The Israeli village mourning the biggest loss from Oct. 7 in the Gaza-Gaza conflict: The case of Kibbutz Be’eri
The Israelis were whispering to the radio people, ‘Why doesn’t anyone come?’ Where are the people? Where’s 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.
The survivors were able to remain alive the day of the attack thanks to silence. 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.
The number of people killed in the Israeli-Gaza conflict was pegged by authorities at over 1,200. Kibbutz Be’eri had the largest loss of people killed, with about one out of 13 people living there.
The kibbutz in Gaza: remembering a year after Israel’s first war, as it has changed everything across Israel, the region, and the world
Gal Cohen, the head of the kibbutz, said that he was exhausted after every funeral. “Because it brings [back] everything, and we cry again.”
This tight-knit Israeli community is digging up its dead from temporary graves further away and reburying them back home, where it’s safer to gather now, a year into the Gaza war.
This story is a part of an NPR series reflecting on Oct. 7, a year of war and how it has changed life across Israel, the Gaza Strip, the region 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 woke up that night after being rescued from the safe room, she found grenades and other items on her living room floor. She understood. Her home had been made into an attack headquarters. There were people shot around her.
Some people who survived the attack are taking sleeping pills to cope with the trauma and they can’t bear to see the destroyed homes. “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. Bullet holes, shattered windows, a pair of children’s shoes in the debris: Oct. 7 frozen in time.
Israel october-7-kibbutz-beeri (hamas attack anniversary): An Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7
A couple hundred families have moved back to Kibbutz Be’eri. Cohen, the head of the community, is trying to bring the residents back within two and a half years.
What do you want? To live on? I am also unable to do that. I really thought about it. She says she decided that she wanted to live. I have a family, and I have children as well. I draw. I’m learning to kayak, to deal with all my fears. I do everything to give meaning to life, even after they’re gone.
At the time his body was unearthed she wanted to be with him. She was no longer living on the kibbutz, she felt bad she hadn’t been with her brother and family that day.
The funeral was attended by Batya Ofir. 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
What Happened When the Israelis Were Abruptly Returned to Gaza? An Israeli Peace activist from a Kibbutz Be’eri Village
“When I gave guidelines to the therapists in Be’eri at the beginning, I said, smile and say, how are you? These people don’t know that it 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 extremely anxious 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. The trauma is national.”
A boy in a kibbutz lost six members of his family and two parents. 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 haven’t suffered a personal loss, he has also counseled people who suffer from sleeping difficulties and anxiety attacks.
Everyone had to be accounted for, including those who were dead and those who were captive in Gaza. The secretary of the village read the names of 27 dead and more than 100 missing people during a meeting in the Dead Sea hotel basement.
During the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, the Israeli military discovered that over 200 attackers had entered the community and that it took several hours for a number of Israeli forces to arrive.
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.
The crowd held a rally next to the homes destroyed in the attack so they could pressure Israel to free the remaining hostages. You are not alone! The attendees called out to the hostages held in Gaza.
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 Vivian Silver, a Canadian Israeli peace activist killed on Oct. 7, chose to display a baking book of cakes she would use to make for her children and grandchildren’s birthdays.
The brother of a man who was killed in January in Gaza said that wars do not end in a perfect victory and only in agreements. “The question is, with how many human lives will we pay 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. The reporting came from southern Israel.
Hamas claimed responsibility for the rockets that were fired on Monday. Israeli police said two people were injured — though not critically — in the Sdot Dan area near Ben Gurion International Airport. Police were also investigating the site of an explosion in Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, but said there were no casualties there. Images on Israeli TV showed large, billowing gray smoke in the air.
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 last track of music played at the Nova music festival became a source of controversy when the Hamas fighters invaded and attacked the festival-goers.
Memorial services across Israel are taking place on Monday, a year on from when Hamas launched attacks on communities close to the country’s border with Gaza, and as Israel is expanding its military response against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Twelve months ago, fighters from Hamas, which is designated a terrorist organization by the United States and several other nations, killed around 1,200 people and seized more than 200 hostages from inside Israel, according to the Israeli government.
In Lebanon, where Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets on Israel in support of Hamas and Palestinians in Gaza, the death toll has risen above 2,000, according to Lebanese officials. The capital city of Lebanon, as well as the Israeli port town of Haifa, were hit by Israeli airstrikes overnight into Monday.
Tens of thousands of people have fled across the border into Syria, as the UN says more than 1 million people have been driven from their homes in Lebanon.