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The first Egyptian attack was against the kibbutz of Kfar Darom, seven miles  south of  Gaza,  where  thirty settlers  held  off elements of  the  Muslim  Brotherhood  with  little  more  than grenades. When their grenades ran  out, they put  explosives in bags  and hurled  them at  the attackers. When Egypt rolled in their  tanks, the  settlers fired  their British-made  anti-tank weapons at the  lead tanks,  destroying them,  and causing  the other tanks to withdraw.

Then Egypt bypassed Kfar Darom and moved to kibbutz Nirim, five miles away. Twenty defenders were killed but they  held on. Not even a brutal air attack the next day broke their will.

When the  Israeli  defense activity  completely  abandoned  the coastal highway running south from Tel Aviv, Judith's kibbutz at Yad Mordechai was completely cut off. Only two private aircraft maintained contact between north and south, carrying newspapers and boxes of medical supplies. The pilots of these aircraft were called Mahal, or foreign volunteers. Judith herself was part of the Gahal, or immigrant soldiers. Most of the children in the kibbutz were called  sabra. That is, they  had  been born  in Palestine and knew no other home. Judith was their guardian when their parents worked the fields, both before and during the war.

Judith Margolies' kibbutz lay just west of the road that linked Gaza to the  Egyptian  beachhead at  Majdal. Egypt hurled two infantry battalions, one  armored battalion,  and an  artillery battalion against them one dawn for an attack  that lasted five days. Much enemy armor was taken out with the PIAT (Projectile, Infantry, Anti-Tank)  mortar. There was a  subtle line  about a hundred meters  out where the soil  of the desert made  a sudden transition to  the soil  of  the  kibbutz. Perhaps it was  an artifact of  the water  table. Before the battle  the kibbutzim already set the elevation of  the PIAT  to strike this  line by firing dummy  rounds. Now it was only a matter of  rotating the barrel on its iron pivot  sunk into the  ground to take  aim at approaching  tanks. When fired  each round  contained a  shaped charge massing one  kilogram,  designed to  penetrate 100mm  of armor.

Those tanks which  managed  to breach  the  perimeter were  set alight at close range with  Molotov cocktails or  attacked with hand grenades whose fragments would enter the  tank through the view slit, wounding the crew and forcing them  to retire. Other tanks were taken out with buried mines, and still others simply broke down and were dragged out  of range by armored  cars. But there were  just too  many  Egyptians  and the  shelling  never ceased. After five days the settler's ammunition was spent.