A Year After October 7th, a Kibbutz Survives

On a recent afternoon in Be'eri, a kibbutz in southern Israel, near the Gaza border, I asked Nira Herman Sharabi, a resident, how it felt to be back. She stopped me mid-sentence.

"Listen," she said, with a faint smile. We were sitting on a park bench, and children were laughing and screaming at a playground nearby.

Nira, who is fifty-five, met her husband, Yossi Sharabi, and moved in with him at Be'eri nineteen years ago. Their eldest daughter, Yuval, was born a year later; two more daughters quickly followed. Now, as she looked on at the children playing, and at their parents, who had congregated on a sloping lawn, it was almost as if things were normal again, she said. "But then you remember that they're here for a funeral."

A year has passed since the massacre of October 7th, in which an estimated twelve hundred Israelis died. Be'eri sustained one of the bloodiest killing sprees , when a Hamas-led force of hundreds raided the kibbutz, murdering more than a hundred people and capturing thirty from the community. Among those taken hostage was Yossi; the gunmen also captured Yuval's boyfriend, who had been staying with the Sharabi family on the morning of the attack.

Some two hundred kibbutz members have moved back to Be'eri, out of roughly eleven hundred who survived. And every day seems to bring another funeral, or a "reburial," as the custom has been named. Members who were interred outside the kibbutz have been brought to a final resting place inside Be'eri. As one kibbutz member told me, about the reburials, "It's exactly like a funeral—you cry as if it happened yesterday—but the smell, the smell . . ."

I first met Nira a week after October 7th, at a hotel by the Dead Sea. Many surviving members of Be'eri had been shuttled there after the attack, with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. Be'eri—piled with bodies, littered with bullet casings, fires still raging—became a closed military zone. Nira stood out that day for her remarkably precise memory. Nearly everyone I spoke to apologized at some point for drawing a blank, but Nira seemed able to account for every minute of what had happened, down to the smell of jachnun (a Yemenite Jewish pastry) that emanated from her kitchen while she and her family were led out of their safe room, or the very first thing that the terrorists did once they burst open the safe-room door (they shot the family dog).

I was struck then, too, by her single-minded focus on her daughters. All she cared for, she said, was their well-being. She spoke about how uncomplaining they had been, how quiet and levelheaded. She seemed intent on blocking the other reality from sinking in. Her husband was gone. So, too, was their home— torched by the gunmen as they advanced. The last time Nira saw Yossi, he was handcuffed and shoved into a car by several men, one of whom had shouted earlier "Idbah al yahud"—"Slaughter the Jews." But Nira believed that it was only a matter of time before the state brought him back. "I thought, For sure, there'll be an agreement and Yossi will come home," she recalled when we met, last month. "I thought, It will take a couple of weeks, and the government will get in the picture. The army will. It will be solved diplomatically." She covered her eyes. "This isn't normal!"

Nira suffered other losses that day. Yossi's brother, Eli, was also taken captive from his home in Be'eri. Eli's wife and their two daughters were murdered.Yossi and Eli grew up in a religious home in Tel Aviv. Nira said that she found herself almost envying her mother-in-law—a woman nearing eighty who had lost two granddaughters and whose two sons were taken captive—because she seemed able to take heart in a sense of higher purpose while Nira herself could not.

After fifty-four days in captivity, Yuval's boyfriend, the eighteen-year-old Ofir Engel, returned home as part of the phased release of about eighty Israeli hostages, in exchange for a temporary ceasefire. He told Nira that he had been held with Yossi in several rooms around Gaza. Yossi served as a father figure for him and another teen-age boy from Be'eri, he said. When their captors kept telling them that Israel had forgotten about them, that no one awaited their return, Yossi reassured them that it wasn't true. Ofir recounted that Yossi had been frantic with the thought that Nira and the girls had been killed or taken hostage. "I left them with the terrorists!" he kept telling Ofir, according to Nira.

One morning, the boys were separated from Yossi and told by their captors that they were being released as part of the first phase of the deal, which focussed primarily on women and children. The men, including Yossi and Eli, were left behind; their release was to be negotiated. But the hostage-release agreement collapsed two days later. Israel blamed Hamas for failing to release promised female captives; Hamas blamed Israel for rejecting an offer of male captives and three bodies. Nira heard nothing more about Yossi—until January 14th.

That day—exactly a hundred days after the Oct. 7th attack—Nira was at a vigil for the hostages in Tel Aviv when word came that Hamas had released a video of her husband and two other hostages. Everyone around her was ecstatic, she recalled. "Yossi is alive!" they told her. But her mind began swimming. She knew that Hamas had circulated a video of a hostage before and that, a day later, the hostage had been declared dead. After watching the video of Yossi, Ofir told her something that strengthened her suspicion: he believed that it had been taken months earlier, when he was still being held with Yossi.

"The day after that video was the worst day of my life," Nira told me. She spent it with her daughters, feeling paralyzed whenever the phone rang. At eight-thirty that evening, the dreaded call came: Yossi had been killed. An I.D.F. air strike targeting a building near where he was being held had buried him in rubble. Another Israeli hostage who had been held with Yossi was shot to death by their captors two days later, according to the I.D.F. "I know it sounds strange, but if you ask me if I prefer to know that Yossi was shot by the terrorists or by our forces, I prefer to know that it's us," Nira said, "that it wasn't done out of evil or cruelty."

