Israeli soldiers carry coffins during the September 28 reburial funeral of Nadav Goldstein and his daughter Yam Goldstein in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Both were killed during the Hamas attack that killed over 60 people from the farming community and were originally buried elsewhere in Israel. Photo / Heidi Levine, for The Washington Post
As hundreds of Hamas militants rampaged through her community two years ago, Noa hid in the safe room of her home and opened a map of Israel, scanning it for a place to relocate if her young family came out of the massacre alive.
“Where do we live if we survive this?” she recalled asking her husband, his body pushed against the door of their anti-rocket safe room while she kept their 3-year-old son watching cartoons on her phone, hoping it would drown out the noise of constant gunfire and gunmen shouting.
Two years later, she is still asking.
Many of the tens of thousands of Israelis who were relocated during the days after October 7, 2023, to other parts of the country have returned home.
But five of the communities hardest hit by the attack from just over the border in the Gaza Strip are suspended in uncertainty, unsure of when or whether they will go back.
Noa, 35, a high school teacher, had lived for seven years with her husband in Kfar Aza, among the five agricultural communities, or kibbutzim, that remain mostly empty.
The assault decimated them, with the attackers lobbing bombs into homes and torching infrastructure, dairy farms, and agricultural fields. Reconstruction work in Noa’s kibbutz is expected to be completed only by next summer.
In recent months, about 30 families from Kfar Aza, including Noa’s, have been searching for new communities to accept them.
“I can’t go back and put my kids in the same danger,” said Noa, who spoke on the condition that only her first name be published because the topic of leaving her kibbutz is so sensitive. “I don’t believe anything will change in the Middle East. I know it will happen again.”
Leaving the close-knit community that her family had so long been a part of is painful for Noa.
“The bond with the community grew stronger after October 7. It brought people closer,” she said at her temporary home in Ruhama, about a 20-minute drive from the Gaza border.
After residents were evacuated on October 7, the Government provided temporary housing. However, many of the kibbutz residents express a sense of betrayal by the Government, in part because it has not answered questions about when they can return home.
In April 2024, the Government approved a five-year budget of about 19 billion shekels, or about $10b, to rehabilitate the border region.
In February, the state comptroller warned about delays in approving the budget allocated for developing the border area, and in March, the parliament allocated funds for the area.
“The Government is dragging its feet,” said Neri Shotan, 42, general manager of the Kibbutz Movement Rehabilitation Fund, part of an umbrella organisation that is handling reconstruction.
To return or not
Many in Israel view Kibbutz Nir Oz as a symbol of how the border communities were abandoned by the Government and security forces on October 7.
The Army entered the kibbutz only after the last of the militants had retreated to the Gaza Strip. Roughly a quarter of its residents were either taken hostage or killed.
In total, about 1200 Israelis were killed and 251 were taken hostage on October 7.
The attack triggered Israel’s war against Hamas, during which more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count.
In Nir Oz alone, about 160 homes damaged in the attack have yet to be razed and rebuilt.
Although the community is still recovering, with volunteers clearing debris, Dafna Margalit, 77, decided she would return this month to a newly built home. “It’s not just four walls; it’s an entire life lived there,” she said.
But she is without her husband, Eliyahu, who had worked there raising cattle.
He was killed near the stables in the first hours of the attack and his body taken. It has yet to be returned by the militants, who are believed to be holding 48 hostages, including 20 thought still to be alive.
Her daughter, Nili, a 43-year-old nurse, was among those taken hostage, but was released during a ceasefire in November 2023. She is moving to another kibbutz.
“Most of the younger families, especially those with small children, won’t return. After what they endured, they don’t want to live in Nir Oz,” Margalit said.
“Many people ask me, ‘Why would you go back there?’” she continued, noting that so few others have done so.
“The place is filled with destruction and memories of those who once lived in the homes that were destroyed.”
But she wanted to move back as quickly as possible. “I realised this would be my last home,” she said.
Waiting for closure
At Kibbutz Kissufim, another community that was severely damaged, the dairy farm has already reopened. Residents named it after Reuven Heinik, a 56-year-old farmer who was killed on October 9, 2023, by militants still hiding on the farm.
In total, 19 people were killed in the attack on the kibbutz, including six Thai workers who had lived there.
Eran Ben Ari, who was born on the kibbutz, recently returned to manage the farm and start its recovery. He said he believes it will be a lengthy process. Only about a fifth of the residents have come back.
“People need time to adjust and to finish taking care of themselves before coming back here,” Ben Ari said.
“We’ve reopened the children’s houses and the swimming pool. We’re doing everything we can to encourage people to come back home.”
He said that as long as the war drags on, the kibbutz cannot find closure.
From the farm, he can see clouds of smoke from the Israeli Army’s bombing of Gaza.
“The war keeps going, and it’s just in front of us,” Ben Ari said.
“The Government bodies tell us, ‘You need to go back home sooner or later,’ [but they] need to understand that not everyone is ready to come back to the same situation that they had before.”
Starting a new life
Ella Haimi, 42, is among the families from the border area who have recently returned to Nir Yitzhak, a kibbutz near Gaza that has been rebuilt.
She came back with her four children, including a 16-month-old baby, Lotan, born after October 7, but not with her husband.
Tal Haimi, who was Nir Yitzhak’s deputy security co-ordinator, was killed in the battle on the kibbutz, and his body is still held in Gaza.
After October 7, Haimi and her children first lived in a hotel in the southern city of Eilat, then moved to a nearby kibbutz and then to another kibbutz in the south.
A year ago, she said, she and her children began sleeping at their home in Nir Yitzhak on weekends.
It was “terrible” and “strange to be alone with the kids in this home”, she said. The children asked that another adult sleep in the home because they didn’t feel safe.
Now, Haimi said the children were happy to be back home and that reuniting with family and friends has helped them recover.
“Now we finally have a kitchen, which we didn’t have while living in a hotel, and we have a place to all sit together and just watch TV, if we can find the remote control,” she said, smiling.
Her 8-year-old son, who missed a year and a half of school, still cannot read or write, but he is now learning in a Montessori school outside the kibbutz.
She said her children say they are not afraid of being so close to Gaza. But they can hear explosions in the enclave, and the three older children sleep together in a safe room.
Haimi still awaits, tormented, for the return of her husband’s body.
“More than half of my life we were together. We spent more time together than apart,” she said. When the family learned he was dead, they held a funeral for him at a temporary grave in another kibbutz.
Haimi said they need him “to be brought back and buried here. Only then can we say that we are beginning a new life.”
- Rachel Chason and Shira Rubin contributed to this report.
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