‘A murder in every corner’: 60-year resident writes book on Kfar Aza challenges post-Oct. 7

Ami Cahana lived in Kibbutz Kfar Aza near the Gaza border for 57 years. Like so many others, his life was shattered on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists invaded the pastoral community, slaughtered 64 of the kibbutz’s 787 residents, and abducted 19 to the Gaza Strip. Since then, Cahana has documented the experiences of his displaced collective.

Some 1,200 people in total were murdered across southern Israel that day and 251 kidnapped to Gaza, while much of the area, including Kfar Aza, was left in ruins.

After a short time in central Kibbutz Shefayim, to which Kfar Aza residents were evacuated, he and his wife Nurit moved into rented accommodation in northern Israel.

In May, he published “A Journey Back to the House of Betrayal” (Hebrew link), which contains the observations he made in the first six months after October 7 and his recommendations for making the practical aspects of life in the wake of the massacre a little easier.

Cahana knows kibbutzim well. An engineer by training, he completed a doctoral thesis on change in the sector over three generations. Today, besides teaching at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, he advises dozens of kibbutzim and kibbutz businesses on insurance and risk.

He says that his broken community is still stuck on October 7 and that the problems and tensions he described in his book have only worsened. Still, when speaking with The Times of Israel, Cahana stressed that his opinions are his own and that he does not intend to be critical.

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

The Times of Israel: What happened to you and your family on October 7?

Ami Cahana: I was touring Aswan in Egypt with my son. My three children are all grown up and have left the kibbutz.

The only family member at home was my wife, Nurit, a daughter of Auschwitz survivors.

Nurit stayed in her protected room from the early morning until 2 a.m., when IDF soldiers rescued her.

You and your wife left Kibbutz Shefayim, to which Kfar Aza’s residents were first evacuated, and live in rented accommodation in northern Israel. Why?

Personal and communal rehabilitation are very difficult together.

When a family experiences tragedy, the grieving can go home for a break. In our case, October 7 is continuously in your face. In Shefayim, you’d constantly pass people whose loved ones had been either murdered or kidnapped. You had to get on a bus every weekend to go demonstrate for the release of the hostages. How could you not when you saw their parents?

The community in Shefayim and Ruhama (the two communities where the displaced residents are living) is still stuck on October 7, still in trauma. Nurit and I are already in post-trauma. The treatment can only start with post-trauma. Moving out may be selfish. It’s about survival.

Kfar Aza’s first decade, post-October 7,  will be about loss, grief, and every awful thing you can think of. Most of the bodies of the murdered were buried outside of Kfar Aza. Many will be reinterred, and every ceremony will take you back. When you live outside, you don’t see the physical expression of loss daily.

You talk in your book about the difficulties of a privatized kibbutz being forced to function as a community again. Can you elaborate?

Kfar Aza was privatized in 2005. In 2023, the houses were transferred into private ownership, and people stopped paying into a kibbutz fund, paying their utility bills independently. The community continued to meet for religious and national holidays. Other than that, it no longer needed the kibbutz.

On October 7, this model collapsed. Suddenly, everyone needed the kibbutz again, for example, to assign rooms in Kibbutz Shefayim, to find work for people who had lost their jobs, to provide documents needed to get government support, and to plan the next steps. The community had to make decisions again as a community. But members were no longer accustomed to weighing their needs against those of others.

Moreover, the structures were, are, no longer appropriate. With privatization, the few shared tasks required managers more than leaders.

We have external administrators who weren’t there on October 7, don’t understand the social hierarchies, and are unfamiliar with collaborative concepts. It takes time to elect committees to address the new problems and prepare them for communal decision-making.

The administrators are working around the clock, with their energies mostly directed outwards to institutions, the government, the bodies hosting the residents, and the organizations providing rehabilitation and compensation. Two enormous compounds have been built requiring massive amounts of energy.

The managers send informative messages out to the residents, which cannot be replied to. A parallel “agora” [center of public life in ancient Greek city-states] has emerged on WhatsApp, where people discuss and complain. It’s fertile ground for rumors.

There is increasing frustration among residents and managers, and I fear that conflicts between people will become entrenched unless they are dealt with now.

Can you give examples of some of the complexities?

On October 7, the ship sank. The survivors got onto life rafts and reached some version of land [Kibbutz Shefayim, to which they were directed first]. It took a month to identify the dead and another two months to get through the funerals and the seven- and 30-day mourning periods. For three months, nobody thought about anything else. Just that we survived and others didn’t.

