The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7-year-after-attack-anniversary of Kibbutz Be’eri
They were whispering to the radio people, ‘Why doesn’t anyone come?’ Everybody, where are you? Where’s the army? They’re shooting at me, in my house. 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.
Silence is what helped keep the survivors of this small community alive the day of the attack. 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.
Israeli authorities said about 1,200 people were killed during last October’s invasion of Gaza. Kibbutz Be’eri suffered the biggest loss of any single village: 102 people killed — about one out of every 13 people living there.
Source: The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7, one year later
The kibbutz tells the story of a girl killed by a soldier during a jihadist attack in Gaza, Oct. 7
“After every funeral, I’m so exhausted that we have to deal with again,” said the head of the kibbutz. “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 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. She says he was stripped naked by the military, and then 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 the attack because they had installed a sliding bolt on the safe room. The attackers tried but failed to open the door. Her neighbors had only the standard locks on their safe rooms.
But he says others who survived the attack are taking sleeping pills to cope with the trauma and cannot bear seeing the destroyed homes. I think we’ll have to take them all down.
The homes that were attacked are a short walk away. There were bullet holes and shattered windows, as well as a pair of children’s shoes.
Bringing the Israeli Village back to life: The biggest loss of Oct. 7 from Kibbutz Be’eri, one year later
The families have returned to Kibbutz Be’eri. Cohen, the head of the community, is overseeing an ambitious project to bring the residents back within two and a half years.
I asked myself, what do you want? To continue living? I can also not. I thought about it a lot. And then I decided that I wanted to continue to live,” she says. I have a family of my own. I draw. I’m learning to kayak to deal with my fears. I do everything to give some meaning to life now that they’re gone.”
At the time of his death, she wanted to be with him. She felt guilty she wasn’t with her family in their worst moment that day because she had not been living on the kibbutz anymore.
Ofir was at 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 Kibbutz Be’eri one recent afternoon, teens and parents walked quietly out of the cemetery after a mother and her son were laid to rest.
Source: The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7, one year later
How to help people in the Gazan village? A memorial to the dead sea, where the Israelis and Palestinians lived during the Oct. 7 attack
I told the therapists in Be’eri how to do their work and asked how they were. Because these people don’t know that it still matters. You need to show them that their well being is still relevant. The life instinct would like to see somebody call 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.”
“For instance, there is a boy in the kibbutz who lost four members of his family, two parents and two siblings. So we tell him about each one separately or we tell him about them all 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.
It took about seven hours for Israeli forces to arrive at the scene of the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri because about 340 attackers had entered the community.
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 gathered next to homes destroyed in the attack and demanded an Israel strike a deal with Hamas to release the hostages. “You’re not alone!” Attendees called for hostages held in Gaza to be freed.
There was an auditorium where the names and photos of the kibbutz’s victims were displayed alongside objects that represented them. 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.
“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. The question is, how many human lives will we pay for by then? The lives of soldiers, the lives of civilians, and the lives of civilians that have been held in Gaza for a year are in serious danger.
In Israel and Tel Aviv, Hadeel Al-Shalchi reported from Tel Aviv. Itay has reporting from southern Israel.
Hamas claimed responsibility for those rockets as sirens wailed across Israel. Israeli police said that two people had been injured in the vicinity of Ben Gurion International Airport. There were no casualties when an explosion occurred in the suburb of Holon. Images on Israeli television showed large, billowing gray smoke rising from the area.
The Israeli military said it had responded to the rockets that had been fired from Gaza at the exact same moment last year, when the current war began.
One of those is at the Nova music festival site, where Israelis gathered Monday to listen to the last track of music played there before Hamas fighters ambushed festival-goers.
Across the world, candlelight vigils are taking place Monday to commemorate those killed in the surprise Hamas attacks one year ago, with thousands planning to gather, from Tel Aviv to Paris to New York. Marches and protests are also planned to demand a cease-fire, particularly in Gaza.
According to the Israeli government, fighters from Hamas killed around 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages from inside Israel a year ago.
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. 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.
The United Nations says more than 1 million Lebanese have been displaced from their homes, including tens of thousands who have fled across the border into neighboring Syria.
