Mum’s 13-mile run to save her baby as Hamas attacked
BULLETS kicked up desert sand and rockets exploded overhead as Astar Moshe ran for her life – and the life of her unborn son. Astar, 35, was three months pregnant and suffering morning sickness on October 7. But with Hamas terrorists on her tail she kept going for more than 13 miles before finally reaching safety.
‘Some kind of maternal instinct came over me,’ she said of her ordeal while at the now infamous Nova music festival exactly six months ago today. ‘I would do anything to protect my child,’ she said. ‘There was no way we were going to get killed. We were going to survive and that was it.’
Insurance worker Astar gave birth to 6lb Benaya Moshe two weeks ago. She and her partner Shlomi, 37, a building maintenance manager, call him their ‘miracle’.
Astar told The Mail on Sunday: ‘When I found out I was pregnant we tried to cancel the festival tickets, but we didn’t succeed. So, we thought, “Why not? Let’s have one last bit of fun.” ’
While at the festival, at 6.30am on October 7 the couple were startled by sirens and explosions.
‘We decided to leave and get the car, but then we saw bullet holes in it and two policemen told us to run,’ Astar recalled. ‘Had we driven off we would have been executed, as all the first cars to leave pretty much didn’t make it.’
‘We didn’t know which way to run and we had no idea where we were going. There was smoke all around us, bombs from everywhere and they were shooting at us.’
At one point Shlomi was sprayed in the face with sand from ricochetting bullets, but during a lull in the shooting he encouraged his fiancee to rest. ‘I told him that if I stopped that would be it, I could not give up,’ Astar said.
Finally, after running the equivalent of a half-marathon, the couple arrived at a settlement protected by the Israel Defence Forces.
‘I was in shock when we started to realise the scale of what unfolded,’ said Astar. ‘I thank my lucky stars I wasn’t kidnapped into Gaza and had to give birth there.’