One year after the loss, the Israeli village is still grieving
Israel, Palestine and the world: how war has changed life in Israel, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and the Middle East, and why Israel has not listened to Israel
But this Israeli government does not have a clean story in Gaza, either. This was always going to be the ugliest of Israeli-Palestinian wars since 1947, because Hamas had embedded itself in tunnels underneath Gazan homes, schools, mosques and hospitals. It cannot be targeted without significant civilian casualties. I said from the beginning that it was doubly incumbent on Israel to make clear that they were going to destroy Hamas in order to create a better solution: two states for two people.
This story is part of an NPR series on how war has changed life in Israel, Palestine and the world.
Iran is telling a story. It is possible for it to create failed states in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq so that they can be used to destroy Israel? And by what right has Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into a war with Israel that the Lebanese people and government had no say in and are now paying a huge price for?
The Israeli Civil Disobedience During September 7, 2001: Lives of the Dead Sea and a New Look at the Gaza Strip
Thousands of Israelis have decided to leave Israel since October 7, and others are considering or plan to leave. Thousands of people have taken to the street week after week, engaging in acts of civil disobedience, and after a brief pause resumed with a new focus on the hostage crisis. In September, images of the former Israeli army chief of staff Dan Halutz being forcibly removed by the police from the street at a sit-in in front of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence, and of relatives of hostages being roughed up by law enforcement officers, were a further manifestation of the internal crisis.
“The Israelis, we all were on the radio, hearing them whispering to the radio people: ‘Why doesn’t anyone come? Where are all the people? Where’s the army? They’re in my house, they’re shooting at me.’ We will not forget this for the rest of our lives.
At a recent demonstration for early elections to replace the Israeli government, one protester held up a sign that said, “Who are we without them?” One of the placards said: give me one reason to raise kids here.
Merav is the sister of Yair, who has counseled the kibbutz members all year long.
Silence kept the survivors of this small community alive on the day of the attack. They hid from their safe room at the border to a hotel on the Dead Sea that took them in.
The deadliest single attack in Israeli history led to the deadliest war in Palestinian history, with more than 41,000 Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip this past year, according to health officials there.
The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7, one year later: Beeri hamas attack anniversaries at the kibbutz
“I’m so exhausted after every funeral that we have to deal with again,” said Gal Cohen, the head of the kibbutz. We cry again because it brings back everything.
The tight-knit Israeli community near the Gaza border is digging up the dead from temporary graves and burying them in their homes, where it is safer to gather now that the Gaza war has ended.
She went into her home and saw the man who had been in her home all day. He was sitting outside, she says, stripped naked by orders of the military, and guarded by an Israeli soldier.
When she was finally rescued that night, and led out of her safe room, she found her living room floor covered in rows of grenades, gas canisters, explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and rifles. She understood: Her home had been transformed into the attack headquarters. Neighbors all around her were gunned down.
He says that other people who survived the attack are taking sleeping pills to cope with the trauma. “I believe we’ll have to take them all down in the end.”
A short walk away, though, are the homes that were attacked last year. A pair of children’s shoes are in the debris after it was hit by gunfire.
The Israeli Village of Kibbutz Be’eri grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7 one year later: a mother and son exhumed from the cemetery
A couple hundred families have moved back to Kibbutz Be’eri. Cohen is in charge of an ambitious project to bring the residents back within two and a half years.
“I said to myself, what do you want? To continue living? I can do that as well. I had to think about it. She says that 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 meaning to life now they are gone.
She wanted to be near his body when it was unearthed. She had not lived on the kibbutz any longer and felt guilty she wasn’t with her brother and family in their worst moment on Oct. 7.
Batya Ofir attended a funeral. After viewing her brother’s body, she decided to exhume his body from the temporary grave in the kibbutz cemetery.
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 survivors of Kibbutz Be’eri: How did they leave the Holocaust? How they lost their loved ones, where they were staying, and how they will return
I asked the therapists how they were when I gave guidelines to them. It still matters because these people don’t know. You have to show them that their wellbeing is still relevant. The life instinct wants to see that person calling back.
They are anxious about the future of this place. Many of them leave the country. She says that the people who didn’t leave the Holocaust were the ones who died. “Hopelessness and helplessness are so strong. It is a national trauma.
“For instance, there is a boy in the kibbutz who lost four members of his family, two parents and two siblings. So do we tell him about each separately or do we tell him about all of them together?” she says.
Families whose loved ones were killed in captivity, former hostages who returned from Hamas captivity in Gaza, and Israelis who don’t experience a loss but still suffer from sleeping difficulties, anxiety attacks and depression have all been counseled by the same man.
It wasn’t easy to determine who was dead and who was held 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.
It took more than seven hours for Israeli forces to arrive to fight off an attack on Kibbutz Be’eri that had been launched by hundreds of attackers, according to the Israeli military’s investigation.
