Finding solace under water: Displaced Oct. 7 survivors learn to scuba dive in Eilat
Diving clubs in Eilat mobilize to offer evacuated Israelis free courses and sessions; one Nir Oz resident finds activity ‘very therapeutic, very healing’
Ilan Ben Zion is an AFP reporter and a former news editor at The Times of Israel.
AFP — Deep under the Red Sea, a passing Israeli warship could barely be heard as Yamit Avital held her breath and dived, her mind briefly cleared of the trauma of the October 7 Hamas onslaught.
“There’s a kind of tranquility to the sea, in the deep,” Avital said after she emerged from 20 meters (66 feet) under the aquamarine waters of the Gulf of Eilat.
“It’s like you don’t hear anything, you only hear the music of the sea.”
She and her husband Benny are among the survivors from Nir Oz, one of the communities hit the hardest during Hamas’s October 7 massacres, when some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and seizing over 240 hostages under the cover of a deluge of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities.
The vast majority of those killed as gunmen seized border communities were civilians — including babies, children and the elderly. Entire families were executed in their homes, and over 360 people were slaughtered at an outdoor festival, many amid horrific acts of brutality by the terrorists.
In response, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and launched a punishing offensive that has reduced vast areas of Gaza to a ruined wasteland and killed at least 21,978 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. These Palestinian terror group’s figures cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires.
In the aftermath of the assault, the Avitals and their three children were evacuated to Eilat, where they found themselves across the street from the coastal resort’s Coral Beach Nature Reserve and its dive clubs.
They are just a few of over 100,000 Israelis who have been displaced since October, evacuated from their homes near battle zones in the south and the north, amid the ongoing war in Gaza and near-daily skirmishes across the Lebanon border.
Israel’s diving federation, diving clubs in Eilat and dozens of volunteers have mobilized to offer evacuated Israelis courses in scuba diving and free diving — where divers plunge deep underwater on a single breath.
Yuval Goren, manager of the Aquasport dive club, said they were “desperate to give whatever we can” to help the evacuees.
Many participants said they found it a meditative exercise that assuaged their trauma.
‘You gave back my smile’
Studies have suggested that therapy through scuba and other diving methods can be beneficial for treating trauma.
The novel underwater setting, physical activity, breathing exercises and body control, and exposure to and overcoming fear can all serve to mitigate emotional pain, experts say.
“We have learned that being in the water and underwater has huge beneficial emotional effects,” said Yotam Dagan, a psychologist who helped mobilize the diving federation’s training efforts.
The sense of weightlessness and the slowed breathing and heart rate “lowers stress in a very meaningful way, not only during the diving session itself, but also beyond that, into the next minutes, hours, sometimes more than that,” he said.
Instructor Ofer Mor has been running a project for children and adults from Nir Oz and other evacuees at the Snuba Dive Center in Eilat.
She said the course was “very calm, very slow” and focused on the individual needs of the participants.
“One of the feedbacks at the beginning was ‘you gave me back my smile,'” she said.
For the past two months, Shai Wolf, a volunteer free diving instructor for Aquasport, has shown evacuees proper breathing and diving techniques and “to know peace and quiet under water.”
“It was simply moving to see them always improving, feeling much better, and ready to go out to a new reality,” said Wolf.
‘That feeling at 23 meters’
Around a quarter of Nir Oz’s 400 residents were killed or taken hostage on October 7. Some captives from the kibbutz were released in November in a weeklong temporary truce deal with Hamas, but a total of 129 people are still believed to be held captive in Gaza.
Benny Avital’s brother was killed defending a nearby village, while he and his three children narrowly escaped death barricaded in their safe room. Both he and his wife Yamit lost friends and neighbors who were killed or taken hostage.
“Something in that feeling at 23 meters deep, when the lungs are collapsing and the diaphragm hurts and the throat is totally choked, and the toes clench — that’s the feeling that accompanied me throughout… October 7 and 8,” Yamit said.
“At the end of the day to feel it, and know what it is, and return to the surface and take a fresh breath of air — that’s something very therapeutic, very healing.”
However, the Avitals will soon be unable to continue diving daily as their kibbutz is leaving Eilat for longer-term accommodation in landlocked Kiryat Gat.
“There’s a long way to go, we know this,” Benny said, but it was “really our good fortune we got this hotel by the sea.”
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