Nira and I started walking toward the neighborhood where her house used to stand. As we were talking, our conversation was interrupted by what sounded like the low rumble of thunder: bombardments in neighboring Gaza. Plumes of smoke rose in the not-too-distant horizon. The war, at the year mark, is far from over. Forty-two thousand Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, according to the Gazan health ministry, many of them women and children. According to Israel, seventeen thousand were militants. Gazans have had to evacuate the northern strip, and then, after Israeli forces invaded the city of Rafah in May, the south. Most of the enclave's 2.2 million people are now displaced. Experts say that parts of Gaza have now reached a state of famine.

Though Gaza was only about three miles from where we were standing, it felt like a universe away. This distance, caused in large part by the Israeli military's efforts to keep the press out of Gaza, has made the absolute terror of ordinary Palestinians inaccessible to most Israelis—a fact that haunts any reporting on the aftermath of October 7th. As Israel in recent weeks has shifted its military focus to the north, striking Hezbollah strongholds and killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah , in Lebanon, none of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 's stated war goals in Gaza have been met: Hamas has not been rooted out; the hostages are still not home.

Nira at first supported the war in Gaza. "I believed that we should pay a heavy price if it means demolishing Hamas," she told me. "Now I say, 'Bring the hostages back first. Because, if you don't, it will break us apart.' " The failure to do so, she said, is "unforgivable on the part of our government." She fears, she added, "that Sinwar "—the head of Hamas—"is sitting there, surrounded by the remaining hostages, and is watching us tear ourselves apart from within."

Like many residents of Be'eri, Nira expected to remain at the Dead Sea hotel for several days; they ended up staying for close to a year. Seventy-four thousand people have been displaced from the southern communities since October 7th, according to state statistics.

More than sixty thousand have fled the Israeli north, as Hezbollah joined forces with Hamas on October 8th and began shelling Israel's northern communities. Hotels that once swarmed with tourists emptied out because of the war, and have instead housed internal refugees, at a cost of more than a billion dollars to the state. Displaced Israelis have appeared in nearly every city, embarking on new lives that are often provisional. The small apartment building where I live in Tel Aviv has housed a displaced family from the north and one from the south. My children's school has hosted a school from the southern town of Sderot.

Of the kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope, Be'eri may turn out to be something of an outlier. Reporting by an Israeli news site in June revealed that, of the twenty-four southern communities that were vacated after October 7th, nineteen "will not return in the foreseeable future."

For the most part, their residents do not feel that it would be safe to move back. In Be'eri, only about a fifth of the residents have so far returned, but most of them, including Nira and her daughters, have remained together, first at the Dead Sea hotel and, in recent weeks, in temporary housing at another kibbutz, Hatzerim, in the south. Gal Cohen, the secretary-general of Be'eri, has been advocating for residents to return; his goal is for between eighty and ninety per cent to do so by the end of 2026.

Cohen spends his days mostly amid the rubble, determining which of the burned homes to save, which to raze, and where their former occupants will be housed. A new neighborhood of fifty-two units will soon go up near where some of the most intense fighting took place on October 7th. But, as Cohen told me, with a bitter smile, "the fastest growing neighborhood is still the cemetery."

A week after the attack, Be'eri's famed printing house resumed work, even as soldiers were still patrolling the grounds of the kibbutz for unexploded grenades. Its workers commuted back and forth from the Dead Sea hotel, about ninety minutes in each direction. "We realized that if we don't rebuild Be'eri immediately, the Gaza envelope will not revive. And then you might as well fold the flag and move to Norway, because this country is over," Cohen said.

Cohen was one of the first residents to return to Be'eri, last December. Unlike many survivors, he has not yet applied for a gun license. "And I still don't lock my door," he said. "I don't feel safe, but I feel at home."

Since moving back, he said, the sight he has come to fear most is "the archaeologists." Every once in a while, a special team comes to comb a specific area of the kibbutz, with investigators fanning out to search the ground. This, he knows, means that some new footage has surfaced suggesting that a kibbutz member who was previously presumed to have been taken captive is dead. In order to corroborate the death, DNA evidence is required. "Any DNA," Cohen added. Because many of the residents were killed in homes that were then burned to the ground, such evidence typically consists of a single tooth, or a fragment of bone. Such was the case with Dror Or, a local cheesemaker and one of Cohen's closest friends, who was thought to be held captive in Gaza until he was pronounced dead in May.

