My Heart is Captive in Gaza
The Inferno and the Survival of the Israelis in Kibbutz Be’eri, a town surrounded by Hamas terrorists
My captors held my arms as they sat me on a golf cart, and we drove off toward the border with Gaza. I held myself together for my kids. I told myself I wouldn’t let them break me. I wouldn’t give them the pleasure of seeing me afraid. I didn’t cry. When a camera was pointed at my face, I smiled. That image was shown all over the world. I was not going to give them the satisfaction of terrorizing me.
The Israelis were whispering on the radio “Why doesn’t anyone come?” Where are all of them? Where is the army? They’re in my house, they’re shooting at me.’ We will remember this for the rest of our lives, all of us,” Roth says.
“Questions from [the] inferno, really,” says Merav Roth, a prominent Israeli psychologist, and the sister of former Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid, who has counseled the kibbutz members all year long.
Silence is what helped keep the survivors of this small community alive the day of the attack. Silence is what they carried out of hiding from their safe rooms along the Gaza border to a hotel on the Dead Sea that took them in.
Israeli authorities say about 1,200 people were killed last Oct. 7, as Hamas led thousands of attackers bursting out of Gaza, ambushing Israeli towns and communities. One out of 13 people living in the village of Kibbutz Be’eri were killed.
The Israeli village that killed Oct. 7: Beli-hamas attacks and rebuilding a home in Gaza, a village mourned
“I’m so exhausted after every funeral that we have to deal with again,” said Gal Cohen, the head of the kibbutz. “Because it brings [back] everything, and we cry again.”
After a year of fighting in Gaza, the tight-knit Israeli community near the Gaza border has decided to bury some of its dead at home, so they don’t get as much attention.
The story is part of aNPR series about war and how it has changed lives in Israel, the Gaza Strip and the world.
The man she had heard loading the gun was in her home. She says he was stripped naked, and guarded by an Israeli soldier, while sitting outside.
When she left her safe room that night, she found her living room covered in many weapons, including grenades, gases, explosives, and rifles. She understood: The home was turned into the attack headquarters. Neighbors all around her were gunned down.
But he says others who survived the attack are taking sleeping pills to cope with the trauma and cannot bear seeing the destroyed homes. “I believe we’ll have to take them all down in the end.”
The homes that were attacked last year are a short walk away. There were bullet holes, shattered windows, and a pair of children’s shoes in the debris.
The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7 [The Israeli village october 7-kibbutz beeri as attack attack]
A couple hundred families have moved back to Kibbutz Be’eri. Cohen, the head of the community, is overseeing an ambitious project to bring the residents back within two and a half years.
I asked myself, what do you want? To continue living? I can also not. I really thought about it. She says that she decided she wanted to live. “I have a family, I have children, I have grandchildren. I draw. I’m learning to kayak, to deal with all my fears. I do everything to give some meaning to life now that they’re gone.”
She wanted to be with his body at the moment it was unearthed. She wasn’t with her brother and family on Oct. 7 because she didn’t live on the kibbutz anymore.
Batya Ofir attended the funeral. She recently reburied her own brother and his family in the kibbutz cemetery, after viewing his partially decomposed body be exhumed from its temporary grave.
At Kibbutz Be’eri, one recent afternoon, teens and parents walked quietly out of the neighborhood cemetery after a funeral for a mother and her 15-year-old son — two of the many reburials of recent months.
Source: The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7, one year later
The Holocaust in Kibbutz Be’eri: Counseling the survivors of a Gazan village lost to captivity and Israeli forces
When I gave instructions to the therapists in Be’eri, I asked how they were. The people don’t know that it still matters. You have to show them that their wellbeing is still relevant. The life instinct wanted to see that someone called him back.
“They are extremely anxious about the future of this place. Many of them leave the country. The parents told them that those who didn’t leave died. “Hopelessness and helplessness are so strong. The trauma is national.”
A boy in a kibbutz who lost four members of his family, two parents and two siblings is an example. So do we tell him about each separately or do we tell him about all of them together?” she says.
In addition to advising former hostages who returned from Hamas captivity in Gaza, families whose loved ones were killed in captivity, and Israelis who didn’t suffer from a personal loss but still suffer from sleepless nights and depression, Roth has counseled the families of people who died in captivity.
It took many weeks to account for everyone: who was dead, who was captive in Gaza. Roth sat with the survivors of Kibbutz Be’eri in the Dead Sea hotel basement as the village secretary read the names of 27 identified bodies and 108 people unaccounted for.
In its investigation it was found that hundreds of attackers had penetrated the community, and that it took seven hours for Israeli forces to arrive and fight off the invaders.
