Shani Hadar is a fitness instructor. In a small street-side café in northern Tel Aviv, she recounts October 7, 2023. It was only in the early hours, around 6 a.m., as she recalls, that she and a friend arrived in her small car at the Nova Festival in southern Israel, near the Gaza Strip. There they saw heavily armed men, less than 100 meters from their car. At 6:29 a.m., Hamas began the attack.
Hadar and her friend fled. They sped down the main road — 16 kilometers to the intersection where one can turn toward Kibbutz Mefalsim. There they saw cars weaving in and out of lanes. “I initially thought the drivers were drunk,” Hadar recalls. Some cars had broken windows. “We thought perhaps rockets had hit the cars.” But it was heavily armed terrorists firing at passing cars.
Today, on a journalist trip of the Europe Israel Press Association, the intersection looks again as it did before October 7. Only a nearby shelter remains as a reminder of the massacre. It has been transformed into a memorial — with dozens of candles, photos, stickers, and mementos of young people whose lives were brutally cut short here.
When Shani Hadar and her friend realized what was happening, there was only one option left: floor it, leave the main road, and drive across the fields. Hadar knows today that after her, nobody managed to pass through here alive by car. “As we raced across the field, I heard bullets hitting my car. Suddenly I felt something like a fireball entering my body.” Blood overwhelmed her. Two bullets had struck the 35-year-old on the right shoulder. Nevertheless, Hadar pressed her car on, as long as she could steer with her left hand.
Tracked by a Drone
The tires were shredded. So the escape first ended in a hollow in the field; the car was not easy to spot. “We still expected the worst, prayed the ‘Shema Israel,’ and heard shots and explosions all around us, saw smoke in the distance.” When a Hamas drone later spots the two women, they are attacked again, but the shots miss their target.
Dass ich heute lebe, liegt daran, dass ich vor dem Angriff auf meinem höchstmöglichen Fitnesslevel war
Shani Hadar
In the afternoon they restart their car on the advice of a police officer and continue driving until they encounter Israeli soldiers. By the time Hadar, with the help of an ambulance, reaches Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, it is 7 p.m. Hadar has now survived nearly ten hours with a huge wound. She is operated on immediately at the hospital.
She shows a photo: one of the bullets hit her upper arm bone and shattered upward, destroying her shoulder and tearing muscle tissue. The photo shows a very large open gap in her arm, bones exposed. “We had bound the wound only roughly with our party dresses,” she reports. Within 18 days she was operated on four times.
Fitness as the Elixir of Life
For Shani Hadar there is a special reason why she managed to escape. “That I am alive today,” she says, “is due to the fact that I was at the highest possible fitness level before the attack.”
Hadar talks about her life: that as the eldest of eight children she became something like a substitute mother, that she became a mother herself at a young age, that her marriage ended and that she soon faced life with her daughter on her own. “My then-husband wanted a small wife who sits at home and over whom he can have control,” she says with frustration. She then mentions that she was overweight as a teenager. “Already as a young mother I started exercising, including kickbox aerobics. That gave me self-confidence and time for myself.”
Five times a week she exercises. A trainer encourages her to train as a fitness instructor. Hadar passes exams and trains her body. A mobile phone photo shows how she looked just before October 7: not a gram of body fat, muscles defined everywhere. “My surgeon could not believe that the bullet did not go through the bone. Then it could have hit my heart.” Hadar is certain that hard bones are the result of her training.
And not just that. “When I was in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, the paramedic could hardly believe that my pulse was completely normal, despite my heavy blood loss,” she reports. She also managed to endure the pain. “All of this is attributable to my previous level of fitness.”
After her operations, Hadar resumes an intensive and painful rehabilitation program. Her former trainers encourage her. Some of it she documents on Instagram. Hadar believes that sport was also essential for other reasons. “You realize that you can achieve more than you think. You also recognize your limits.” Understanding this is not only physical work, but also mental. “It also stems from the fact that after my divorce I had deeply reconsidered my life.”
Hadar speaks of goal-oriented thinking, of positive visualization, and that God wanted her to achieve more. “You have to ask yourself, what is good for you and your body?” Hadar constantly takes notes about what she notices, what changes in her, how sport helps her. Maybe it will become a book. After sport and fitness have helped her life so much and after she has completed the long rehabilitation journey, she now wants to convince others what is possible when you work on your body.
Suddenly she twists her right shoulder and moves the right forearm behind her back. “That I can do this again, no one thought possible. I even convinced my rehab team,” she laughs. Even before October 7, she worked as a fitness trainer almost exclusively with women and girls, mostly mothers. “They are the ones who need encouragement the most.”
