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The Israeli village grieving the biggest loss from Oct. 7, one year later
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This story is a part of an NPR series reflecting on Oct. 7, a year of war and how it has changed life across Israel, the Gaza Strip, the region and the world.
KIBBUTZ BE’ERI, Israel — The natural course of grieving is distorted here, a year after the Oct. 7 attacks.
This tight-knit Israeli community near the Gaza border is digging up its dead from temporary graves further away and reburying them back home, where it is safer to gather now, a year into the Gaza war.
“I'm so exhausted after every funeral that we have to deal with again,” said Gal Cohen, the head of the kibbutz. “Because it brings [back] everything, and we cry again.”
Israeli authorities say about 1,200 people were killed last Oct. 7, as Hamas led thousands of attackers bursting out of Gaza, ambushing Israeli towns and communities. Kibbutz Be’eri suffered the biggest loss of any single village: 102 people killed — about one out of every 13 people living there.
The deadliest single attack in Israeli history led to the deadliest war in Palestinian history, with more than 41,000 Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip this past year, according to health officials there.
This year, Kibbutz Be’eri has grappled with questions of death, memory, guilt and vengeance.
“Questions from [the] inferno, really,” says Merav Roth, a prominent Israeli psychologist, and the sister of former Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid, who has counseled the kibbutz members all year long.
This is the story of some of their answers.
The first weeks
Silence is what helped keep the survivors of this small community alive the day of the attack. Silence is what they carried out of hiding from their safe rooms along the Gaza border to a hotel on the Dead Sea that took them in.
“It was the most quiet place I've ever seen,” says Roth, who met them there. “Everybody were quiet, defeated. Their bodies were, like, no air inside.”
She had heard their whispers on Oct. 7, carried live on the news.
“The Israelis, we all were on the radio, hearing them whispering to the radio people: ‘Why doesn't anyone come? Where are everybody? Where's the army? They're in my house, they're shooting at me.’ We will remember this for the rest of our lives, all of us,” Roth says.
When the Israeli military eventually published its investigation into the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, it found about 340 attackers had infiltrated the community and that it had taken about seven hours for significant numbers of Israeli forces to arrive to fight off the invasion there.
It took many weeks to account for everyone: who was dead, who was captive in Gaza. Roth sat with the survivors of Kibbutz Be’eri in the Dead Sea hotel basement as the village secretary read the names of 27 identified bodies and 108 people unaccounted for.
“It's just name by name by name,” Roth said. “Everybody are, again, quiet, dead quiet.”
Counseling the counselors
This year, Roth has helped the kibbutz make agonizing decisions.
“For instance, there is a boy in the kibbutz who lost four members of his family, two parents and two siblings. So do we tell him about each separately or do we tell him about all of them together?” she says.
Roth has also counseled former hostages who returned from Hamas captivity in Gaza, families whose loved ones were killed in captivity, and Israelis who didn't experience a personal loss but still suffer from sleeping difficulties, anxiety attacks and depression.
“They are extremely anxious about the future of this place. Many of them leave the country. Because their parents told them that in the Holocaust, those who didn't leave, died,” she says. “Hopelessness and helplessness are so strong. The trauma is national.”
From the very first days after the Oct. 7 attack, Roth coached other therapists how to respond.
“When I gave guidelines to the therapists in Be’eri at the beginning, I said, smile and say, how are you? Because these people don't know that it still matters. You have to show them that their wellbeing is still relevant. The life instinct wants to see that someone calls him back.”
Burying their dead, again
At Kibbutz Be’eri, one recent afternoon, teens and parents walked quietly out of the neighborhood cemetery after a funeral for a mother and her 15-year-old son — two of the many reburials of recent months.
Reburied with the boy was his surfboard: his dying wish as he bled out in his home Oct. 7.
Batya Ofir attended the funeral. She recently reburied her own brother and his family in the kibbutz cemetery, after viewing his partially decomposed body be exhumed from its temporary grave.
"It was not easy," she says, "but I had to see him."
She wanted to be with his body at the moment it was unearthed. She had not lived on the kibbutz any longer and felt guilty she wasn't with her brother and family in their worst moment on Oct. 7.
Ofir says she made a decision, after her brother was killed.
“I said to myself, what do you want? To continue living? I can also not. I really thought about it. And then I decided that I wanted to continue to live,” she says. “I have a family, I have children, I have grandchildren. I draw. I'm learning to kayak, to deal with all my fears. I do everything to give some meaning to life now that they're gone.”
Keep the destroyed homes or demolish them?
A couple hundred families have moved back to Kibbutz Be’eri. Cohen, the head of the community, is overseeing an ambitious project to bring the residents back within two and a half years.
The kibbutz has broken ground on a new neighborhood of 52 homes.
A short walk away, though, are the homes that were attacked last year. Bullet holes, shattered windows, a pair of children's shoes in the debris: Oct. 7 frozen in time.
There's a debate in the community about what to do with these broken homes. Cohen says it will be put up for a vote.
“Some of the people say, let's make it like Auschwitz. Okay? And it'll be open for people to come and see what happened here,” he says.
But he says others who survived the attack are taking sleeping pills to cope with the trauma and cannot bear seeing the destroyed homes. “I believe we'll have to take them all down in the end.”
He doesn't want one person moving back to the kibbutz to see the remnants and relive the nightmare.
One survivor wished for vengeance
Yasmin Raanan, 56, waters her new plants on her patio. She and her husband moved back home to the kibbutz from the Dead Sea hotel a few months ago.
On Oct. 7, she grabbed her personal firearm, and she and her husband locked themselves inside their reinforced shelter room at home. They survived the attack because they had installed a sliding bolt on the safe room. The attackers tried but failed to open the door. Her neighbors’ safe rooms only had the standard locks and were breached.
When she was finally rescued that night, and led out of her safe room, she found her living room floor covered in rows of grenades, gas canisters, explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and rifles. She understood: Her home had been transformed into the attack headquarters. Neighbors all around her were gunned down.
Then she saw the man she had heard all day loading gun cartridges in her home. He was sitting outside, she says, stripped naked by orders of the military, and guarded by an Israeli soldier.
“I came with my gun to kill him,” she recalls. “A commando soldier said, ‘Ma'am, we are a moral people.’ I said, ‘I have no more morals anymore.’”
The commando took away her weapon, and she says she took the attacker’s face in her hands and demanded to know his name. He gave it.
She replied with a vow:
“I will make sure you have no family, no home, no Gaza.”
One year later, the Israeli military has left much of Gaza in ruins. That gives her a measure of comfort.
And one year on, the passage of time has taken some of the edge off her anger.
“A year later, things sink in a bit,” she says. “Time heals.”
Itay Stern and Maya Levin contributed to this story from Kibbutz Be’eri.
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