Eyal Giller last month inside a farmhouse burned in a strike in Netiv Ha’asara, a village in Israel attacked on October 7. Photo / Amit Elkayam, The New York Times
Along Israel’s border with Gaza, reminders of the trauma of the Hamas-led assault are inescapable as the few who have returned try to start anew.
Before October 7, Naama Giller let her children roam freely through her Israeli village on the border with the Gaza Strip. Her front door was rarely locked. She liked living in a place animated by communal festivities, outdoor life, the din of boys and girls playing.
Now, she darkens her home at night to avoid being targeted in strikes from Gaza. Most of the children in the village, Netiv Ha’asara, left and have not returned. Military patrols and the thud of bombs are the soundtrack to a spartan and ghostly life.
“Our village now is empty, deserted,” Giller said.
“I live here,” she said, “but I’m scared.”
One year ago, Hamas-led assailants raided Netiv Ha’asara and at least a dozen other villages, setting fire to them, killing residents in their homes and dragging hostages back to Gaza in a terrorist attack that Israeli authorities said killed roughly 1200 people and led to the displacement of thousands more. About 250 people were taken hostage.
Most of the residents from the worst-affected villages are still living elsewhere, in hotels or government-funded temporary housing. And for the few like Giller who have dared to come back, they are surrounded by the hard realities of war, and daily reminders of the trauma of October 7.
The Giller family bought an extra refrigerator to stock up on supplies because there is now no grocery shop nearby and no neighbours to borrow from. Their youngest child, 8, sleeps in a room with fortified walls so he does not have to rush for shelter in the middle of the night during strikes. Any trip in or out of the village requires passing through a military checkpoint.
Giller, 49, who helps run the family’s farm, returned with her four children in March to reunite with her husband, Eyal Giller, 53. He was the only one of the village’s civilian residents who never left Netiv Ha’asara, which the regional council’s spokesperson said had a prewar population of about 1000.
Eyal Giller stayed to look after the family’s sheep and goats. He said he spent the first month in almost complete solitude, essentially barricaded inside the village as Israeli soldiers turned part of it into a makeshift military camp amid searches for possible gunmen from Gaza still in the countryside.
After an anti-tank missile hit a nearby home, Giller said, his morning routine became one of letting his loved ones know he was still alive.
“She feared I was on a suicide mission,” Giller said of his wife.
Netiv Ha’asara has no collective plans for the rebuilding of the village; that choice is left to individual initiative.
In several communal villages along the border, known as kibbutzim, residents are holding group discussions about how to manage reconstruction after the Hamas-led assaults. It is a process often fraught with conflicting visions about what returning should entail and whether it should even occur.
In Beeri, a kibbutz 4km from the Gaza border where assailants killed dozens of people, residents have covered fences surrounding several scorched buildings with posters of lush rural scenes. But longer-term decisions about reconstruction designs have yet to be finalised.
Nili Bar Sinai, 74, returned there in August, one of the roughly 150 residents – a little over 10% of the village’s prewar population, according to a spokesperson for the kibbutz – who have come back. She had visited the village frequently in the months after the attack. Returning was never a dilemma.
“Be’eri is my home,” she said.
These days, she leads English-language tours through the kibbutz for international journalists, diplomats and philanthropists. She begins with the good parts: the vast brutalist communal dining hall that has reopened, and the winding, tree-lined footpaths flanked by beige bungalows.
Only then does she proceed to the houses where the worst horrors of the raid took place.
“You approach hell slowly,” Bar Sinai said.
Hundreds of assailants attacked Be’eri on October 7, abducting 30 residents and killing about 100 residents, according to a kibbutz spokesperson and the Israeli military. Bar Sinai lost her husband, Yoram Bar Sinai, who rushed to guard their daughter’s home with a 1940s pistol the couple kept as a relic.
She learned that he had been shot dead on their daughter’s porch nearly 14 hours later, when soldiers rescued her from her home’s safe room, she said.
Still, Bar Sinai says her decision to return was easier than that of families with young children, many of whom remain deeply traumatised by the attack. One of her granddaughters, she said, cannot stay in the village for long before experiencing a panic attack.
While many of the families have relocated to a different kibbutz in southern Israel, those who did return to Be’eri – mostly older residents or young, single ones – built a kind of camaraderie. Bar Sinai now frequents the village pub and sits at the young people’s table at the dining hall.
But signs of the attack are still visible in most parts of the village – bullet holes, ruined buildings, seared walls. Many who left continue to weigh whether it is livable enough to come back.
“It’s incredibly bucolic – until you reach the war zone,” Bar Sinai said. “Living here is no picnic.”
Naama Giller decided to rejoin her husband in Netiv Ha’asara after she concluded that the rest of Israel, which has continued to experience sporadic attacks, was hardly much safer than her home village.
She returned to Netiv Ha’asara, where she grew up, initially as a trial run to re-establish a sense of home for her three daughters and young son. If the threat of another attack rose too high or the children showed signs of distress, she was prepared to leave.
Seven months in, Giller said she did not regret the move. “The girls want to be here, and the young one is OK,” she said. Just enough families have returned to allow children to gather two teams for a soccer match.
The Gillers and Bar Sinai are optimistic about their future, but still have reservations.
Naama Giller acknowledges that it would take a lot for Netiv Ha’asara to return to what it once was, and that a lot will need to change for her to feel truly safe. Twenty people were killed in the Hamas-led assault there, according to a spokesperson for the regional council.
Her trust in Israel’s leadership and its military has been shaken, she said. “Many will never come back, but the village will be a good place again,” she said. “If only the military could keep us safe.”
Bar Sinai says she knows that Be’eri is unlikely to regain its former character, but she is open to seeing what her village will become. For now, she draws inspiration from everyone who has returned, and from the volunteers from around the country who have made it livable again.
“Before the attack, we were all just regular people,” Bar Sinai said.
“Now, giants.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Johnatan Reiss
Photographs by: Amit Elkayam
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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