I can’t stop thinking about the bra.
The large white bra, dark bullet holes ripped through the centre of both cups, with spreading blood-stained areolas the colour of rust.
It was lying amid a scatter of panty liners, underwear and gym gear, on a floor with a top-dressing of dried gore, in a modest kibbutz home that had been turned into a Hamas house of horror. A family’s own private abattoir.
The IDF had recorded the scene meticulously for posterity, and brought the media in, so nobody could say never again had not happened here.
Chilling evidence: the bloodstained bra in a kibbutz home at Kfar Aza (Credit: Rachel Johnson)[Missing Credit]
Six months after October 7, 2023, I saw it when I went to Israel, in early March. When you enter the country the first thing you see is the people who haven’t been seen since that Saturday morning, Simchat Torah: the 134 faces of the hostages. They follow you everywhere. Their faces are on billboards, made into a mosaic of the 130 squares. In the official buildings, the office of the PM, the Knesset, they are on videos that run on a loop, with footage of Netanyahu saying “Bring Them Home”.
I went all around the country, and yes, to the West Bank, but I’ve chosen my private diaries about Kfar Aza, a kibbutz, and the site of the Nova music festival, Be’eri.
I’m happy for them to be out there as demonstrations all over the world on the third anniversary are under way, most intended to deepen the grave insult to the only Jewish state and global Jewry.
I will never forget what I saw, the conversations I had, the people I met, and the pain.
Jerusalem, March 3
There are three hotels in Jerusalem considered head of state-worthy, and we’re in the Inbal. Last time I was here, meeting a friend at the Montefiore Windmill, President Obama’s motorcade went past. Another, of course, is the King David, where I’d have beers in the garden with journalists in an earlier life. When we passed by, late, on the way to the Old City, the large doors were closed. The bar was shut. A reminder that I had flown into a war. BICOM’s Richard Pater, our leader, pointed to the dark shaded tree-lined slope between the Montefiore Windmill and the Old City (we were standing on the bridge that in 1967 formed the border between East and West). “That is the valley of the shadow of death,” Pater said, pointing to an area where they discovered the evidence of child sacrifice, a practice that ended after Abraham. “From then on, it was like, God doesn’t need the blood of your children.” Amazing to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. It’s always made me shiver but only in Jerusalem could you discover the valley of the shadow of death is an ACTUAL PLACE not a line in a psalm. We entered where Edmund Allenby, the British Army officer who led the Sinai and Palestine Campaign against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, had dismounted and walked through the Jaffa Gate.
Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Gaza Envelope, southern border, March 5
“Welcome to what’s left of Kfar Aza.” Zohar Shpek is a lawyer but looks straight out of Fauda, with his skull-shave, tan, and automatic weapon slung over his black military T-shirt.
Zohar briefs us at the palm-fringed bus stop of the kibbutz before he shows us the sights. It’s the grimmest guided tour.
The armoury. The concrete shelters, useless when it came to the waves of Palestinian jihadis and Hamas terrorists. They had no doors. Ditto safe rooms – mamad – some you couldn’t lock from the inside. He shows us tiny incinerated houses, pocked by hundreds of bullets, burst and blood-stained mattresses.
This hamlet is a mere click from Gaza and I can see the shimmering outline of Gaza city. Kfar Aza used to be inhabited by dreamy-sharey liberals, one of the most sought-after kibbutzim, with a long waiting list and a joining fee of $50,000. Or was. Until October 7, when 63 men, women and children from Kfar Aza were killed and 19 taken hostage.
The entrance to a concrete safe room (Credit: Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre)[Missing Credit]
“We used to watch the sunset over the strip and listen to the muezzin in the mosques. As kids we’d go into Gaza to see friends and go to the market for 7Up,” Sharone Lifshitz, whose 89-year-old father Oded was still a hostage, told me. “You couldn’t get 7Up in Israel, you see…” That was then.
It’s 153 days into the war. Just two families have returned to Kfar Aza. “If you see or hear a red alert head for the shelter,” David Baruch of the IDF tells us. “On October 10, the commander of my unit thought it was important to bring journalists here to witness what had happened. I was one of the officers who brought in foreign media. It is what we call our Eisenhower moment…”
Everyone stresses how the residents here were lefties, Haaretz readers, who tried to make their dreams of community with Gaza a reality, till those dreams were shattered by thousands of jacked-up (they found packets of amphetamines in the trucks) terrorists then a “second wave” of civilians who streamed over, raped, looted, murdered, mutilated, 1,200 innocents whose only crime was to be Jewish or in the Jewish state.
The Nukhbas killed Thai workers, anyone – their hatred and murderous lust extended generously to Arab, Bedouin, any foreigner in their path who worked for the infidel next door. The kibbutz is the worst place I’ve ever been. Green-clad army reservists are visiting in silence in the strong sunshine. The small but happy lives of so many – who were born here, or moved here to be part of something good, ie a collective kibbutz with a plastics factory, a business, a waiting list – shattered by so much built-up spite and anger. As a tractor trundles past, a kibbutznik joins us. He describes the death of his brother Tal, and speaks of his mother Liora, a woman so public-spirited “she’d go to Gaza to clean their houses if she could” and so left wing “if she turned left there is nobody there”. I ask him what Liora thinks of the Gazans now, after losing her son. “She wouldn’t skip yoga class for them now...” is all he says.
