Remembering Merav: a little kidnapped, murdered Israeli Prime Minister and the deadliest single attack in Palestinian history — How Merav and his sister Yair Lapid lived and died
During my abduction I knew that there were a lot of terrorists. Some of them had gone into my daughter’s house at the same time. When I was with other hostages, I learned that my kibbutz had been set on fire, as well as that my son-in-law had gone out to defend his family, and that his wife and two children had been left in the family safe room. We would only find out many months later that he was kidnapped and murdered. His body remains in Gaza today.
“The Israelis, we all were on the radio, hearing them whispering to the radio people: ‘Why doesn’t anyone come? Everybody, where are you? Where is the army? They’re shooting at me in my house. For the rest of our lives, we will remember this.
Merav is the sister of Yair Lapid, a former Israeli prime minister who has counseled the kibbutz members for the entire year.
Silence is what helped keep the survivors of this small community alive the day of the attack. They hid from their safe rooms along the Gaza border to the Dead Sea hotel and didn’t say a word.
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: Beli hamas attackers attack the Jewish village near the Gaza border
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 near the Gaza border is digging up its dead from temporary graves further away and reburying them back home, where it is safer to gather now, a year into the Gaza war.
This story is part of an NPR series reflecting on how the war in the Gaza Strip has affected life in Israel and around the world.
She saw a man loading his gun in her home after all the noise she had made. He was sitting outside, she says, stripped naked by orders of the military, and guarded by an Israeli soldier.
On Oct. 7, she grabbed her personal firearm, and she and her husband locked themselves inside their reinforced shelter room at home. They survived because they had installed a sliding bolt on the safe room. The attackers couldn’t open the door. Her neighbors had standard locks on their safe rooms.
Some people who survived the attack are taking sleeping pills in order to cope with the trauma and can’t bear to see 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. Bullet holes, shattered windows, a pair of children’s shoes in the debris: Oct. 7 frozen in time.
Source: The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7, one year later
The Israeli Village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7: “It’s a miracle to come back,” says Batya Ofir
Several hundred families have moved to Kibbutz Be’eri. Cohen is trying to bring the residents of the community 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. And then I decided that I wanted to continue to live,” she says. I have a family, I have children, and 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 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 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 the cemetery at Kibbutz Be’eri, some teens and parents walked quietly out of the cemetery, after the funeral for a mother and her son, two of the many deaths in recent months.
Source: The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7, one year later
The Israelis and Palestinians in Kibbutz Be’eri: The tragedy of a child who lost his family in the Holocaust
“When I gave guidelines to the therapists in Be’eri at the beginning, I said, smile and say, how are you? Because these people don’t know that it still matters. They need to be shown that their wellbeing is still relevant. The life instinct wants to see that someone calls him back.”
The people are concerned about the future of this place. Many leave the country. Because their parents told them that in the Holocaust, those who didn’t leave, died,” she says. Hopelessness and lack of help are really strong. The trauma is a national problem.
A boy in a kibbutz lost his entire 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.
Roth has also counseled former hostages who returned from Hamas captivity in Gaza, families whose loved ones were killed in captivity, and Israelis who didn’t experience a personal loss but still suffer from sleeping difficulties, anxiety attacks and depression.
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.
When the Israeli military published its investigation into the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri they found that there were about 340 attackers who had penetrated the community, and that it took approximately seven hours for significant numbers of Israeli forces to arrive.