Dr. Tzur Gabi, a dentist from West Hollywood, California practicing in nearby Brentwood, was in Nice, France during the terror attack on Bastille Day — directly in the path of the truck that killed dozens of people.
He was saved by his Israeli girlfriend, Meital, who pulled him from the crowd when she sensed that something was about to happen.
Dr. Gabi spoke to Breitbart News on Friday afternoon:
It was the evening before my girlfriend and I were departing back to L.A., via Paris. We had just come back from a drive along the coast, and came back for dinner at a restauant called Di Piu. We had dinner, and around 10:00 p.m. the fireworks began. And then around 10:30 it ended, and we started walking towards our hotel.
Basically, the whole crowd went out onto the street, up onto the main road and onto the streets. And then, my girlfriend started feeling anxious about being around a very large crowd. She’s Israeli and doesn’t feel confident about being around a very large crowd and being vulnerable to terrorist acts. She lived in Tel Aviv for ten years…
And then she started hearing what she thought were gunshots. And I thought, no, it’s just some independent fireworks from some kids, because in my experience, that’s what we did on Independence Day, we had our own fireworks after the main show. She said, no, I think it’s gunshots, and she started getting really anxious, and she said, “We gotta run.” And I said, “All right.”
And so we started moving towards the hotel, and the next thing you know this truck was starting to drive down the road. And we didn’t really know what was going on. We had gotten to the hotel and we only had a couple hours to pack, and as we were about to leave for the airport we heard that a truck had been plowing people over, and gunshots had been going on.
And it was crazy, because just before this whole event, we had parked our rental car in the main piazza, and one of the individuals that rented us the car told us that this is the first year they’re blocking out and closing the road to the public, because of the attack that took place in Paris several months back.
We were shocked, because we were seriously 100 yards away from this whole thing. We would have been standing there. She pulled me away from the crowd and we just walked down one of the side streets, where there were not many people, and just walked to our hotel.
Dr. Gabi noted that the streets were eerily silent as they rushed to the airport. They felt stunned, but he noted: “Because we grew up in Israel, it wasn’t as impactful as for someone that was a local.”
He added: “I’m fortunate that my girlfriend trusted her gut feeling, and said: ‘Something’s about to go down. We have to get out of here.'”
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