Never again
From the shattered Israeli communities on the Gaza border comes not despair but hope, courage and inspiration
I made a pilgrimage this week to the the area of the south-western Negev that was devastated by the Hamas pogrom on October 7.
It was a lot to take in and process. Here are some of the things I saw and heard which particularly spoke to me.
The eerie silence of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, whose once idyllic aspect is still visible through its shrubs and spacious landscaping despite the wrecked and deserted houses.
Outside his house sits Shachar, the only kibbutz resident who is still there.
They came from five directions, he says; between 300 and 600 terrorists. There were only 11 members of the kibbutz civil defence; they were prepared for only two, three terrorists, maximum. Seven of the 11 were murdered.
When the attack started, he said, he got a knife, told his wife Ayalet to get under the bed and stood guard at the door for 30 hours. The terrorists didn’t try to get in.
Why not? He shrugs. The house stands alone: others are connected in pairs. They seemed to be killing people in one of each pair of houses and leaving the other one alone, he says. They thought no-one was inside here, he says. And they were in a hurry. They didn’t think they would have time to kill so many. The terrorists expected the army to come at any minute.
Why did he come back to his house just a few weeks after the massacre, to live here alone, in the silence, in this place of death? He spreads his hands. It’s my home, he says simply. And I hoped that if I came back, others would follow. Not yet.
Further into Kfar Aza, the scene is very different. This is not tranquil. This is a place of the utmost horror. These houses are laid out in neat rows with neighbours facing each other across the pathway. In two of these double rows, the inhabitants of every single house were murdered or kidnapped. Not one house was spared.
Every house is wrecked. Outside each one are pictures of the murdered or the kidnapped who had lived there. Most are taped off. Every house has symbols painted on the outside by those who came to retrieve the remains of the slaughtered. A circle with a dot, we are told, means a body or body parts were inside.
The young soldier who is our guide in Kfar Aza says that at half past six in the morning on that terrible day the kibbutz alarm sounded without interruption for 15 minutes. About 30 minutes after the alarm started, hundreds of terrorists poured into the kibbutz on motor bikes, pick-up trucks and paragliders. They came with guns and RPGs, she says, and set houses on fire. People were shot and burned, or burned while alive, or forced out of their houses through smoke to be killed when they emerged.
Two or three hours later, there was a second wave of attack. “Ordinary” Gazans came in by bike, on foot or on donkeys. They looted the houses and did a lot of the raping and murdering. These attackers included women and children.
In one of these houses lived a young couple, Sivan Elkabets and Naor Hasidim. Their remains were found on the sofa, side by side. Sivan’s parents decided to turn the house into a museum, a memorial to their slaughtered family and a way of telling the world what happened here.
We file through the wrecked house looking at the photographs Sivan’s parents have assembled. It feels wrong to be there. It feels like an intrusion into grief, a trespass upon the sacred. Outside the house Sivan’s father is standing there, available to talk. He is calm, focused. “Tell everyone, show everyone what happened here,” he says. Such courage; such strength of character; such astonishing positivity in the face of the unspeakable devastation of his family. It is hard to talk to him and maintain my composure. He strokes my sleeve.
We visit Sderot, the city that’s been under near continuous bombardment for more than two decades. The mayor tells us that despite this the city has more than doubled in size over that time. Since October 7, most of the population has left. We’ll open the schools in March, he says; he hopes this will bring the residents back, but there’s still great fear. Nothing’s working properly here, he says; we’ll have to start from scratch. Sderot is a wonderful city, he says. Because of the terror here, people don’t hate each other.
On October 7, when the sirens went off at half past six in the morning people assumed it was another missile attack. It wasn’t. Dozens of terrorists poured into the city; by the end of the attack, 50 residents had been murdered.
We go down into the control room, with banks of computer screens monitoring the city through CCTV cameras and with civilians and military officers answering calls from the public. On a giant screen on the wall we watch CCTV footage of what happened on the morning of the pogrom at a roundabout (traffic circle) in the city.
A car carrying a man, his wife and their two children aged four and six drives round the circle and stops a little way up the road. The air-raid siren is sounding the alarm. The car doors open, the man jumps out with the little six-year old girl and they run, presumably to seek shelter because he thinks its a missile attack. The mother and smaller child seem to be still in the car. We watch in horror as onto the roundabout drive two pick-up trucks stuffed with terrorists brandishing machine guns. They shoot the father. We see he is still moving. Before he dies he apparently tells the little girl to go back to the car. We see her set off unsteadily towards the car.
