Sderot memorializes police station that was destroyed on October 7
The site of the battle now has murals, pillars that reach for the sky and recorded voices of those who called for help
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
Sderot’s local police station was the infamous scene of a brutal gun battle after it was assaulted by Hamas terrorists during the October 7, 2023, attack.
Terrorists stormed the station and killed 20 police officers before barricading themselves inside and exchanging heavy fire with security forces. The station was eventually bulldozed by Israeli forces amid gunfire to kill the remaining terrorists inside.
“They conquered it, for real,” said Ilan Abecassis, a Sderot resident who now serves as a tour guide at the site. “Three of their pickup trucks were right there,” he said, pointing at a nearby traffic circle, “and they encircled the station. This place was a death trap.”
Abecassis stood on the plaza of what was formerly the location of the station, now a hastily assembled memorial site established last summer for the catastrophic attack that shook the city to its core. In all, 72 people were killed in Sderot during the Hamas onslaught.
On a late afternoon recently, several people stood under concrete pillars that reach toward the sky, mirroring the central tower that once formed the core of the community police station.
They read the Hebrew quotes engraved on the pillars, listening to the embedded speakers playing snippets of voice recordings of phone calls from that day as police officers and citizens under attack called for help.
The recordings include the voice of one six-year-old girl whose parents were shot and killed in front of her in their car. As the police rushed to rescue her, she asked, “Are you the police of Israel?” and told them she was hiding her two-year-old baby sister under the back seat cushions. The two were eventually rescued.
Another group of visitors that had arrived at the memorial site in a tour bus sat nearby, softly singing songs of loss as one person strummed a guitar.
A walkway lined with rubble from the station serves as a memorial wall, featuring plaques of some of those killed in the city. Abecassis pointed out the people he knew, many of them former students of his.
Ayala Shakuri, the mother of Mor Shakuri, a Sderot police officer killed on the roof of the station, lit two memorial candles, one for her daughter, the other for her husband, Roni Shakuri, also a police officer who was killed this past September in the line of duty.
“I have two heroes,” said Shakuri. “I’d rather have them die as heroes than in some accident or of sickness — but these aren’t things that you can choose. But I choose to live.”
The cycles of mourning and anguish have felt never-ending this last year, said Abecassis, as he hugged Shakuri.
He recalled the early morning hours of October 7, as rocket sirens sounded throughout Sderot.
Abecassis, like many other Sderot residents, thought at first that the rocket attack was yet another of the sort the city had grown used to over 20 years of such attacks. But then bouts of gunfire began to be heard, signaling that something far worse was happening in this city of some 33,000, located less than a mile from Gaza.
That morning some 60 terrorists entered Sderot in pickup trucks and on foot via Routes 232 and 34, the two main highways into the city. They took over Begin Boulevard, Sderot’s main artery, then encircled the police station.
The terrorists immediately killed police officers stationed on the ground floor of the station with RPGs, grenades and gunfire.
“They made it a death trap,” said Abecassis. “Everyone met their end right here,” he said, pointing around the station plaza, “police officers who heard the crazy shooting and came to help, any civilians who happened to be here, soldiers who were off duty and came running in their shorts. [The terrorists] took over the station.”
It took snipers, forces from the elite Yamam counter-terrorism unit, an IDF helicopter and finally a bulldozer to raze the building to eliminate the final 26 terrorists.
The attack changed Sderot forever.
It’s a story that is told in deep detail in Eyal Blachsan’s “The Sderot Police Battle,” an 82-minute documentary made with Kan that was screened on November 14 at the Sderot Film Festival in the city’s Cinematheque arthouse theater.
Blachsan was asked to make the film by Kan in the days following the terrorist attack. Within two weeks he was in Sderot, where he said he and his crew gathered “millions of stories.” They went door to door asking residents for footage they had of events at the station, which eventually included videos from police officers’ phones, security cameras from neighboring homes and footage captured from terrorists’ GoPro footage.
“This was the most filmed war in history,” said Blachsan. “We knocked on people’s doors in Sderot and everyone gave what they had. Everybody felt a sense of mission.”
The film tells its story using the footage intertwined with intensive interviews of officers and closeup shots of a 3D model of the police station to show viewers different aspects of the battle.
The testimonies of the surviving police officers included several who survived the intensive, hours-long battle on the roof of the station, where they ran out of ammunition. Those who survived were eventually rescued by Yamam forces who used firetrucks to bring them down to safety.
Shlomi Levi Wertheim, an officer present at the screening, was in the station house on October 7. After being shot by one of the terrorists as he attempted to keep the attackers away from the roof, he played dead for hours.
“I didn’t believe an event like this could happen,” said Levi Wertheim. “We thought there were three or four terrorists and we would take them out and that would be that.”
Some officers, including Levi Wertheim, had never before shot and killed anyone in the line of duty. They had spent most of their careers living and working in this small-town police department they said had felt intimate and communal.
Rami, another officer present at the screening, had left his synagogue as soon as he heard the gunfire. He was shot as he tried to help the two little girls left in the car, their parents dead in the front seat. He spent hours lying on the ground as the battle raged around him.
“I’ve been a police officer in Sderot for 18 years,” he said. “I never imagined anything like this.”
The film doesn’t ask how the attack could have happened, said Blachsan. Rather, he focuses on the heroics of the officers, soldiers and civilians who fought there, and how they saved the town from a far worse fate.
“They only understood at the end that there were 26 terrorists [in the station],'” said Blachsan. “That’s the huge surprise that they only realized at the very end.”
The annual film festival, a project of the School of Audio and Visual Arts at Sderot’s Sapir Academic College, was canceled last November following the atrocities of October 7. Within several weeks, festival director Tamir Hod came up with a plan for a traveling festival, taking some of the films to evacuees situated throughout the country.
“If our audience wasn’t here, we took it to them,” said Hod, who brought screenings to evacuees in 17 cities, including Eilat, Haifa and the Dead Sea region.
“Sapir was a kind of Chernobyl. No one was here,” said Hod, who lives in a nearby community that wasn’t attacked on October 7.
Now, 13 months later, this year’s festival was held in the intimate theaters of the Sderot Cinematheque, where the small auditoriums, even the bathrooms, are built inside fortified structures, allowing events to take place even when rockets are flying.
With the IDF battling Hamas in Gaza, there haven’t been many sirens of late, said tour guide Abecassis, who moved back home in March, after spending five months organizing an ad hoc school for Sderot evacuees in Eilat.
Schools reopened in Sderot in March, with about 50% of the student population in place, and close to 90% by the year’s end. There are also some 1,000 new residents in Sderot, said Abecassis.
“That’s a ‘wow’ for me,” he said.
Life feels calm in the streets, with stores open and traffic flowing.
“I feel safer, but others don’t,” added Abecassis. “There’s lots of post-trauma, and it’s very individual.”
He looked up at two murals painted above the police station memorial, one featuring two lions — perhaps alluding to the biblical saying in Numbers 23:24: “The people rise up like a lioness.”
The other mural, on a wall adjacent to the plaza, showed a Torah scroll with Hebrew letters floating into the sky, an allusion to the story of Rabbi Chananya ben Teradyon, a second-century rabbi burned at the stake by the Romans for teaching Torah. The Romans wrapped him in the wet Torah parchment, and he claimed he could see the letters of the Torah floating up to the sky.
“Perhaps that’s what this says,” said Abecassis. “The station burned, but maybe those last text messages, the final phone calls, the last words said to their loved ones, are the letters going up to the heavens above.”