Though some parts of Be'eri appear unchanged, green and tranquil, its two westernmost neighborhoods, closest to the border fence, were ravaged beyond recognition. To walk down their streets is to walk through ash and debris. A terrible stench still hangs in certain areas. We passed by Or's scorched home and entered a single-story house where not much beyond the walls was left standing. Rain fell into what was once the kitchen. Red roof tiles, broken into shards, crunched underfoot. Down the road was a singed two-story house. Cohen showed me into a room where the walls were distinctly fortified: the safe room. I counted more than a dozen bullet holes on the walls opposite the entrance, attesting to a desperate struggle. The house had belonged to the Bachar family—mother, father, their fifteen-year-old son, and their thirteen-year-old daughter. The four of them hid in the safe room for hours until gunmen noticed them and began shooting through the closed door; the father held its handle closed until he couldn't anymore. Both the mother, Dana, and the son, Carmel, died inside that room. Cohen told me that Carmel, an avid surfer, asked for one last thing as he was dying: to be buried along with his surfboard. A day after my visit to Be'eri, Carmel and Dana were reburied, together, at the kibbutz. Carmel's last wish had been granted.

Cohen described many of those who survived that day as broken. As he put it: "Some people never left the safe room." To those residents, Cohen repeats a single mantra: "Your rehabilitation will happen in Be'eri."

Fewer than a thousand people live at Kibbutz Hatzerim, in southern Israel; it is known primarily—if it is known at all—for the Air Force base next door. This desert farming community is expected to nearly double in size as surviving members of Be'eri take up temporary housing there, living in neat rows of small prefabricated homes.

A dog bounded up the dusty road as I arrived, and an Irish accent that sounded out of place in the desert issued a guttural "Hello!"

Thomas Hand showed me into his new home. The floor was covered with moving boxes. A terrace door opened directly onto sand.

I first met Hand a week after the October 7th attack. He was grieving then for his eight-year-old daughter, Emily, who, he was told, had been killed at her friend's house after spending the night there. As I interviewed him that day, tears kept streaking his face, yet he insisted that what he felt was mostly relief. Emily's death was preferable, he said then, to the other option: that she was being held hostage in Gaza.

Weeks later, however, army officials called Hand and his two adult children—who lost their mother in the assault on Be'eri—into a room, where they gave them news: Emily was not dead. "It was a case of mistaken identities," Hand recounted last month, shaking his head in disbelief. His hair was whiter and sparser than last fall. He wore a black T-shirt that said "Bring Them Back Home," and seemed much thinner than I remembered. "So I was immediately back in the nightmare I thought I'd avoided."

With the initial shock came the understanding that he was losing time. Unlike the other hostage families, who had already sprung into action, Hand felt as though he had abandoned Emily for a full month. He went public immediately, travelling to Ireland and making sure, he said, "that Hamas knows, be careful touching her!" Some in the family argued against the public campaign for Emily's release. Hand, at night, found that he had reservations, too. "Should I make her such a prize? Will that help or hinder me getting her back? Maybe they'll hold her to the last," he recalled thinking.

One day, while speaking to a reporter, Hand received a "miracle call," as he puts it. He was told: "A list is going out today, and Emily is on it." He was driven to Hatzerim Air Force base—not a mile from where we were speaking months later—and then to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, between Israel and Gaza. As Hand had prepared to travel there to greet his daughter, he had decided to bring their dog along. The military objected, but Hand insisted. The way he saw it, he told me, "I wanted her to see a friendly face as soon as humanly possible." He wasn't sure whether his presence was enough. "I thought she was going to be cold to me," he told me, sobbing. "I wasn't there to protect her on the day. That's what you would expect of your dad."

Emily, to his relief, ran directly into his arms. But she kept staring at him, he recalled, a fact that made him uneasy. Now he knows why: when she was led away by her captors, "she saw dead people that she knew, she saw fires, she saw other people being kidnapped," Hand said. Finally, she explained, "I thought you were either dead or kidnapped." Emily came back speaking in a whisper so faint that "I had to put my ear to her lips in order to hear her," Hand told me.

This was true of many of the returning children. They had been held at gun or knifepoint and told to keep silent, and for weeks after they came home they still whispered. Hand doesn't know much else about Emily's time in captivity. They never speak about it unless she brings it up. She told him that she was held with her friend Hila and Hila's mother, who cut the girls' hair when it became infested with lice. Their rations sometimes consisted of a quarter of a pita and a few olives. "Her chubby cheeks were gone," he said. She had a captor with her at all times, he added, and even had to leave open the bathroom door. She was held in Gaza for fifty days.

To Hand's surprise, Emily now appears largely recovered. She has stopped whispering and is smiling again, delighting in her friends' company. On the evening of my visit, Hand was preparing to take Emily and Hila—who was released on the same day and soon joined by her mother—to a concert of a singer they both liked. Occasionally, however, Emily still withdraws to her room with an absent look in her eyes, he said, and he knows to give her space.

A few weeks ago, Hand and his elder children took Emily to visit Be'eri. Hand told me that he hopes to return there one day, but he would need to know that Hamas was no longer a threat. The people who were in charge that day also had to be out of office, he said. Especially Netanyahu. "I blame him. He has to go," he told me.

Back in Be'eri, they stopped by Hila's house, which was burned down that day. They also visited the ravaged home where Emily's older siblings' mother had lived. Then they went to Hand's house—Emily's house—which is riddled with bullet holes but otherwise intact.

"That's our home," Hand recalled telling Emily. Then he cried. "It was paradise."