One row of burnt-out, bombed cottages is taped off and there’s a barrier with the faces of hostages on it, so you can’t enter. Poster reads: “Kidnapped from his house! Bring him home today!”
It’s still a crime scene. “Netta Epstein was brutally murdered in this house,” reads a black sign outside, with a photo of the teenage Netta. The names. Nitzan Libstein. Next door, 606/2 is daubed in red. A wreath has been left by a visiting prime minister.
The terrorists shot from rooftops, landed in microlights, shot old people through doors, in their beds. The country is set up to defend itself from rockets. Not from a drugged-up army of terrorists on foot or in microlights. It turned out the thousands of Gazans who breached the fence were the one method of mass destruction the IDF never planned for.
I stand outside the house and squint over to the coastal enclave: the minarets, the apartment blocks, and every so often hear the outgoing crump of a rocket. I think of the Palestinians who would die when it landed, seconds later. And I’d pray that this asymmetric war might end in a just and symmetric peace.
Army reservists at Kfar Aza (Credit: Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre)[Missing Credit]
But I still can’t get the image out of my mind – the murdered woman’s bra. It’s not surprising that the residents I meet here call the Gazans not even terrorists, but “animals”. I wince. That can’t help, but I can’t blame them.
When I go to the toilet block in the kibbutz I sit down, I glance up. At crotch height, a large round bullet hole, glaring at me like a Cyclops eye.
I realise that this cubicle is a crime scene too. Someone died here, just where I’m sitting.
A man called Derek Eilon, who works in the Department of Agriculture, describes what happened as “our catastrophe, the end of this beautiful era in Kfar Aza”. He vows, “We are going to rebuild and restore our home.”
Be’eri, the site of the Nova Festival
Everything is so close in Israel. You can get anywhere in an hour or so. We passed the sign to the Erez Crossing into Gaza but went on to Be’eri, a national park area, where the trance-dance-rave party was.
“Food stands were here, the stage…” we are told, as if someone is describing the site of a wedding. Now this peaceful patch of park is a memorial to a massacre, where 350 young people who just wanted to dance were slaughtered, raped, mutilated by Nazis with Go-Pros.
Our day was like visiting Babyn Yar. Or Auschwitz. But before it had been curated for the consumption of posterity.
The chaos and confusion and death are all around still, but with new signage: painted marks, words and numbers on houses and concrete shelters denoting bodies had been found there, or cleared by the military, marks that were daubed and will probably stay for ever, or as long as Israel lasts. How long Israel can last is the biggest question in my mind, not when will the hostages be released, nor when will the war end.
A field of blue and white Israeli flags fluttering on thin sticks driven into the hard desert earth, a little garden of stones and photos attached to the sticks, with all those beautiful dead young faces shining out.
A service for the police is going on, and dozens of black-clad uniformed offices are standing in the sunlight, as messages are read and someone plays the national anthem on a keyboard. The country is so sad. It refuses to bow to the narrative that because it is on borrowed land – or so the Palestinian drumbeat of “their truth” demands – it is on borrowed time.
At Nova, an IDF soldier called Joel comes over. “We knew it could happen down south, but we weren’t prepared on that specific date for what happened.” He goes on, “As the chief of staff said, we broke our contract with the Israeli population on that day, and we’ve earned it back.”
I’m not sure the past tense is justified. The world has moved on, but here the clock stopped at 6.50am on a Saturday morning in October.
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Johnson surveying the Israeli flags at the Nova site (Credit: Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre)[Missing Credit]
Israel can’t move on because… it’s Israel. A tiny Jewish democracy of seven million, a state so hyper-vigilant that it is aware that anyone who has even been there is at risk and you don’t even get your passport stamped, you get a green permit slip from border control. The next day we visit the office of the prime minister and have a briefing from a minister. It’s off the record, and we’re not supposed to write anything down.
“Israel, the country for whom the word genocide was invented, stands accused of genocide,” the man thunders, “for defending itself from terrorists whose treaty and very existence is our genocide.” It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.
March 8, 2026
On the El Al flight back, in my “prestige” seat, I am next to a woman called Denise (surname redacted), an elegant woman who invited me to dinner in Knightsbridge where she says she feels less safe than on the streets of Tel Aviv.
“You don’t know how precious Israel is to us,” she almost sobbed. “We are a small country. Every loss of every soldier is a tragedy for every family.”
The Jewish race has a saying that no Jew is safe unless all Jews are safe.
I felt for her. I feel for all Jews. Outnumbered. Not yet outgunned but will be when Iran gets a nuclear weapon. As El Al flies me home I think will I be going back to Israel or even a “Jewish entity” in another five years?
Rachel Johnson has donated her fee for this article to the CST UK
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