Oct. 7 evacuees from Kibbutz Re’im are fleeing back home amid Iranian missile fire
Back in their protected rooms, survivors of the onslaught face renewed trauma as successes in the war with Iran cause them to ask where the military was during the 2023 massacre
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
In an unforeseen turn of events, many residents of Kibbutz Re’im who were evacuated after their community was devastated in the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023, are now fleeing again — this time homeward.
Over the last several days, as Iranian ballistic missiles continued to indiscriminately bombard Israel’s highly populated north and center, a large number of kibbutz members have quit their temporary accommodation in two towers in south Tel Aviv and headed home, said the kibbutz secretary.
“Most of the community is in Re’im at the moment,” Zohar Mizrahi told The Times of Israel. She added, “It’s not clear whether they will stay or go back to Tel Aviv.”
A spokeswoman for Kibbutz Kerem Shalom said a handful of evacuated families had also come home. But other kibbutzim said nobody had returned since Iran’s retaliatory strikes began following Israel’s June 13 launch of Operation Rising Lion.
Re’im is the first of eight border communities to which the state expects members and residents to return this summer, following renovations to buildings damaged during the Hamas terror invasion on October 7.
Before Israel attacked Iran, around 200 out of 428 residents had returned to Re’im, with 170 still residing in the Tel Aviv tower blocks or elsewhere in the country, said Mizrahi.
Since Israel began its attack on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and other targets essential to the Islamic regime on Friday, damage from Iran’s retaliatory rocket attacks has mainly occurred in the center and north of the country. So far, 24 people in Israel have been killed and hundreds wounded, according to Israeli officials.
Going back into bomb shelters for extended periods and waiting for Iranian missiles to enter Israeli airspace arouses complex feelings for many of those who were at home in the Gaza border area when Hamas gunmen entered their communities and embarked on a killing spree, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 to the Gaza Strip.
In many homes, reinforced rooms became death traps as gunmen breached the steel doors and murdered those hiding inside.
Ilanit Swissa of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, which was one of the hardest hit communities on October 7, was fortunate to be spared the carnage that saw 10 of her immediate neighbors slaughtered. For reasons unknown, the invading terrorists skipped the home in which she, her partner, her daughter, and her mother hid.
Like many from Kfar Aza, Swissa, a playwright, theater and film director, and producer, resides in temporary accommodations in Kibbutz Shefayim, in central Israel.
She said she has deliberated whether to drive south.
“It’s absurd,” she said. “But I don’t have the energy to pack again after we managed to create some kind of routine in our caravilla [prefabricated home] in Shefayim.”
Swissa said that her family’s temporary house has a bomb shelter, but that many other Kfar Aza evacuees living in Shefayim did not, and had to go to portable bomb shelters outside or take refuge in community shelters. “It’s very complex,” she said.
“I hope this [confrontation with Iran] will close the October 7 chapter. I hope the world will change, the hostages will return, and we will manage to finish all the craziness thrown at us since October 7. I ask myself how Hamas dared to do what they did. Either they will succeed and it will be farewell to Israel, or there will be a new Middle East. [The war against Iran] needs time, patience, and faith. Everyone who has faith, no matter in what, has to summon it up,” she said.
Batia Holin, also from Kfar Aza, is living with her husband, Nachum, in temporary accommodation in central Israel’s Moshav Kfar Monash, close to her daughter Rotem, who is renting in Moshav Tzur Moshe. Rotem and her two young children spent four traumatic hours together with terrorists in their protected room in Kfar Aza on October 7. Her husband, who had been in a car crash, was in the hospital. When the six terrorists holding Rotem’s family hostage commanded the family to follow them to their car, Rotem refused, and the terrorists miraculously left; the family was one of only two in the neighborhood to survive the Hamas onslaught intact.
Two months ago, after the moving-in date for their temporary house in Kibbutz Ruhama in southern Israel was delayed again, Batia and her husband left their small temporary apartment in Kibbutz Shefayim for a pleasant house with a garden in Kfar Monash that reminded them of home. But it has no protected room.
“The neighbors opposite have a protected room and invited us to join them,” Holin told The Times of Israel on Sunday. “But it’s not the most comfortable thing to start running around at 3 a.m. Last night, we didn’t even get out of bed.”
“We thought nobody would know where Kfar Monash was and that it would be okay,” she joked. “We have no other option.”
“Our daughter has no protected room,” continued Holin. “These are old buildings. During the first night of missile attacks, they went to a supposedly protected space on the moshav that wasn’t really protected. On the second night, they slept with family in [nearby Moshav] Kfar Hess. But these are not acceptable conditions.”
Holin said the war with Iran reminded her of the Gulf War, which began in 1990 when the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, going on to fire missiles at Israel early the following year.
“The wars I’m used to are much nearer,” she said. “They are wars [against Hamas] where the missiles fall before there’s time for a warning. For nearly two years now, I’ve been in a war situation that doesn’t end. What kind of life is this?”
“People talk about how extraordinary our army and our intelligence are on Iran,” Holin said. “I ask myself, where were they on October 7? Why did so many people die? How is it that they go all the way to Tehran but are unable to bring 53 hostages back from Gaza? If they think they can kill the head of the Houthi [Yemeni terror group], they can’t go 100 meters [yards] from my house and bring back the hostages? It’s apparently about priorities.”
Two hostages from Kfar Aza remain in captivity, the twins Gali and Ziv Berman, both believed to be alive.
Danny Rahamim, a veteran kibbutznik from Kibbutz Nahal Oz on the Gaza border, who currently lives with his wife Siobhan and part of his community in the southern town of Netivot, said that sitting in the protected room was “Deja vu.”
“It’s very hard,” he went on, noting that since Friday, the issue of the hostages had disappeared from the public agenda. Two hostages taken from Nahal Oz remain in Gaza, one living and one dead: Omri Miran, still assumed to be living, and the body of a Tanzanian agricultural intern, Joshua Mollel, who was murdered in captivity.
“On TV, they don’t talk about the hostages anymore. It drives us mad,” Rahamim said.
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