KIBBUTZ BE’ERI — In the bullet-riddled interior of what used to be Ma’ayan and Yuval Bar’s living room, the murdered couple’s daughter leafed through old family photos.
Her 6-month-old baby was sleeping in a clean lilac baby carriage that looked jarringly out of place against the charred house, pocked with grenade shrapnel. The former residence’s entire façade was missing, exposing its interior to the front yard. The destruction had been wrought on October 7, when Hamas terrorists invaded Be’eri and other communities near the border with Gaza, murdering a total of some 1,200 people and abducting 251.
Noya Vered-Bar, who was born in Be’eri but moved away years ago, and her husband Ido were sorting photos for a humble memorial wall — just a string of pictures hanging on a clothesline. On visits to the kibbutz after Hamas’s murderous onslaught, the couple had noticed a stream of visitors on tours of the aftermath.
“We want to show a bit of life before all this destruction, too,” Ido Vered-Bar said.
Reconnecting with life before the massacre is not easy in heavily affected communities like Be’eri, which are still largely vacant. Their residents live elsewhere, as wrecking crews demolish one condemned building after another in entire neighborhoods that once were vibrant and picturesque but are now full of bombed-out shells.
For locals who return here regularly, the sights trigger inescapable traumas, residents say.
Making matters worse for some survivors of the onslaught, they said, is the feeling of abandonment by the state during their rehabilitation efforts, and what they perceive as the authorities’ failure to account for the oversights that allowed the onslaught to occur.
Nira Shpak, a survivor of the October 7 onslaught, gently checked in on Noya Vered-Bar upon passing what was left of Noya’s childhood home. Shpak, a former lawmaker for the Yesh Atid party led by Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, was in Be’eri last week with a delegation of Times of Israel journalists, whom she had also met at her own kibbutz, nearby Kfar Aza. She made small talk with Noya about the baby, casually placing her hand on Noya’s shoulder.
Ravaged homes and mass murder scenes that dot the area’s towns and villages are particularly stark reminders of the horrors of October 7, Shpak, 57, noted.
“But to us, even the placid-looking pathways and roads can bring back traumas,” said Shpak.
Vivid reminders
In Kibbutz Kfar Aza — where Shpak survived the October 7 invasion in a sheltered room while coordinating rescue efforts with her army contacts — she pointed to a green patch near a square.
“You look at this and you probably see a nice green space. I see the place where I found my neighbor’s body inside a Jeep,” she said. “Every alleyway tells a horror story,” added Shpak, who has three adult children.
Other places bring back a mixture of anger, helplessness, and humiliation.
“They came through this gate, took it over and set up a hostage shuttle service to Gaza, making rounds,” Shpak said of the terrorists. She showed the visitors a back gate of Kfar Aza with a clear line of sight to the Gaza neighborhood of Shejaiya, where the Israel Defense Forces were at that moment battling.
In Kfar Aza, which had about 900 residents on October 7, Hamas terrorists murdered 62 people. Two more were killed accidentally by Israeli troops and another 19 were abducted, of whom five are still believed to be held hostage in Gaza. The kibbutz is among several — along with Be’eri, Nir Oz, and Nahal Oz — that were hardest hit on October 7. Survivors of the onslaught from those places live elsewhere in temporary accommodations (in Kfar Aza’s case, largely at Kibbutz Shefayim near Herzliya; Kibbutz Be’eri’s survivors mostly live in hotels at the Dead Sea).
The government’s Tekuma Authority, which is responsible for rehabilitating the Gaza-adjacent communities infiltrated during the onslaught, is rebuilding the damaged communities’ infrastructure and buildings. The works are expected to continue for at least another year in the eight heavily destroyed ones.
The government has allocated approximately NIS 19 billion ($5.2 billion) toward the Tekuma Authority’s budget. The coalition has passed multiple laws and issued regulations aimed at supporting the invaded communities.
Meanwhile, neighbors from less damaged communities help maintain the evacuated ones (Kibbutz Beit Hashita, for example, sends its landscaping team to water and prune the vegetation of Kfar Aza, an act that inspires hope and gratitude in Shpak and many other survivors.)
Returning pain
A handful of locals have already returned to some of the largely destroyed communities, including Shahar Shnorman and Ayelet Cohen, the only couple residing permanently in Kfar Aza currently. Others visit their ravaged community daily because they work there, typically at one of the kibbutz factories in the area. Yet others are counting the days until they come home.
