Residents return to visit their homes, sift through wreckage and shake their heads in disbelief that some loved ones are still held hostage in Gaza
On October 12, six days following the October 7 Hamas attack, Batsheva Yahalomi recounted to reporters the harrowing hours as her husband, Ohad, was shot and she and her three children were taken hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz.
On that day, her 12-year-old son, Eitan, was taken alone to Gaza as Yahalomi and her two younger daughters managed to escape. Eitan Yahalomi was released after 52 days, but her husband, Ohad Yahalomi, is still in Gaza, while Batsheva and her three children are living in a northern kibbutz, trying to rebuild their lives, for now.
Now, a year later, Yahalomi stood outside her Kibbutz Nir Oz house, the magenta leaves of a new bougainvillea plant snaking up the wall behind her while a banner displaying Ohad’s face and a message about his bravery was staked out in the yard.
She guided journalists into her home, the dining room table strewn with random household items, the walls pocked with bullet holes and stained with Ohad’s blood, in their house that hasn’t been lived in for the last year.
With great dignity, Yahalomi described, once again, the terrifying events of that day, of being taken hostage on two motorcycles, Eitan on one with two terrorists, she with the two girls on another, as they watched hundreds of Gazans stream into their kibbutz.
“It was like the exodus from Egypt,” said Yahalomi of seeing regular Gazans in flip-flops, carrying TVs and driving kibbutz tractors, moving between Gaza and the kibbutz fence. “Many citizens came to loot and with big knives, I remember the knives because it was so violent and all so surrealistic. I saw Gaza getting bigger and bigger and the passage to the kibbutz becoming smaller.”
It was a chance sighting of two IDF tanks and a helicopter that gave Batsheva the moment she needed to escape with her two daughters from their stalled motorcycle, spending hours hiding and walking until they made their way back to one untouched corner of the kibbutz.
Batsheva Yahalomi was last notified in January by the IDF that Ohad was still alive, but the IDF then lost track of him. At the same time, a radical Palestinian group published a video of Ohad and wrote that he had been killed by IDF fire.
“I don’t know,” said Yahalomi, a slight, small-boned woman who radiates a sense of calm and dignity. “I prefer to believe that he’s alive, but we’re not naive.”
Her son, Eitan, is recovering, but doesn’t like to go to sleep because that is when the nightmares come.
Most of the families in Kibbutz Nir Oz haven’t returned home yet. The kibbutz, one of the smaller southern communities, was one of the hardest-hit on October 7, where 117 out of the 400 residents were either killed or kidnapped. There are still 29 hostages from Nir Oz held captive in Gaza.
“These hostages are our family,” said Rita Lifschitz, whose father-in-law, Oded Lifshitz, 84, is still held captive, while his wife, Yocheved Lifschitz, was released on October 28, along with another woman from Nir Oz. “All these grandmothers’ hearts are broken.”
Only seven out of 220 homes in Nir Oz were left untouched, said kibbutz resident Ola Metzger, whose in-laws, Yoram and Tami Metzger, were also taken hostage. Tami Metzger was released during the November ceasefire, but Metzger’s father-in-law, Yoram Metzger, 80, was killed in captivity, his body was found and brought back by the IDF this summer for burial in Israel.
“Our rituals are not as they should be,” said Metzger.
Ola Metzger, 45, who immigrated directly to the kibbutz from Kurdistan when she was 15, told of being in her home’s safe room with her husband Nir and two teenage children for nearly 12 hours, released by the army in the late afternoon hours of October 7.
They heard at least three or four groups of terrorists or looters enter their home, but no one succeeded in breaking into their safe room.
“It was Russian roulette,” said Metzger, who is currently living with her family in the nearby city of Kiryat Gat, along with most of the kibbutz members. “Some people got lucky.”
Most were not. The door to the home of Yair Yaakov was blasted open with a grenade by the terrorists. Yaakov was killed, his body and his living partner, Meirav Tal, were taken captive. Tal was released home in late November.