The manager of the control room picks up the story. A Bedouin man and a police offer arrive at the scene. The police officer tells the Bedouin man to drive the mother and children to the police station where they will be safe. He doesn’t know that the terrorists have singled out the police station as the focus for their attack. A fierce gun battle takes place at the police station in which the Bedouin man and the mother are murdered. The children, hidden under a blanket in the car, are unscathed. The police hear the little girl asking if anyone can hear her who speaks Hebrew. “Can you take me and the baby” they hear her cry. The orphaned children are now living with their mother’s parents.
We go to the field where the IDF have assembled the wreckage of some 800 cars and trucks that were caught up in the massacre. In these vehicles, hundreds of participants at the Supernova music festival at Re’eim tried to escape when terrorists in paragliders, pick-up trucks and bikes systematically mowed them down as they tried to flee. They were murdered in their cars; 300 of these vehicles were burnt to ash by RPG fire and explosives.
Some 35 volunteers cleared the vehicles of human remains and ash. The decision was taken not to clear all this wreckage from the field but to keep it as a memorial site, a permanent testimony to what happened. The wreckage of hundreds of these vehicles has been assembled into a wall of twisted and tangled metal, the starkest memorial imaginable to a horror that the mind cannot properly imagine.
We look at the wrecked vehicles that are still largely intact. They have been torn apart by bullets, explosions, burnt by fire. The young soldier showing us the site tells us the stories behind some of them. Here is a police vehicle that was hit by an anti-tank missile. Here is a burnt-out ambulance that was hit by an RPG and in which we found 16 human remains, he says. Here is Omer’s car; Omer drove it four times to rescue people from the Supernova festival until the terrorists stopped him and kidnapped them all into Gaza.
These wrecks aren’t just twisted pieces of metal. They are structures that have been sanctified by the blood of the innocent. This is how the Jewish people have always ensured their survival in the face of unendurable barbarities: they make memory into a sacred duty. When the soldiers had finished assembling the wreckage in this field, they all said kaddish together, the prayer for the dead whose words affirm the faith that is eternal regardless; and they all wept.
The site of the Supernova festival itself is a forest of markers bearing the pictures and names of the hundreds who were gunned down, raped, murdered or kidnapped. Here we meet Rami Davidian who drove hundreds of these young festival goers to safety. He tells us that on that day he got a call from a friend saying help was needed. He drove from his house about ten minutes away and saw thousands of young people running. He called other drivers to come and help.
He made four trips to the site, driving across open fields because the roads had turned into carnage. Each time, he packed about 15 young people into his car that seats five. One of them said her friend was still at the site and he needed to go back and get her. He called her but she was unable to give him a precise location. He told her he would keep honking his horn until she told him she could hear him. Eventually he found her — but then he saw she was being held by terrorists.
What he did next defies belief. He approached the terrorists. He posed as one of them. He spoke to them in Arabic, giving himself an Arab name. He told them the Israeli soldiers were closing in and they didn’t have much time, that the girl was trouble and would delay them, and that he would take her and meet up with them later. Astoundingly they believed him and he rescued her.
These were all sites of horror. Yet remarkably there was also a glimpse of something else, something inspirational and wonderful. The young police officer who was our guide at Re’im and the two young soldiers who had been our guides at Kfar Aza and the vehicle graveyard transmitted an overwhelming belief that eventually good would triumph over evil here.
They were not looking backwards but forwards. They were not dwelling on the horror. They had a duty to safeguard the memory of what happened here in order that people should never forget and that it should never happen again. They radiated love of their people and their nation; they radiated trust in the future of the Jewish people.
These wonderful young people, along with the hundreds of other wonderful young people currently on the front lines of this terrible war offering their lives in the defence of their nation against what they recognise as the ancient threat to the existence of the Jewish people, show that they truly understand the meaning of “never again”. They are our hope; they are our future.
The ground at Re’im, so brown and dry in the pictures we’ve all seen of the fleeing festival-goers on that terrible day, is now lush and green, and carpeted with wild red flowers.