambulance never got any bullets. There was so much noise going on. We had one rocket landing on the left, and another on the right – and we drove in between. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever how we got out of there alive.”
Horn doesn’t remember all the calls, but knows they “had one from (the southern city of ) Ofakim – where they were butchered. We got a call about two severely injured civilians. We saw soldiers there, who told us we went in purely at our own risk.”
He told his driver: “Let’s go for it. We had no time to think. We had a mission. That’s one of the things I learned from October 7th. If you’ve got a mission and you don’t think, you will get there. My mission was to save as many people as I can. And I did. I learned that it’s possible to get your mission done.”
Ashkelon rescue, 7th October 2023.
They arrived at Ofakim and “hell broke loose. It was horrible. Dead bodies all over. Someone flags us down. The two injured people people we were told about were already dead. And that broke me. I put my life at risk to save two people. And they’re dead. I felt I had come too late.”
A policeman asked Leo to take the two dead bodies. Whilst at first he refused, adamant that he was there to save people, the policeman “begged and begged me.”
Eventually he relented. “We ran to the cemetery and put them down. Suddenly we hear a missile burst over us. We ran for cover and there’s shooting from the other side. We’re trapped. We stay, we’re killed. We move, we’re killed. I called base and told them not to send anyone else. All calls should come to me.”
And so it went on, Leo and his driver going back and forth, under fire, into Ofakim, rescuing injured soldiers and civilians, many “shot all over” and having to decide “who to deal with first, who to stabilise first”.
Leo Horn, re-united with one of the soldiers he saved.
Two of the men they saved and took to hospital were the Sharabi brothers, Daniel (24) and Neriya, (22) who, Horn says, “fought the terrorists at Nova, saving about 120 people. They were shooting every sixty seconds, one of the had shrapnel in his arm, another, his finger was nearly off. Interestingly, their blood pressure was fine. but I realised they’d been in a special unit in the army, so they knew how to keep calm.”
They evacuated five soldiers from Kfar Aza, where ‘people were butchered and we heard they were bringing out 70 injured soldiers. Massive tanks were there. Those five soldiers fought the terrorists for hours.”
The day before he speaks to Jewish News, Leo reunited with one of the soldiers, who told him he was amazed at the control he displayed with them in the ambulance.
Kfar Aza, 7 October 2023. Pic: Leo Horn
Horn says: “I was shouting at them to stay awake. No one was going to lose consciousness when I’m around. They couldn’t hear because of sustained gun fire. Baruch Hashem, we got them to hospital in one piece.”
He vividly recalls weaving across the infamous 232 Road, known as the “Road of Death”. It runs through the Kfar Aza and Be’eri kibbutzim, past Sderot and to the Heletz Junction (around 10 minutes from Sderot) which served at United Hatzalah’s emergency medical center, command centre, and landing pad for helicopters. Terrorists waited all across that road to ambush the drivers trying to escape.
“We ended up in the line of fire. skidding from side to side, to avoid the dead bodies on the road. We weren’t going to run any of them over.”
When Horn eventually returned home, he collapsed, in a state of shock. It took him 20 minutes to realise he was safe. Months later, on Purim, he looked out the window, and burst into tears, convinced he was back in Ofakim, being shot at. He cried for 90 minutes.
Oct 7 photos – credit United Hatzalah
It is only now that he realised that by taking the two dead bodies to the cemetery, he saved them from being taken hostage into Hamas. It meant their families could bury and mourn them.
Horn says he’s proud to be part of the Hatzalah family of 6,000 people but that the real hero is his wife. “The question was only when we were going to get hit. We knew 90/10 we weren’t going to come out alive. So whenever I talk, I say that she is the hero because she’s the one who would have raised the kids if I had died that day.”
