Lieutenant Colonel Guy Madar, who commands the Bedouin soldiers organized as the Desert Patrol Battalion, was celebrating the Simchat Torah holiday at the home of relatives in Kiryat Gat, but as soon as artillery fire began in the south, he hurried there, still in civilian clothes and armed only with a handgun. In the Re’im area, he evacuated a badly wounded Golani Brigade soldier and after a terrorist shot at him, he returned fire and killed him. With the Golani soldier’s weapon, he continued fighting, engaged the terrorists, and eliminated several of them. Later he joined a policeman in a patrol car. He and the policeman both suffered leg wounds from terrorist gunfire, and the car veered into a ditch by the roadside. He applied a tourniquet to himself and lay there for roughly two and a half hours, surrounded by dead terrorists. When IDF forces arrived, they mistook him for a terrorist because he was out of uniform, but luckily one of the soldiers noticed his ritual fringes and he was evacuated to a hospital where he is now recovering from his wounds.
