Nira and I started walking toward the neighborhood where her house used to stand. As we were talking, our conversation was interrupted by what sounded like the low rumble of thunder: bombardments in neighboring Gaza. Plumes of smoke rose in the not-too-distant horizon. The war, at the year mark, is far from over. Forty-two thousand Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, according to the Gazan health ministry, many of them women and children. According to Israel, seventeen thousand were militants. Gazans have had to evacuate the northern strip, and then, after Israeli forces invaded the city of Rafah in May, the south. Most of the enclave’s 2.2 million people are now displaced. Experts say that parts of Gaza have now reached a state of famine.
Though Gaza was only about three miles from where we were standing, it felt like a universe away. This distance, caused in large part by the Israeli military’s efforts to keep the press out of Gaza, has made the absolute terror of ordinary Palestinians inaccessible to most Israelis—a fact that haunts any reporting on the aftermath of October 7th. As Israel in recent weeks has shifted its military focus to the north, striking Hezbollah strongholds and killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon, none of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated war goals in Gaza have been met: Hamas has not been rooted out; the hostages are still not home.
Nira at first supported the war in Gaza. “I believed that we should pay a heavy price if it means demolishing Hamas,” she told me. “Now I say, ‘Bring the hostages back first. Because, if you don’t, it will break us apart.’ ” The failure to do so, she said, is “unforgivable on the part of our government.” She fears, she added, “that Sinwar”—the head of Hamas—“is sitting there, surrounded by the remaining hostages, and is watching us tear ourselves apart from within.”
Like many residents of Be’eri, Nira expected to remain at the Dead Sea hotel for several days; they ended up staying for close to a year. Seventy-four thousand people have been displaced from the southern communities since October 7th, according to state statistics.
More than sixty thousand have fled the Israeli north, as Hezbollah joined forces with Hamas on October 8th and began shelling Israel’s northern communities. Hotels that once swarmed with tourists emptied out because of the war, and have instead housed internal refugees, at a cost of more than a billion dollars to the state. Displaced Israelis have appeared in nearly every city, embarking on new lives that are often provisional. The small apartment building where I live in Tel Aviv has housed a displaced family from the north and one from the south. My children’s school has hosted a school from the southern town of Sderot.
Of the kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope, Be’eri may turn out to be something of an outlier. Reporting by an Israeli news site in June revealed that, of the twenty-four southern communities that were vacated after October 7th, nineteen “will not return in the foreseeable future.”
For the most part, their residents do not feel that it would be safe to move back. In Be’eri, only about a fifth of the residents have so far returned, but most of them, including Nira and her daughters, have remained together, first at the Dead Sea hotel and, in recent weeks, in temporary housing at another kibbutz, Hatzerim, in the south. Gal Cohen, the secretary-general of Be’eri, has been advocating for residents to return; his goal is for between eighty and ninety per cent to do so by the end of 2026.
Cohen spends his days mostly amid the rubble, determining which of the burned homes to save, which to raze, and where their former occupants will be housed. A new neighborhood of fifty-two units will soon go up near where some of the most intense fighting took place on October 7th. But, as Cohen told me, with a bitter smile, “the fastest growing neighborhood is still the cemetery.”
A week after the attack, Be’eri’s famed printing house resumed work, even as soldiers were still patrolling the grounds of the kibbutz for unexploded grenades. Its workers commuted back and forth from the Dead Sea hotel, about ninety minutes in each direction. “We realized that if we don’t rebuild Be’eri immediately, the Gaza envelope will not revive. And then you might as well fold the flag and move to Norway, because this country is over,” Cohen said.
Cohen was one of the first residents to return to Be’eri, last December. Unlike many survivors, he has not yet applied for a gun license. “And I still don’t lock my door,” he said. “I don’t feel safe, but I feel at home.”
Since moving back, he said, the sight he has come to fear most is “the archaeologists.” Every once in a while, a special team comes to comb a specific area of the kibbutz, with investigators fanning out to search the ground. This, he knows, means that some new footage has surfaced suggesting that a kibbutz member who was previously presumed to have been taken captive is dead. In order to corroborate the death, DNA evidence is required. “Any DNA,” Cohen added. Because many of the residents were killed in homes that were then burned to the ground, such evidence typically consists of a single tooth, or a fragment of bone. Such was the case with Dror Or, a local cheesemaker and one of Cohen’s closest friends, who was thought to be held captive in Gaza until he was pronounced dead in May.
Though some parts of Be’eri appear unchanged, green and tranquil, its two westernmost neighborhoods, closest to the border fence, were ravaged beyond recognition. To walk down their streets is to walk through ash and debris. A terrible stench still hangs in certain areas. We passed by Or’s scorched home and entered a single-story house where not much beyond the walls was left standing. Rain fell into what was once the kitchen. Red roof tiles, broken into shards, crunched underfoot. Down the road was a singed two-story house. Cohen showed me into a room where the walls were distinctly fortified: the safe room. I counted more than a dozen bullet holes on the walls opposite the entrance, attesting to a desperate struggle. The house had belonged to the Bachar family—mother, father, their fifteen-year-old son, and their thirteen-year-old daughter. The four of them hid in the safe room for hours until gunmen noticed them and began shooting through the closed door; the father held its handle closed until he couldn’t anymore. Both the mother, Dana, and the son, Carmel, died inside that room. Cohen told me that Carmel, an avid surfer, asked for one last thing as he was dying: to be buried along with his surfboard. A day after my visit to Be’eri, Carmel and Dana were reburied, together, at the kibbutz. Carmel’s last wish had been granted.
