With His Bare Hands

When Bechor Chai Swid heard, on the morning of October seventh, that his friends were being slaughtered, he drove toward them immediately. It didn’t matter to him that the area was swarming with terrorists and he had no weapon

Today as well Bechor Chai Swid is dead. He was thirty-two years old, from Shlomit, a small community in the western Negev. He grew up in Netivot, and later his family relocated to the nearby moshav of Shuva. Those who knew him from childhood describe a young man of uncommon gentleness: the kind who, upon spotting an elderly woman returning from the market, would drop whatever he was doing and take her bags, and who, upon encountering a stray animal, would stop and feed it. More than once, he brought a dog home and announced that he was keeping it.

Beni Meshulam: “Bechor was thirty-five minutes away from us, but Bechor is Bechor. When he hears that the guys need help, he shows up”

He served in the Givati Brigade, then studied education and became a Shelach teacher — a discipline that fused environmental studies with fieldwork, and that suited perfectly his lifelong attachment to the land, its heritage and history. He and his wife, Neora, built their home in Shlomit not as a figure of speech but as a literal fact: they constructed it themselves, with their hands, and had only just finished the second floor when Bechor was killed. Their three daughters – Kerem, Alma, and Shaked – grew up within those walls.

In his final years, Bechor had begun to pivot. He left teaching, opened a gardening business, and enrolled in landscape architecture studies. On October seventh, he was at his parents’ home in Shuva. The sirens began at half past six in the morning. Bechor, a member of Shlomit’s emergency response unit, turned on his phone and quickly understood that his fellow responders had driven to assist the neighboring community of Pri Gan, where terrorists had already broken through. Then he heard a recording of his friend Yehuda Rabinowitz screaming: “Guys, get to Pri Gan fast — we’re wounded, we’re finished”.

Bechor got in his car.

He was unarmed. The area was under heavy fire, swarming with terrorists. In the television investigation program Ha’Makor, which was devoted to the extraordinary story of Pri Gan’s rescue, his friend Beni Meshulam recalled: “He was thirty-five minutes away from us, but Bechor is Bechor. When he hears that the guys need help, he shows up”. In an audio recording made as he drove, Bechor can be heard shouting, “I’m coming through the fields. I’m flying, flying, flying.”

Somewhere along that route, he encountered a cell of terrorists. He ran them down with his vehicle, and then fought them even with his bare hands.

His body was found three days after the massacre. Several months later, his mother, Hadassa, accepted on his behalf the degree in landscape architecture that he had completed with honors. His final project — a bird park planted entirely with species of trees used in the construction of the First Temple, designed for the entrance to his community of Shlomit — is now being realized by his neighbors, with the support of KKL Australia and the guidance of his lecturer Yan Stadden.

Bechor Chai Swid was the cousin of Mor Swid Gabay, who was also murdered on October seventh, and about whom I wrote here last week.