A 14-year-old girl has been hailed a hero after bravely shielding two children from the gunmen during the Bondi Beach terror attack.
Chaya Dadon, who is just a kid herself, was hiding underneath a bench as the two gunmen were firing in her direction.
Two people next to her had been shot, one of them being a mother who desperately cried out for someone to protect her two children.
In a moment of selflessness and bravery Chaya jumped out from her hiding spot and ran towards the children, shielding them with her own body as shots rang.
“I was just holding them, I was hugging them. I said: ‘It’s gonna be okay’,” the teenager told 7NEWS.com.au.
The teenager attended the Hanukkah event, run by her father and Rabbi Eli Schlanger, like she always did for the past 25 years.
“(There’s) just so much love, and it was that, even minutes before all the shooting,” Chaya recalled.
Chaya, who attended the event with her father and brother, had just bought jewellery from a market stall before heading to the petting zoo with a friend. Not long after, the gunshots started going off.
“I thought it was fireworks, but then my friends like, there’s no fireworks in the day, and they can’t be fireworks. And she was like, it’s gunshots,” she said.
“And then we looked around and all the (security) people were like ‘get down’.”
Chaya and her friend were praying and not long after, she spotted the two women who had both been shot.
“I was hearing: ‘Save my son, please save my kids. Please save my kids, I beg you guys, please save my kids.’ And no one was doing anything,” she said.
“The police were down next to me. They were just getting down, they weren’t doing anything.”
Chaya put her own life on the line.
“Everyone was screaming, get down, get down, save yourself, save yourself,” she said.
“I could not watch those little kids die, so I climbed up from under the bench, and I jumped on top of the kids, and I grabbed them from their mum.
“It was horrific”.
She led the children in the Shema prayer, asking them to repeat the words as they tried to stay calm. Chaya said she believed the prayer helped save her life, but she was shot moments later.
“I thought there was just a hole in my skirt. Obviously, I felt the pain, but I didn’t want to stress the kids out,” she said.
“It was like a hole and it went through my skin … it was horrible.”
Chaya said the moments after she was shot were also when she felt a strong sense of faith that gave her strength and hope.
“Everyone has been shocked when I tell them this but that was the moment where I felt God the most, like I felt so connected, and I felt so like powerful that it just gave me so much strength and so much hope,” she said.
She was unable to reach triple-0, so she called her father instead, who ran to find her.
As emergency resources were stretched, a Bondi surf lifesaver placed her on a surfboard and took her to a police car, which then transported her to hospital.
Chaya’s cousin, the wife of Rabbi Eli Schlanger who was shot dead during the attack, was with the teenager as her wound was being treated.
She recalled the moment Chaya Schlanger realised her husband had died.
“That was the most horrible thing of the whole night. I don’t care about how I got shot, I don’t care about all of that. That was the most painful thing for me.”
Chaya’s mother, Shterny Dadon, was overseas at the time of the shooting and boarded a flight as soon as she learned what had happened to her daughter.
“I had Wi-Fi on the plane, so I was getting updates,” she told 7NEWS.com.au.
“It was very … very hard.”
Shterny said she was in awe of her daughter’s actions during the attack.
“I just keep on telling (her), you’re a hero, and you’ve not only saved people’s lives, but you’re also for yourself, given such a horrible situation, you now have at least something positive that will help her with her healing, to know that she’s able to have made such a difference,” she said.
“We’re still in shock also and we have a lot still ahead of us to process.”
Chaya and her family have been unable to confirm what happened to the two women she saw being shot, or to the two children she protected during the incident.
The teenager has since undergone surgery and is now able to walk short distances with the help of crutches.
“I got the surgery to get the big bullet out but they (the doctors) said there were more little ones but they would filter out my system,” Chaya said.
“I saw the bullet and it was the size of a 20 cent coin.”
She also praised the nurses who treated her, describing them as “amazing”.
Chaya is expected to be discharged from hospital on Thursday.
Image: 7News
