KIBBUTZ NIR OZ, Israel—When Bat Sheva Yahalomi awoke to air raid sirens on the morning of October 7, she didn’t think much of it. The mother of three lived with her husband and children in Nir Oz, an idyllic community of 400 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 very quickly we understood something was different. We started to hear shouting outside in Arabic,” she said from her ruined family home. “We heard ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and we started to hear shooting on our house.”
At around 10 a.m., four terrorists in Hamas headbands and tactical gear entered the home and opened fire on her husband, Ohad Yahalomi, as he guarded the safe room—a typical feature in homes so close to Gaza—where his family was sheltering. They then forced Bat Sheva and her children, shoeless and pajama-clad, outside at gunpoint.
“They were saying in English, ‘Gaza’ and ‘come.’ I understood immediately what they wanted from us,” she recalled. “We saw Ohad on the floor bleeding and wounded, but he was still conscious. I asked him what to do and he told us to go with them. I left the baby on him because I was sure they would not 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 troops battled the attackers. After walking back to Nir Oz and narrowly avoiding recapture en route, she discovered upon her arrival home that Ohad was missing. Eitan was released after 52 days of captivity in the November hostage deal, and Ohad remains in Gaza to this day. It’s unknown whether he’s still alive.
Shachar Tzuk, Kfar Aza resident
There was no battle for Nir Oz, Yahalomi said. Israeli troops did not arrive at the kibbutz until eight hours after the attacks began, and by then one-quarter of the community’s residents had been kidnapped or killed. “When the army arrived, the last terrorist had gone back to Gaza,” she said.
A year after more than 6,000 Hamas-led terrorists poured across the border fence into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 others back to Gaza, the feeling of abandonment among October 7 survivors persists. It came in two waves: first, in the military’s initial failure to stop the pogrom, and later, in what many view as the world’s desertion of their friends and family members still in captivity. Now, many residents of southern Israel don’t know if they’ll ever return to the once tight-knit communities that became killing fields.
With the last year spent fighting to degrade Hamas in Gaza, Israel sits on the cusp of a wider war involving Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah. Fear of a regional conflagration—together with the failure of talks aimed at reaching a ceasefire with Hamas in exchange for some or all of the hostages’ return—now has many Israelis concerned that the urgency of saving however many hostages remain alive in Gaza has faded.
In the partially destroyed kindergarten of Nir Oz, Yifat Zailer held up her phone to show a video of her cousin Shiri Bibas’ son Ariel on his fourth birthday. It was in this room that the red-headed toddler blew out candles for his birthday and here that he celebrated Rosh Hashanah just days before his abduction. “It’s really hard to be here after a year,” Zailer said. “In my worst nightmares, I never thought it was going to take so long to release them and bring them back home.”
Soot from a fire set by Hamas still covers the walls of the classroom—a bleak reminder that no target was off-limits for the terrorist attackers. Ariel’s brother, Kfir, was the youngest abductee at just 9 months old at the time of his kidnapping. In January, he turned 1 in captivity.
“I ask myself if Ariel and Kfir remember their father. I ask myself if they’re even alive. No one can give us that answer. Not the Red Cross, not UNICEF. This entire family vanished and no one is talking about it anymore,” Zailer said through tears. “We were raised to believe in peace. Something inside me broke on October 7. I never believed this kind of cruelty and violence could later be justified.”
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 captors was also how Tomer Keshet, the cousin of Shiri’s husband, Yarden, began to realize what had happened to the family on October 7. “It was my greatest fear that they would be taken captive,” Keshet told The Dispatch. He later discovered that Yarden had also been kidnapped after Hamas published a video of his cousin being beaten by crowds of people in Gaza.
When the family wasn’t released as part of a November hostage deal that freed 81 Israelis during a weeklong pause in fighting, Keshet said his euphoria for the freed captives faded into despair over the fate of his family. “On the last day, when we learned they were not coming back, I think as a family we broke. We felt this dread that we might not see them. It was very difficult,” he said. “But we know that we must stay hopeful, because we owe it to them—to Yarden and Shiri and Kfir and Ariel—to keep up the fight.”
In the year since what was left of the community evacuated, very few people have returned to Nir Oz. Survivors of the Hamas attack, who described the kibbutz as “paradise” before the war, are still contemplating whether they can rebuild their former lives. The community must now collectively decide whether to demolish the homes shot up and set afire by Hamas or leave them standing as a grim memorial to what happened that day. While some homes appear virtually untouched, others are burned beyond recognition.
“It was just a matter of Russian roulette,” said Nir Oz resident Ola Metzger. She and her husband managed to hold the safe room door closed that day, saving their family. “They tried to break into the safe room, but they didn’t succeed, so they just robbed us and made a mess in the house. We consider ourselves lucky.”
Only seven of the 220 homes in Kibbutz Nir Oz were left completely unharmed. Down the road from Metzger are the remnants of Tamar and Johnny Sinan Tov’s home. Terrorists shot into the family’s safe room before setting the house on fire, killing the young couple and their three small children. “They’re here, they’re burning us, we’re suffocating,” Johnny Sinan Tov’s sister later recalled him saying to her in a frantic phone call as the attack unfolded.
Some 15 miles north sits Kfar Aza, a community of more than 700 people where 62 people were killed in one of October 7’s deadliest massacres. Like Nir Oz, very few people have made their way back to the kibbutz that still bears visible scars from the attack. Bullet holes pockmark communal spaces and pictures of kidnapped and murdered former residents are displayed outside ravaged homes. Israeli flags are a newer addition, flying outside the residences whose inhabitants were killed.
Like many of Israel’s southern kibbutzim, Kfar Aza once considered itself a beacon of coexistence with the Palestinians. The community was home to many self-described peace activists, including Batia Holin, a 71-year-old photographer who in spring 2023 held a joint exhibition with an artist from the Gaza Strip. On the morning of October 7, the young man she had collaborated with began to press her for information about her location and nearby Israeli troop movements. Holin survived the attack, but the feeling of betrayal for her and many of Kfar Aza’s other left-leaning residents endures.
“A lot of people feel that they lost all hope. The youngest kid abducted from the kibbutz was 3 1/2. We saw [Palestinian] crowds cheering. Seeing babies taken into Gaza, seeing elderly people taken into Gaza—that shattered something deep,” said Kfar Aza resident Shachar Tzuk. “I’m not interested in building trust with them. I’m interested in them leaving me alone. I don’t want anything to do with them.”
Now, Tzuk doesn’t know if she’ll ever move back to the kibbutz, where the sound of explosions from continued fighting in nearby Gaza punctuates our visit. “It’s like if I asked you what you want to eat on a Friday 15 years from now. 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 last year. “I lost everything.”