Rita Lifshitz, for example, tries to visit Nir Oz on Friday evenings. On those visits, she thinks of Oded Lifshitz, who is presumed to be held hostage in Gaza and is the father of Rita’s ex-husband.
“I have a beer on the bench where we’d usually have a beer together on Friday evenings. It’s my way of showing he’s with me,” said Lifshitz, who immigrated to Israel from Sweden in the 1980s and now lives with the rest of Nir Oz evacuees in Kiryat Gat.
Raaya Rotem and her daughter Hila came to Be’eri on Thursday to see their home being demolished by a wrecking crew. They were abducted from there to Gaza on October 7.
“It’s a strange feeling,” said Rotem, who was released on November 29, several days after the release of Hila and her friend Emily Hand, who had been staying over that day. “This place doesn’t feel like home anymore anyway,” she said of the heap of rubble that used to be her home.
Some do not want to return. One Kibbutz Be’eri resident, who spoke to The Times of Israel under the condition of anonymity, said his wife has not returned once to Be’eri since October 7, when she struggled to prevent terrorists from opening the latch of their home’s sheltered room while he was fighting the attackers with the local emergency team. He was seriously injured in battle and nearly died, and saw several of his friends get killed.
He wants to return to Be’eri, and supports rebuilding the war-battered structures rather than preserving some of them for commemorative purposes.
“Nobody wants to live at Auschwitz,” he said, not far from the massively destroyed dental clinic of Be’eri, where he and several individuals were holed up before Hamas terrorists murdered most of them.
His wife, he said, has not forgiven him to this day for going out to fight and leaving her alone with their small children. The prospect of return continues to be an unresolved issue for the couple, and for many others from the heavily affected communities of the Tekuma Region, also known as the Gaza Envelope.
Asked whether he felt he could ensure his family’s safety in the future, the man said: “Maybe.”
Several years before the October 7 onslaught, the Israel Defense Forces reduced the number of rifles in Be’eri’s armory from 35 to six, citing fears of burglary, the injured defender said.
Months before the onslaught, the army asked the emergency team to deposit those six rifles in the armory instead of keeping them in a safe at the homes of team members. Some members of Be’eri’s team declined, fearing complying would complicate their response time. This decision may have saved the lives of the injured man and others, because they were already armed when they arrived at the armory, which was surrounded by terrorists.
The emergency team of Kfar Aza, which complied with the IDF order and kept its rifles in the armory, were killed trying to reach it, Shpak noted.
“Had you been a good boy and done what they told you, then you would have ended up dead,” she said to the injured man in Be’eri.
The short-sightedness and complacency reflected in the armory policy handed down by authorities, Shpak said, “raises serious questions.”
Orphaned failures
Shpak and the injured emergency team member, who both have extensive military experience, are trying to make sense of the failures that allowed terrorists to massacre their communities.
The results of an army probe on Be’eri that came out Thursday “contains all the details, but doesn’t connect the dots, doesn’t acknowledge the scale of the failure, and does not reflect any fundamental shift in perception. It made me sad to read. Made me feel alone,” he said.
Shpak for her part, is focused on addressing the government’s “profound” failures that happened after October 7 in helping the shattered population rehabilitate. As a former politician with ties to the Defense Ministry and beyond, she has become an advocate for the rights of the victims at the Knesset and in the media.
Government-funded compensation for destroyed property is inadequate, she said — only up to NIS 90,000 ($25,000), and half of that for divorced individuals living in separate households. Additionally, malfunctions in the burial process of some fatalities have led to errors that are complicating the healing process of their surviving loved ones, Shpak said.
“It’s a series of failures, one on top of the other, and it’s still ongoing,” she added. The Tekuma Region says it is tailoring its solutions to each community, but to Shpak, it feels like a one-size-fits-all effort that leaves some individual needs unaddressed. “The response needs to be person-specific, family-specific, community-specific,” she said.
Pain over the hostages who have been held in Gaza for months and “the utter absence of answers,” as Shpak put it, as to how the onslaught was allowed to happen are shaking her confidence that it won’t happen again in the Tekuma Region or elsewhere in Israel.
But “desperation is not an action plan,” said the man from Be’eri. “And yes, there’s hope. We see it in the factories that resumed work within weeks, sometimes days, of October 7. And we see it every day at our hotel, where we’re running education and social frameworks for a community whose vast majority is geared toward return and revival.”
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