The Eritrean migrant, now a resident, works at the same neighborhood bakery and, with state assistance, has moved into a nearby flat while awaiting imminent approval of his citizenship paperwork.By Etgar Lefkovits, JNS“Are you alive?” the astonished Eritrean migrant asked the senior Israeli army commander in his hospital bed.“I’m alive because of you,” the officer replied.It was a week earlier, on Oct. 7, 2023, when 51-year-old Mulugeta Tsegay happened upon Israel Defense Forces Lt. Col. Y., hunched over in his car on the southern Israeli road, his head careening out of the window and his body badly bleeding from the bullets that had riddled his vehicle during the Hamas-led terrorist attacks from the Gaza Strip.He would risk his own life to save the Israeli officer.The Eritrean is now a resident of Israel and on his way to becoming a citizen in recognition of his heroism.“I didn’t do anything special,” Tsegay shyly demurred in an interview with JNS last week, shaking off the title hero. “I did what anybody else would do.”‘I was sure they would kill us’On that fateful Sukkot holiday weekend, Tsegay had set off with two friends in a taxi from the southern Israeli town of Netivot to spend a day in Tel Aviv.He first arrived in Israel about a decade and a half earlier as a migrant who snuck into the country via the Sinai Desert, determined to come to the Jewish state after hearing about its famed military from his own commanders in the Eritrean Army, some of whom underwent training with the IDF and lavished it with the highest praise.He then brought over his wife and two children, and later found work in a bakery in the Negev Desert city where he lived.The taxi driver asked the group if they were worried about the Red Alert sirens warning of incoming rockets, but, like native Israelis in the south having become used to years of rocket and other projectile attacks from the Gaza Strip, they nonchalantly replied that they were OK.Soon after they started their journey to Tel Aviv, Tsegay noticed a car sitting aimlessly next to the separation barrier on the road with the driver’s head outside the window and told the taxi to stop.The group, who assumed that the driver had been wounded by shrapnel from a rocket, got out of the cab to check it out. No sooner than Tsegay had reached the vehicle—stopped cold on the road after crashing into the barricade—than gunshots rang out nearby.The taxi driver, who was armed, pulled out his gun and shouted, “There is a terrorist nearby!”Everybody—save Tsegay, who was trying to pull the severely wounded victim out of the car—quickly ran back to the cab for safety. The vehicle sped off, leaving Tsegay alone with the victim.Soon realizing that the commander had been hit by bullets and not by shrapnel from a rocket, Tsegay, who had been trained as a commando himself during his youth in the Eritrean Army, brought him to the ground and applied a makeshift tourniquet to stop the bleeding.Bullets began to whiz above their head with only the separation barrier on the road protecting them.The badly injured commander asked him if an ambulance was coming, and Tsegay, thinking to himself, ‘What should I tell him?’ assured him that one was on the way.“I’m with you till the end, don’t worry,” Tsegay assured the officer.As bullets flew above them and into the barrier, he poured some seltzer on the commander’s forehead as he lay on the ground, remembering from his own training decades earlier that it would be dangerous to let him drink any water, as he had requested, in his current condition.Slowly, he moved the bleeding officer away from the car, which they both thought might catch fire.“It was difficult because he was heavier than me,” he recounted.Suddenly, three men came into view from across the separation barrier, and Tsegay, mistaking them for Israeli soldiers, waved to them only to find out they were Palestinian terrorists who opened fire on them from just 25 meters (80 feet) away.“We were both in shock,” he said. “I was sure they would kill us.”Eritrean migrant Mulugeta Taegay and the Israeli officer he saved during the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, see together again on Nov. 13, 20205. Photo by Rina Castelnuovo.‘I felt such a sense of relief’As they lay on the ground of the road, ducking for cover and their own lives, a firefight broke out directly above their heads. Five minutes later, there was total silence; the three terrorists were dead, but now, someone else was pointing a gun straight at his head.“Who are you?” the civilian asked him.“I’m an Eritrean. I’m helping this guy here,” he responded, gesturing to the officer on the ground.The badly wounded commander confirmed his story. The civilian put down his gun.A jeep with IDF soldiers finally pulled up—some two hours after the Eritrean first told his own taxi to stop—and medics evacuated the commander.“I felt such a sense of relief,” Tsegay recounted. “Like a woman after giving birth.”Escape to safetyWith the whole area under attack, the Israeli soldiers told Tsegay that they could not take him back to his hometown and advised him to head to the nearby Israeli agricultural village of Yakhini, near the southern Israeli city of Sderot, for safety.He walked between the bodies that littered the street—his own clothes stained with the commander’s blood—and after about 15 minutes or so arrived in the community seeking refuge in a sukkah, which was still up following the Jewish autumn holiday.He began to talk to himself inside the hut and pray to God, he recounted, tears streaming down his face.Soon, the owner of the house opened the door of the house.“Aren’t you the Ethiopian who works in the bakery in Netivot?” the dumbfounded resident asked him, referring to the nearby city in the Negev Desert where the Eritrean migrant lived and worked.“Yes, that’s me,” he responded, even though he knew that the resident had mixed up his nationality. “What are you doing here?” the resident asked anew and handed him a glass of water.A religious neighbor who overcame his initial concern that a terrorist had entered the sukkah soon came over with a coffee and told him to make the Jewish blessing.Remembering the start of the benediction he would often overhear in the bakery, he began to say out loud the first words of the blessing in Hebrew said for a drink.The neighbor, who was so unnerved by the morning’s events, had accidentally put salt instead of sugar in his coffee and invited him to his home for a meal.He spent the night there with the family watching the unimaginable news of the Oct. 7 massacre and kidnappings, which he had witnessed live, in part, unfold on TV.The following day, he finally got a ride back to his hometown and immediately reported himself safe to the police, who had assumed he was killed and taken to Gaza after his friends from the cab who had fled reported him missing.For a few nights, he could barely sleep. “I got out of there because God was there,” he told himself.Reunion and residencyIt was a week later that the wounded officer reached his rescuer by phone after news of the Eritrean migrant’s story was posted on a Facebook page.The commander invited him to come see him in the hospital for an emotional reunion.The two men have bonded ever since and remain in touch daily.The Eritrean who expressed his wish to legalize his status in Israel was granted residency after the commander immediately connected with Israel’s Interior Minister, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, and told him the story.“This is the little bit we can do in order to express our thanks to someone who risked their life to save an Israeli officer,” said Moshe Arbel, former interior minister, at the ceremony. “Recognition of something good is a supreme Jewish value.”The Eritrean migrant-turned-resident works in the same neighborhood bakery and, with the help of the state, has since moved into a small flat in a neighboring town. His paperwork to become a citizen is expected to be approved shortly.Meanwhile, in a further life twist and in a dream come true, Tsegay’s own teenage daughter was allowed to enlist in the IDF with her own Israeli high school peers as she long desired and is undergoing a concomitant conversion to Judaism with the help of Lt. Col. Y’s family.For the commander who has since recovered from his near-death experience and his Eritrean hero, it is a journey that brought them together for life.“I am alive by virtue of a series of miracles of which he is the center anchor,” Lt. Col. Y said. “I owe him my life.”The post Eritrean migrant who saved IDF officer on Oct. 7 settles down in Israel for good appeared first on World Israel News.