The village in Israel is grieving the biggest loss of the year
Israel Oct. 7, The Israeli Village Beeri Hamas Attack Anniversary – A Memories with Yair Lapid
The Israelis whispered to the people on the radio, ‘Why doesn’t anyone come?’ Where are everybody? Where is the army? They are shooting at me in my house. We will remember this for the rest of our lives, all of us,” Roth says.
The sister of Yair Lapid, the former Israeli prime minister, has counseled kibbutz members all year long.
Silence is what helped keep the survivors of this small community alive the day of the attack. They hid from their safe rooms at the border into Gaza to a hotel on the Dead Sea.
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 kibbutz of a Gazan town: How tragedy has changed everything in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and around the world
The head of the kibbutz said he was exhausted after every funeral and had to deal with it again. “Because it brings [back] everything, and we cry again.”
This tight-knit Israeli community near the Gaza border is digging up its dead from temporary graves further away, and returning them to their homes as a result of the Gaza war.
This is a story that is part of an NPR series about how a year of war has changed life across Israel, the Gaza Strip and the world.
Then she saw the man she had heard all day loading gun cartridges in her home. 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 was turned into the attack headquarters. All her neighbors were dead.
He said that survivors are taking sleeping pills to deal with the trauma of the attack and can’t look at the destroyed homes. I think we’ll have to take them all down.
The homes that were attacked last year are just a short walk away. Bullet holes, shattered windows, a pair of children’s shoes in the debris: Oct. 7 frozen in time.
The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7 as attack aniversary: “It’s going to die aint reburied” Batya Ofir
A couple hundred families have moved back to Kibbutz Be’eri. The head of the community is trying to bring the residents back in two and a half years.
“I said to myself, what do you want? Do you want to continue living? I can also not. I really thought about it. And then I decided that I wanted to continue to live,” she says. I have a lot of people in my family. I draw. I am learning to kayak in order to deal with my fears. I do everything to give some meaning to life now that they’re gone.”
At the time his body was unearthed, she wanted to be with him. 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 the funeral. She decided to rebury her brother and his family in the kibbutz cemetery after viewing his partially dead body in a temporary grave.
Parents and teens walked quietly out of the cemetery after a funeral for a mother and her son, two of many reburials in the past few months.
Source: The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7, one year later
How many of your relatives are in the Dead Sea? The survivors of Kibbutz Be’eri, Israel, cried out in solidarity
I said to smile and say how were you when I gave guidelines to the therapists in Be’eri. Because these people don’t know that it still matters. You have to show them that their wellbeing is still relevant. The life instinct wants to see that someone calls him back.”
They are worried about the future of this place. Many of them leave the country. Because their parents told them that in the Holocaust, those who didn’t leave, died,” she says. “Hopelessness and helplessness are so strong. There is trauma that is national.
“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 and former hostages who returned from Gaza have also been counseled by Roth.
It took weeks to figure out who was dead and who was in captivity. 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.
When the Israeli military eventually published its investigation into the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, it found about 340 attackers had infiltrated the community and that it had taken about seven hours for significant numbers of Israeli forces to arrive to fight off the invasion there.
Though the Israeli military said it had sent more troops to Gaza to prevent the possibility of further Hamas attacks to mark Oct. 7, it was the plight of those still held inside Gaza that was central to commemorations in nearby Kibbutz Be’eri, a community close to Gaza where almost 100 residents were killed and more than two dozen hostages seized.
A few hundred community members held a rally next to homes destroyed in the attack, demanding Israel strike a deal with Hamas to free the remaining hostages. “You are not alone!” The attendees called for the hostages held on the Gaza side to be freed.
In an auditorium, the names and photos of the kibbutz’s victims were displayed alongside objects that represented them: a pair of ballet shoes; a flute; a motorcycle helmet. The family of Silver displayed a book of cakes she was going to make to make up for the lost of her.
“Wars do not end in absolute victory or a clear decision, wars end in agreements,” said Merav Svirsky, whose brother Itay Svirsky was taken hostage and then killed in January in Gaza. How many human lives will we pay for by then? The lives of soldiers, the lives of civilians and the lives of civilians including our people who are currently hostage in Gaza and have been in immediate life-threatening danger for a year.”
Willem Marx reported from London; Daniel EStrin in Kibbutz Be’er and Tel Aviv, Israel and Hadeel Al-Shalchi in Tel Aviv. Itay had reported from southern Israel.
Sirens wailed across Israel Monday morning as Hamas claimed responsibility for those rockets. Two people were injured in the Sdot Dan area near Ben Gurion International Airport, according to Israeli police. There were no casualties when an explosion occurred in Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Images on Israeli television showed large, billowing gray smoke rising from the area.
Nearby, frequent Israeli artillery launched into Gaza was audible, and the Israeli military said it had responded with airstrikes to rockets that had been launched out of Gaza at almost the same precise moment they were a year ago, at the start of the current war.
The Nova music festival site is where Israelis gathered Monday to listen to the last song played before Hamas fighters attacks the festival-goers.
Across Israel, memorial events will mark the deadliest day in the country’s history. The attacks that took place in Gaza last year led to the government organizing one, and another is led by family members of those who were killed or taken hostage.
The Israeli government says fighters from Hamas killed around 1,200 people and took more than 200 captives inside Israel last year.
The death toll in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets on Israel in support of Hamas, has risen to more than 2,000. Israeli airstrikes continued to pound parts of the capital Beirut overnight into Monday, after rockets launched from Lebanon hit the Israeli port city of Haifa Sunday.
More than 1 million people were displaced in Lebanon, including tens of thousands who fled across the border into Syria.
