The IDF has killed the Hamas commander responsible for killing a British-Israeli citizen who died while defending partygoers at the Nova Festival on October 7 by chucking seven Hamas grenades back at the terrorists.
The military said last week that Mohamed Abu Itiwi, commander of the Nukhba force, Hamas’s elite military unit, was killed in central Gaza.
Itiwi is said to have been responsible for leading the mass slaughter at the Nova Festival, along with the subsequent kidnapping of hundreds of young revellers on October 7 from the Re’im party.
He was seen on dashcam footage cornering 22-year-old Aner Shapira, whose mother is from Oxford, and several terrified attendees in a small concrete building, into which he chucked several grenades.
But Shapira, who at the time of his death was serving in an elite unit in the IDF’s Nahal Brigade, was seen catching the grenades and throwing them back at the Hamas fighters.
He managed to do this seven times, before the eight grenade tragically killed him.
Chilling footage caught by a dashcam in a car parked outside the shelter appears to confirm this, with the video filmed just after 8am showing several armed terrorists swarming the shelter and firing shots through the entrance.
The terrified people inside the bunker cannot be seen in the footage, which was shared by the First South First Responders group on the Telegram messaging app.
The clip opens with the group of terrorists standing around the entrance, with one shirtless man – who has been captured – sitting on the floor.
Two cars – one of which is from where the video was filmed – are pulled up outside.
One of the terrorists throws the first grenade through the door, prompting a person inside to make a break for it across the road. As he runs, the Hamas gunman fire shots at him. While it is not seen in the footage, it is presumed that he was shot.
The gunmen are then seen attempting to assault the bunker. Some are seen firing shots through the door, while one throws grenades.
However, each time he does, the explosives are sent right back at him, as Shapira throws them back out the door, causing confusion and panic.
The terrorist then appears to call for back-up, and other Hamas gunmen come running to the entrance of the shelter. They too are seen firing shots through the door and throwing grenades into the shelter.
The same grenades are seen being tossed back out of the bunker’s entrance, causing the terrorists to scatter before the explosives detonate.
In total, the terrorists are shown in the video throwing eight explosives into the bunker throughout the course of the four-minute video. Seven grenades are seen being thrown back by Shapira until tragically the eight one doesn’t return.
At the end of the video, a huge blast erupts from the doorway, followed by smoke and dust. The grenade blew up in Shapira’s hands.
‘Shapira eventually died of wounds sustained while holding off the terrorists, as he fought to save the lives of his fellow party-goers,’ South First Responders wrote when posting the video.
‘Some of those he shielded survived the shelter attack to tell his heroic story.’
Shapira’s mother told Israel’s Kan News that her son stood by the entrance of the bomb shelter, tossing the grenades back outside as they were thrown in one-by-one.
‘He stood at the entrance, and threw the grenades out and he managed to save so many people,’ she told the outlet.
Shapira’s grandmother Yamima Ben-Menahem said at the time that he ‘took leadership’ during the crisis and tried to calm everyone else down.
He then put himself in the firing line when Hamas gunmen approached, blocking the entrance to the hideaway and throwing back grenades launched by the terrorists.
He has been hailed by a survivor of the attack as the ‘angel who guarded us’ who ‘saved our lives and deserves a medal of honour’.
After seeking shelter with the group, Mr Shapira reportedly made an effort to calm down the terrified festivalgoers.
‘He said the army was only half an hour away and he was sure that everything was going to be okay,’ Ms Ben-Menahem told the broadcaster.
Then, as armed Hamas terrorists approached the hideaway, he used his body to act as a barrier between the gunmen and the group.
‘When they [Hamas] started throwing grenades into the shelter, he said “I’m going to throw them back and if I miss one you do the rest of the work”,’ she shared, adding: ‘He stood there and threw back one grenade after the other’.
After he died, Hamas reportedly went into the shelter and took five or six hostages before shooting the rest of the group, Ms Ben-Menahem has claimed.
It reportedly took several hours for aid to arrive and only ‘those who were not injured severely’ survived.
After the incident, Ms Ben-Menahem said that some of the survivors reached out to their family to say that Mr Shapira ‘saved our lives’.
Another posted a tribute on Facebook, writing: ‘Aner Shapira… saved our lives and he deserves a medal of honor for being an angel who guarded us.’
Hamas launched their deadly assault into Israel from Gaza on October 7, with the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im among their first targets.
Other terrifying footage from the festival showed the terrorists flying into Israel from Gaza on hand gliders, and riding in on other vehicles, before opening fire, killing some 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and abducting 250 others.
Since then, Gaza has been plunged into war following Israel’s counterinvasion.
Since then, the death toll from more than a year of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has passed 43,000, Palestinian officials reported this week, without distinguishing between civilians and combatants.
