The boy’s story shows how the violence in the West Bank is having a negative affect on him
The Israeli-Israeli Civil Disobedience: From the Crisis in Tel Aviv to the Emergency Rooms of a Hamas Hotel
The terrorists arrived at my house Saturday morning. I wore my pajamas. I lived on my own. I had guns pointed at me and couldn’t escape. It was in the early stages of the attack. Initially, they wanted money. I took them to my bag in the bedroom and told them to take it, but then they wanted me, too. I saw terrorists enter through the broken fence when they forced me outside. I saw them looting and breaking everything — throwing all the clothes out of the closets, cutting everything up, breaking and stealing things.
Since October 7, thousands of Israelis have decided to leave Israel, while others are considering emigration. The civil disobedience began before the attacks on October 7 and continued week after week, as well as the demand for early. There were pictures of the former army chief of staff Dan Halutz being forcibly removed from the street by the police at a sit-in in front of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence.
This story is part of an NPR story that looks at the impact of the war on Israel, the Gaza Strip, the region and the world.
At one of the recent mass demonstrations in Tel Aviv calling for a hostage deal and for early elections to replace the Israeli government, one protester held up a sign reading: “Who are we without them?” referring to the hostages. Another placard read: “Give me one reason to raise kids here.”
“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.
The situation for Palestinian civilians caught up in the conflict between Israeli and Hamas has been very difficult.
The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7: Berei-Haas Attack Annihilation & Reburying
The head of the kibbutz said he was exhausted after every funeral and had to deal with it again. We cry again because it brings back everything.
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.
She saw the man in her house after she heard him loading his gun. She says he was stripped naked by the military and guarded by an Israeli soldier outside.
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’ safe rooms only had the standard locks and were breached.
But he says those who survived are taking sleeping pills to deal with the trauma and are not able to see the destroyed homes. I think we will have to take them all down.
The homes that were attacked last year are a short walk away. There are bullet holes, shattered windows and a pair of children’s shoes in the debris.
Israel october-7 kibbutz beeri: The biggest loss from Oct. 7 one year later: A grieving widow’s story
A couple hundred families have moved back 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 said to myself, what do you want? To continue living? I also can’t. I was thinking about it a lot. She says that she decided that she wanted to live. “I have a family, I have children, I have grandchildren. I draw. I am learning to kayak, to get rid of all my fears. I do everything possible to give meaning to life since they’re gone.
She wanted to be by his body when 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 a funeral. She exhumed her brother’s body from his temporary grave after viewing it and reburied her own family in the kibbutz cemetery.
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
The Dead Sea of Gaza: A Community of Palestinians, Israelis, and the Palestinians. Has Israel Become More Responsible for its People? And Has Israel Solved It?
I said, smile and say, how are you? at the beginning of the guidelines I gave the therapists in Be’eri. The 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 leave the country. They were told by their parents that in the Holocaust, those who didn’t leave died. Hopelessness and helplessness are very 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 do we tell him about all of them at the same time? She said so.
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.
The Israeli military discovered that more than 300 attackers had penetrated the community and that it took seven hours for significant numbers of Israeli forces to arrive to fight off the invaders.
In the past year, violence has risen in the West Bank between Palestinian extremists belonging to Hamas and other groups and Israeli settlers and the Israeli military which has a large network of checkpoint and military outposts.
Hamas, designated a terrorist group by the United States and several other nations, has seen its control over territory in Gaza diminish over the past 12 months, leaving a political and logistical vacuum that international aid groups have struggled to fill.
Cease-fire talks between Hamas and Israel, brokered by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, are on hold, so for civilians in Gaza, the forced displacement that for many began last October, still has no end in sight.
The same area of northern Gaza where civilians were ordered to evacuate again on Monday was where the father of seven had already been evicted four times in the past year.
Israeli officials say that when the Hamas-led fighters attacked communities in southern Israel a year ago, they killed more than 1,200 and took about 250 hostages. Musleh was a teacher on his way to school that day.
He feels sympathy for Israeli hostages held by Hamas, but blames Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for the continued suffering both sides have suffered, and he insists that peace will be possible if Israeli citizens oust their premier.
Dozens of Palestinians waving Palestinian flags and holding anti-occupation signs gathered in the main square of the West Bank city of Ramallah on Monday.
One year after the beginning of Gaza’s war, Basma Abu Sway said she came to mark one of the most important days in Palestinian history.
An Israeli village mayor tells the story of his father killed by settlers in the West Bank: “The Israelis do not want to be afraid of their deaths,” said Rima
On Monday the Palestinian advocacy group, Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, announced that Israeli military forces had arrested 45 people through Sunday night into Monday morning across the West Bank.
Rima said that she was worried that Israel’s actions after Oct. 7 last year would strengthen its occupation of Palestinians.
On Dec. 2, Israeli settlers raided his village in the central West Bank and shot his father, Ahmed Assi, dead, according to the family, residents and local officials.
The Israeli military told NPR that they responded to a physical confrontation between Palestinians and Israeli citizens in Qarawat Bani Hassan with riot disposal means and live fire and that the circumstances of Assi’s death were still under review.
While showing bloodied clothes and a sweatshirt with a bullet hole in the back, the mother of Ahmed Assi pointed out the bullet hole. A picture of her dead dad is in a necklace as Assi’s 5 year-old daughter looks on.
I began working after my father was killed, I also started spending on the house as I took over his profession. The person says that he was responsible for the house because he was smart.
Noor may maintain his teenage haircut. But he has the hardened hands of an older working man, no longer hanging out with friends, devoting himself, instead, to work, faith and family.
A barbershop in the Middle East is more than just a place to get your hair cut. It’s also a good place to talk about everything from family to sports and politics. Not long after Noor gets his trim, the village’s mayor, Ibrahim Assi, enters. He is not related to one of the people. It’s a small community and family ties are strong. There is a poster of a dead man outside.
The mayor believes that there is an ever-growing network of Israeli settlements and outposts. The United Nations says that 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank. The settlements they live in are deemed illegal by the international community. Israeli politicians like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, have promoted their expansion, and they’re growing through a web of smaller outposts.
On Dec. 2, he says, settlers entered the village, damaging property, burning cars, wounding one man and shooting Noor’s father dead. He was found dead in an olive grove just outside of Qarawat Bani Hassan.
It is important to pray throughout the day and night. He said the Islamic funeral prayer from the porch outside his home.
“I tell him what is happening, what we are doing, and who is coming over, for example,” he says. “He told me to take care of my family and my brothers when he came to me in a dream last time.”
Noor Assi’s table in an Israeli-occupied village: wrapping a table on a cardboard shelf in a carpentry shop
In a carpentry shop in the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Noor Assi is at work packaging a wooden table. He pulls off strips of tape, tying it to the cardboard and flipping the table on its side.
