On October 7, four Hamas commando units, consisting of around 150 men, drove and marched across the fields from a village in Gaza just over a mile away to attack this small, very left-wing commune where residents would once pick up sick people from the Gaza border and take them for specialist treatment in Israel. After them, between 400 and 900 Gazan civilians swarmed into the kibbutz and continued the pogrom. The IDF – fatally underestimating the attack on Nir Oz – didn’t show up in force to protect the kibbutz until 1.30pm, nearly an hour after the last terrorist had left.
After murdering and kidnapping more than a quarter of the residents and stealing everything they could get their hands on, the Palestinians then set many of the houses on fire. “They didn’t want us to have anything left,” says Irit Lahav, 59, a survivor.
The burnt-out Bibas home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, where Kfir, Ariel, Yarden and Shiri Bibas lived until they were kidnapped on October 7.[Missing Credit]
Some sections of the kibbutz are charred remains of what was once here. But elsewhere this Jewish cooperative is slowly being rebuilt. It is coming back to life.
Irit, a jewellery designer and travel agent manager, is one of 15 residents who have so far returned. She has lived on the kibbutz all her life – her parents helped found it. Her house is among the first ten to be renovated. No part of the exercise is straightforward. She is living in her home for half the week, and with the rest of the community in temporary housing in Kibbutz Kiryat Gat, a few miles north of Sderot.
“I came back here in May thinking I would stay here all week long, but after a few days I was too afraid,” says the mother-of-one as she takes me around the kibbutz where so many of her friends were murdered. “I found myself being OK during the day but in the evening, I would turn down all the shutters, lock all the windows, lock the door to my bedroom. I would try and sleep but I would wake up really tired.
“After three days, I realised my whole body was aching. So I went back to Kiryat Gat. We are allowed to keep our apartments there until we decide what to do. So I stay a few days here and a few days in Kiryat Gat because it’s too stressful to be here all the time.
“I am alone in my neighbourhood of the kibbutz and I think about how, even if I shouted, no one would hear me. Because there is nobody here. But even when they come back, that wouldn’t make everything OK.”
Irit stands beside fields overlooking Gaza in Kibbutz Nir Oz.[Missing Credit]
On October 7, terrorists tried to break into her safe room at least four times. She had managed to fashion a door lock using an oar, her Dyson vacuum cleaner and the wire she uses for her jewellery. She and her 22-year-old daughter whispered goodbye to each other as the terrorists managed to break in. But they survived.
“I appreciate the fact of being alive,” she says. “You always think that death is really, really far away but when you face it, it is mind-blowing. It changes your life thereon.”
As we walk around the kibbutz she stops to describe who is alive, who is dead, who is still being held hostage and who is still too traumatised to talk about their experiences of being kidnapped. Irit describes how the kibbutz’s Thai workers were murdered: “They told the terrorists they were Thai and showed them their passports. Twelve of them were murdered in the space of a minute.”
Irit is back partly to help in the rebuilding and also to take journalists around the rubble of her beloved kibbutz to make sure the stories of those she loved who were murdered, and those who are still in captivity, are remembered. She does not doubt that the kibbutz will be restored. “It is just a matter of time until all the houses will be ready, as we were the most severely attacked, and really we need to rebuild the whole kibbutz again from the start.
"At the moment, even people who want to come back can’t because who wants to live among burnt houses. We don’t have a shop here to buy milk or eggs. We don’t have any cultural activities.”
Kfir Bibas' rocker outside the Bibas home in Kibbutz Nir Oz.[Missing Credit]
Houses are being built in a new neighbourhood of the kibbutz, slightly further away from the border. In addition to the residents, approximately 30 volunteers are living on the kibbutz who are helping to restore it.
Irit’s house, one of the first among the ten to be renovated, is now in pristine condition. Outside Irit’s house are shoes, which she says were donated. “All of my shoes were stolen. All of my jewellery, which I make.”
The worst-hit houses – such as those belonging to the family of British Israeli citizen Sharone Lifshitz, whose peace activist father Oded was murdered in captivity – will have to be pulled down. His stunning cactus garden, however, will remain as a living testament to this peace activist and journalist.
It is thought it will take another two years for the kibbutz to be fully ready for everyone and when it is there will be homes for more people than there were before. The message is these people will not be moved. Not everyone will return, but Irit says most will.
Irit holds a sign with a photo of her former Kibbutz Nir Oz neighbor Oded Lifshitz, who was kidnapped on October 7.[Missing Credit]
Irit was and remains a peacenik. She was one of the Nir Oz residents who would drive Palestinians to Israeli hospitals. She had always known danger lurked across the border, but had never imagined the extent of its depravity.
“Three of us – including Oded, who was kidnapped and murdered in the tunnels – used to come with our own cars to the border, wait for several hours until the sick people who needed treatment in the more sophisticated hospitals could cross,” she recalls. “I would take four people in my car, drive them to the hospital, and then others would pick them up after a day or two and take them to the border again.
“I used to think the Palestinians were good people. I had no fear at all. I would do it again, but this time I would be afraid that they would have a knife or try to strangle me. So it will not be easy, but it feels important to do. To be a good person and do what I can to help.
“All my jewellery was stolen and because I design some I had a collection from all around the world. Sometimes I think, what would I do if a woman I picked up from the border was wearing my earrings or ring? These are the thoughts that fill in my head.”
A poster memorialising the three Bibas family members who were killed in Gaza remains outside their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz[Missing Credit]
We are close enough to the border to hear the artillery and bombs. It is hard to know what they all are. But the point is you cannot escape Gaza, just a mile away.
Irit knows more Palestinians than most. The good ones and the bad ones. She is deeply shocked at how October 7 seems to have been forgotten, especially on the progressive left which once felt like her political home.
“It is sad that people support the slaughter,” she says. “Especially when they know that the protests against us started on October 8, before Israel had retaliated. The brutal rapes, the cutting up of people’s bodies, the kidnapping of people in their eighties. I wonder who they are these people who support this savagery. How they would they feel if they woke up in their pyjamas and found out how much their neighbour wants to kill them? How can they justify what happened and think they are, call themselves, progressives?”
And she also cannot understand how nations including ours feel able to recognise a Palestinian state.
“Doing it right now is a reward for slaughter,” she says, surveying the burnt husk of what used to be her kibbutz, her home. “It’s as if the West, the world, is saying, guys, it’s OK to attack. You can kill people, rape women, kidnap and murder babies. It’s OK because you have the right to have a state. It is a very bad message for them, for us, for the whole world.
“And I want to remind people that the Palestinians were not happy with their territory; they kept saying, we want all of Israel to be erased.
"I would like them to have a peaceful country of their own, but right now, when they have 48 of our hostages, it is wrong.”
