KIBBUTZ NIR OZ, Israel – When Bat Sheva Yahalomi woke up to air raid sirens on the morning of Oct. 7, she didn’t think much about it. The mother of three lived with her husband and children in Nir Oz, an idyllic community of 400 residents on the western edge of the Negev Desert and, given its proximity to the Gaza Strip, an occasional target of cross-border rocket fire.
“But we soon realized that something was different. We heard shouting in Arabic outside,” she said from her devastated family home. “We heard ‘Allahu Akbar’ and we started hearing shots at our house.”
Around 10 a.m., four terrorists wearing Hamas headbands and tactical gear entered the house and opened fire on her husband, Ohad Yahalomi, as he guarded the safe room — a typical feature of homes so close to Gaza — where his family was hiding. They then forced Bat Sheva and her children outside at gunpoint, shoeless and dressed in pajamas.
“They said in English: ‘Gaza’ and ‘come.’ I immediately understood what they wanted from us,” she remembers. “We saw Ohad lying on the ground bleeding and injured, but he was still conscious. I asked him what we should do and he said we should go with them. I left the baby with him because I was sure they wouldn’t take her, but one of them took her and pushed us out of the house, me and the three children. That was the last time I saw Ohad.”
On the way to Gaza, Yahalomi was separated from her 12-year-old son Eitan, but managed to escape with her two daughters as Israeli forces fought the attackers. After walking back to Nir Oz and narrowly avoiding recapture along the way, she returned home to find Ohad missing. Eitan was released after 52 days of captivity November hostage dealand Ohad remains in Gaza to this day. It is unknown if he is still alive.
Shachar Tzuk, resident of Kfar Aza
There was no battle for Nir Oz, Yahalomi said. Israeli forces arrived at the kibbutz only eight hours after the attacks began, and by then a quarter of the community’s residents had been kidnapped or killed. “When the army arrived, the last terrorist had returned to Gaza,” she said.
A year after more than 6,000 Hamas-led terrorists crossed the border fence into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 251 others into Gaza, the sense of abandonment among October 7 survivors persists. It came in two waves: first, when the military initially failed to stop the pogrom, and later, in what many consider the worldwide desertion of their friends and relatives still in captivity. Now many residents of southern Israel don’t know if they will ever return to the once tight-knit communities that have become killing fields.
Having spent the past year fighting to demote Hamas in Gaza, Israel is on the brink of a broader war involving Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah. The fear of a regional conflagration – together with the failure of the talks aimed at reaching a ceasefire with Hamas in exchange for the return of some or all of the hostages – is now raising concerns that the urgency to to save, how many hostages are still alive in Gaza has faded. .
In the partially destroyed Nir Oz kindergarten, Yifat Zailer held up her phone to show a video of her cousin Shiri Bibas’ son Ariel on his fourth birthday. In this room, the red-haired toddler blew out candles for his birthday and celebrated Rosh Hashanah just days before his abduction. “It’s really hard to still be here after a year,” Zailer said. “In my worst nightmares I never thought it would take so long to release them and bring them back home.”
Soot from a fire started by Hamas still covers the walls of the classroom – a somber reminder that no target was off limits to the terrorist attackers. Ariel’s brother, Kfir, was the youngest abductee at the time of his abduction, only nine months old. In January he turned 1 year in captivity.
“I wonder if Ariel and Kfir remember their father. I wonder if they are even still alive. No one can give us that answer. Not the Red Cross, not UNICEF. This whole family is gone and no one talks about it anymore,” Zailer said through tears. “We were raised to believe in peace. On October 7, something broke inside me. I never believed that this kind of cruelty and violence could be justified later.”
The Bibas family became the public face of the hostages’ plight after a video of Shiri holding her sons spread online. The footage recorded by Shiri’s kidnappers also shows how Tomer Keshet, the cousin of Shiri’s husband Yarden, began to realize what had happened to the family on October 7. “My biggest fear was that they would be captured,” Keshet said. told The Dispatch. He later discovered that Yarden had also been kidnapped after Hamas published a video of his cousin being beaten by crowds in Gaza.
When the family was not released as part of a November hostage deal that freed 81 Israelis during a weeklong lull in the fighting, Keshet said his euphoria for the freed prisoners faded into despair over the fate of his family. ‘On the last day, when we heard they weren’t coming back, I think we were devastated as a family. We felt the fear that we might not see them. It was very difficult,” he said. “But we know we must remain hopeful, because we owe it to them – to Yarden and Shiri and Kfir and Ariel – to continue the fight.”
In the year since the evacuation of what was left of the community, very few people have returned to Nir Oz. Survivors of the Hamas attack, who described the kibbutz as a “paradise” before the war, are still considering whether they can rebuild their former lives. The community must now collectively decide whether to demolish the houses shot and burned by Hamas or leave them standing as a grim reminder of what happened that day. While some houses appear virtually untouched, others have been burned beyond recognition.
“It was just a case of Russian roulette,” said Nir Oz resident Ola Metzger. She and her husband managed to keep the safe room door closed that day, saving their family. “They tried to break into the safe room but they couldn’t, so they just robbed us and made a mess of the house. We consider ourselves lucky.”
Only seven of the 220 houses in Kibbutz Nir Oz were completely unharmed. On the road from Metzger are the remains of the house of Tamar and Johnny Sinan Tov. Terrorists shot into the family’s safe room before setting the house on fire, killing the young couple and their three small children. “They are here, they burn us, we suffocate,” Johnny Sinan Tov’s sister remembered later he told her in a frantic phone call as the attack unfolded.
About 15 miles north is Kfar Aza, a community of more than 700 people where 62 people were killed in one of the deadliest massacres on October 7. Like Nir Oz, very few people have returned to the kibbutz which still bears visible scars from the attack. Bullet holes pockmark common areas and photos of kidnapped and murdered former residents are displayed outside destroyed homes. Israeli flags are a newer addition, flying outside homes whose residents have been killed.
Like many of Israel’s southern kibbutzim, Kfar Aza once considered itself a beacon of coexistence with Palestinians. The community was home to many self-identified peace activists, including Batia Holin, a 71-year-old photographer who held a rally in the spring of 2023 joint exhibition with an artist from the Gaza Strip. On the morning of October 7, the young man she had been working with began pressuring her for information about her location and nearby Israeli troop movements. Holin survived the attack, but the sense of betrayal for her and many other left-wing residents of Kfar Aza remains.
“Many people feel like they have lost all hope. The youngest child abducted from the kibbutz was 3 1/2 years old. We saw (Palestinian) crowds cheering. Seeing babies being brought to Gaza, seeing elderly people being brought to Gaza – it shattered something deep,” said Shachar Tzuk, a resident of Kfar Aza. “I’m not interested in building trust with them. I find it interesting that they leave me alone. I don’t want anything to do with them.”
Now Tzuk doesn’t know if she will ever move back to the kibbutz, where the sound of explosions from the ongoing fighting in nearby Gaza punctuates our visit. “It’s like I’m asking you what you want to eat on Friday in fifteen years. God knows,” she said. “It’s home and it’s not home. It’s comforting and painful.”
“It’s like someone exploded a grenade in my life,” she added, reflecting on the past year. “I have lost everything.”