Groups of journalists clustered around the simple front door of other Kibbutz Nir Oz neighbors, the Bibas family. The sidewalk outside their home was familiar from the footage recorded by the terrorists as they took a terrified Shiri Bibas, clutching four-year-old Ariel and baby Kfir. Her husband, Yarden Bibas, was taken separately on that day.
Next door in this row of kibbutz homes is the house of Itzik Elgarat, 69, also still held captive in Gaza.
On a recent Monday, one week before the first anniversary of October 7, Kibbutz Nir Oz was mostly quiet and calm but empty, the occasional sound of gunfire or the boom of an explosion marring the birdsong.
A fantastical ficus tree with multiple roots provided plenty of shade in the central lawn of the kibbutz, while the smell of the charred homes still lingers in the air. Several sukkah huts still stand, one year after hundreds of terrorists attacked this kibbutz.
The kibbutz was preparing to vote in 40 new families on October 11, said Ola Metzger. Now some of those families are living in apartments with the rest of the kibbutz in two apartment buildings in Kiryat Gat.
“We’ll build new houses,” said Metzger.
Yifat Zailer, first cousin to Shiri Bibas, stood in the kibbutz’s Strawberry kindergarten, where her cousin’s eldest, Ariel Bibas, had just begun a new year last September.
His name, along with his fellow kindergartners, is printed on a sticker above a hook outside the front door. Inside, all is blackened and filled with soot, the ceiling drooping, and the low tables, chairs, games, and books, all ruined by the terrorists’ fire.
“No matter how many times I’m here, I’ll never get used to it,” said Zailer, who lives in Tel Aviv with her young family but is one of the relatives central in the struggle to bring her cousin and family back home to Israel. “In my worst nightmares, I never expected it would be this long.”
Zailer’s aunt and uncle, Shir’s parents, Margit and Yossi Silberman, were murdered in their Nir Oz home near Shiri and Yarden, their house was completely burned.
“No one can tell us anything, this entire family vanished,” said Zailer, adding that her children, aged 3 and 18 months, have a different mother now, less patient and at home far less as she continues to battle for her cousin and family.
It’s similarly quiet in nearby Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where 62 people were killed and 19 taken hostage on October 7 from this community of 1,000 residents.
Twelve of the Kfar Aza hostages were released, while two of the 19, Yotam Haim and Alon Shamriz, were killed by accidental IDF fire. They were two of the hostages taken from the young generation neighborhood of the kibbutz, where the younger kibbutz members, mostly in their twenties, lived side by side in small, one-bedroom homes.
Around half of those young residents were brutally murdered, while the other half were yanked across the fields, some assaulted, and then taken to Gaza.
Kibbutz resident Zohar Shpak, 58, is one of the few kibbutz members currently living in Kfar Aza. Shpak is a lawyer who moved back to help clean up the kibbutz, which includes an ongoing search for the head of one of the murdered kibbutz residents, savagely beheaded by the terrorists.
“They didn’t just kill people but did horrible things,” said Shpak, who was raised in the north, with the threat of Katyusha rockets from Lebanon and moved to Kfar Aza to raise his own three children.
Shpak is also working with the October 7 Justice Without Borders group which is suing UNRWA for its responsibility in the international crimes committed on October 7.
He was in the sealed room of his home with his wife, daughter, grandson and two dogs for 22 hours on that day, and by Monday morning was clearing dead bodies. The kibbutz wasn’t fully cleared of terrorists until four days later.
He pointed across the fence that circles the community, to the easily visible neighborhoods of Shejaiya and Jabaliya on the Gaza Strip. The terrorists crossed through a small gate as well as the main entrance when they attacked on October 7.
His wife and family are still evacuated from Kfar Aza, but Shpak is staying put.
He’s in his own home, but nothing is the same.
“We have houses now,” said Shpak, “we don’t have homes.”
As reported by The Times of Israel