Then, gradually, lots of hierarchies formed. At the start, everyone was in similar rooms in the Shefayim hotel. Then, the mobile homes arrived. They were a bit bigger. How do you divide them? Does the grieving person have the right to breathe more than the family with two or three children? Is the number of people murdered in one family a factor? You have to build a new world within the chaos and you don’t know the rules.

Where was the kibbutz leadership drawn from pre-October 7?

Around 20 people, aged 35 to 50, were the ones with leadership qualities that the kibbutz developed, and they were all killed. Some were in the kibbutz security team.

The community is split into three. What are the challenges, and how many do you think will return to the kibbutz?

Around 40 families are still at Kibbutz Shefayim, around 400 people are at Kibbutz Ruhama, and the rest, around a third, are in what’s being called “the diaspora,” spread all over the country.

The plan for rehabilitating Kfar Aza was carried out externally and brought to the kibbutz for approval because the kibbutz community was so broken and weak, and a decision had to be made quickly.

Around 60 houses were severely damaged and have already been demolished. They will be rebuilt, either on the same site or in a new area in the southern part of the kibbutz, where construction has begun. The new area is primarily for new families expected to come.

Houses like mine, which sustained a few bullet holes, will be patched up.

There are around 30 houses with either minor damage or none, where people were murdered or taken hostage or that were invaded by terrorists. The survivors cannot go back to live in those houses. A year ago, the Tekuma Directorate [tasked by the state with rehabilitating the Gaza border communities] said they understood and would find a solution. That hasn’t been found yet.

People often ask, innocently, if we’re returning to Kfar Aza. We have nowhere to return to. You usually return to the same house with the same things in the sink, the same neighbors, and the same cat. We are talking about a place that was once home but has changed beyond all recognition. In every corner, somebody was murdered. Around my house, 20 faces of friends will no longer be there.

Will people feel safe enough to live in Kfar Aza?

With every ceremony Hamas organized for the released hostages, we saw that they have recovered. The new army chief says 2025 will be a year of war. The protected rooms didn’t protect. Around half of those murdered were killed in the protected room. The terrorists shot through the doors, blew them off, or just walked in.

Those whose houses need rebuilding will get a protected room with a better door. Nobody else will. There’s no budget. The kibbutz has just received cash to repaint and repair.

At this point, young families with kids don’t want to take their children to such a place. Will the older founding generation find the energy to rebuild the kibbutz they built once?

I think 65% of the residents will return, some out of respect for their murdered dear ones, others who say we built something and we won’t abandon it. A not insignificant number will go back because they have no choice. Before October 7, a house like mine would fetch NIS 3 million ($820,000). Who would want to buy it today? To rent outside, you need a lot of money.

Many of the people like us who are living outside of Shefayim and Ruhama are the stronger ones. They have relative economic strength, an academic education, managerial and entrepreneurial skills, and can adapt.

A memorial has been built outside the kibbutz. How will the community deal with commemorating what happened on October 7 within the kibbutz?

People are talking and arguing about commemoration, and it won’t be easy. Everyone has a different view. One of the families whose son was killed in his car trying to escape from Kfar Aza wants his car left there, for example. Someone whose daughter was murdered in the young people’s neighborhood wants her room preserved. There are big differences of opinion over the young people’s neighborhood, where so many were murdered. A decision has already been made to build a new neighborhood for the young where an old cowshed once stood. It leaves time to decide on the old one. In the meantime, it will remain.

Will you and your wife return?

Nurit will decide.

I was very struck by a paragraph in your book where you were reminded of the Exodus from Egypt: “A community builds its life and culture in a new and alien place — Egypt — and shapes a comfortable reality over generations that, in retrospect, turns out to be imaginary. A shattering event destroys the old community and sends it on a journey of wandering in which it is reshaped, but the generation of the desert does not survive, and a new community is built.”

Like the residents of Kfar Aza, the people who left Egypt were uprooted. They didn’t know where they were going or when they’d arrive.

When the kibbutz established an extension where outsiders could build homes, the former initially wanted no contact with the latter. However, when it decided to open the gates and many in the extension area became kibbutz members, some of the latter quickly took on leadership positions.

In my view, the new people who buy the new houses, who are free of the baggage that makes it hard for us to function — they will be the new leaders. They will be the generation that did not know Egypt.