Before I crossed the threshold of the first house, the smell of burnt wood and human flesh had already begun to unsettle whatever confidence I had that I was prepared for what I would see. Above us came the constant hum of drones and the roar of jets, occasionally broken by the deep boom of bombs falling somewhere in Gaza. I had arrived in Israel in the days after Oct. 7, 2023, but this was not yet a place of remembrance. It was still an active combat zone.
It was my first time visiting a kibbutz, although I had long wanted to see one. Back in India, I had read about their model of collective living, shared responsibilities and close community bonds. I had imagined experiencing that way of life for myself. Instead, I was entering homes whose occupants had been killed, abducted or evacuated.
The Israeli soldiers had to go from house to house, clearing rooms and marking buildings to indicate what had been found, whether explosives or booby traps were suspected and whether it was safe to enter. Some houses were still standing but scarred by bullets, shattered windows and broken doors. Others had been burned almost completely, their interiors covered in black soot, their roofs damaged or partially collapsed. Occasionally, while clearing the wreckage, they would discover human remains.
Outside, the lawns still held children’s toys, bicycles, half-burned books and barbecues beside the houses. Oranges had fallen beneath the trees, scattered across ground that no one was tending. Inside, the destruction became more intimate. Clothes spilled from broken cupboards, personal belongings were scattered across the floors, and bloodstained bedsheets lay beside family photographs shattered in their frames. The traces of violence were mixed with the objects that had once made these rooms private and familiar. The homes had not only been attacked by Hamas terrorists; some were also looted afterward by Gazans who took whatever they could carry away.
The kitchens were perhaps the most haunting because everyday life still seemed suspended inside them. A teapot sat beside a half-empty jar of cookies, spices and stacks of utensils remained where they had been left, and a glass rested beside the sink. In one house, a partly used carton of milk had never made it back into the refrigerator.
These were insignificant things, the kind of chores we postpone without a second thought because we assume that there will always be another chance to finish them. Standing in those kitchens, I struggled with the knowledge that someone’s last ordinary act in their home might have been something so small that they had scarcely noticed doing it.
The kibbutzim themselves felt emptied of life. Most survivors had already been evacuated, while some had remained for a short time before being moved elsewhere. I met only a handful of residents. Most were too shocked to speak for long and others were mourning family members or neighbors.
I had covered conflicts before, and I believed that experience had made me capable of absorbing difficult scenes. Before visiting Nir Oz, Kfar Aza and Be’eri, I had already watched footage of the attacks, the killings and the hostages being dragged into Gaza, but nothing on a screen had prepared me for what I witnessed.
The difficulty of returning is psychological
When I left those kibbutzim on that day, I was certain of one thing: I did not have it within me to return again. For almost three years, I believed that. But while working on my upcoming book about Oct. 7, I realized that I could not continue writing about these communities only through the destruction I had witnessed in the immediate aftermath. Eventually, on the day before Simchat Torah this year, I returned to see what had changed, what had survived and whether the places that had haunted me for three years still existed as I remembered them.
As I entered Be’eri, I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. The sharp turn after the security checkpoint immediately brought back memories of the destroyed neighborhoods. This time, however, much of that landscape had disappeared.
Most of the ruined homes had been demolished and cleared, leaving large stretches of empty ground where new houses would eventually be built. The smell of burned wood and human remains had been replaced by the scent of autumn and flowers beginning to grow again. I had carried an image of Be’eri frozen in destruction, and it was strange to realize that much of what I remembered no longer physically existed.
Gal Cohen, the secretary of the kibbutz, who was born in Be’eri and has lived there for more than six decades, showed me around the areas now being rebuilt. The scale of reconstruction is significant. Cohen told me that 132 houses had been burned or destroyed and that the kibbutz decided to build the same number of new homes. He described the process of planning a new house as part of recovery itself.
Families who had spent years dealing with loss, displacement and uncertainty were now being asked to think about ordinary things again, including the design of a room, the color of a tile or the arrangement of a kitchen. These decisions may appear small, but in a community where so much of life had suddenly been taken away, the ability to plan something for the future carried its own significance.
Security, however, has become an inseparable part of that rebuilding. Many residents had been murdered after terrorists managed to penetrate or burn the doors of safe rooms, and the kibbutz is now investing heavily in improving shelters, replacing doors and installing systems designed to remove smoke in the event of another attack.
At the same time, the community is trying to ensure that the return does not create new divisions between those who are able to come back sooner and those who are not. Around 100 people are currently living again in Be’eri, while many others remain temporarily housed in Kibbutz Hatzerim near Beersheva to the east or elsewhere. Some new homes are already ready, but Cohen said the kibbutz has deliberately tried to keep community services together so that those still waiting do not feel that the community has moved on without them.
The difficulty of returning is also psychological. Cohen described families in which one person feels compelled to come back while another cannot imagine sleeping in Be’eri again. Even people who survived the same attack in the same room can emerge with very different feelings about home. Psychologists are helping families navigate those differences because rebuilding a house is far easier than rebuilding a sense of safety.
That effort to restore ordinary life began almost immediately after the massacre. On Oct. 15, 2023, Be’eri Printers partially resumed operations. For residents, hearing the machines running again carried a meaning far greater than the reopening of a workplace. The printworks had long been one of the economic and communal lifelines of Be’eri, and restarting it while the kibbutz was still devastated became an early sign that life there had not ended.
Leaving Be’eri, I felt something I had not expected to feel when I returned: relief.
Some homes will remain as memorials
However, the experience at Nir Oz was very different. Before Oct. 7, the kibbutz had a population of around 400 residents and was one of the communities most severely affected by the attack. More than a quarter of its population was murdered or kidnapped, and three years later, the scale of that trauma remains visible almost immediately after entering the kibbutz. Unlike Be’eri, where much of the physical destruction has already been cleared away, several parts of Nir Oz still look remarkably similar to the way I remember them from my first visit.
Homes scarred by the attack still stand, their roofs partially crumbled, their walls blackened by fire and weathered by time, while visitors have scratched messages of love and remembrance into the walls. Sunlight pierces through broken windowpanes and falls across the cobwebs inside, briefly illuminating rooms that otherwise seem frozen in time. Occasionally, a large mouse can be seen rummaging through the belongings left behind.
The rebuilding has begun, but the process is still at an early stage. New houses are under construction, and a small number of residents have returned, but much of the kibbutz remains empty. Rita Lifshitz, whose father-in-law Oded Lifshitz and mother-in-law Yocheved Lifshitz were both kidnapped into Gaza on Oct. 7, took me through the kibbutz and showed me Oded’s cactus garden. Yocheved eventually returned alive, while Oded did not.
As we walked, Rita told me that only 23 members have so far come back to live in Nir Oz, while construction is expected to continue for several more years. A new store has opened, replacing the bigger and burnt one, and a group of younger people has arrived to help rebuild community life, including some former residents who are not members of the kibbutz but nevertheless chose to return and contribute.
What became apparent in Nir Oz was not simply how much destruction remained, but how differently recovery can unfold from one community to another. Be’eri showed me how a kibbutz can begin rebuilding itself around the memory of what happened, while Nir Oz revealed how much longer that process can take when the scale of loss is so overwhelming.
A larger challenge facing these communities is now deciding what should remain.
Clearing every ruined house risks erasing the physical memory of Oct. 7, while preserving too much of the destruction can make it harder for residents to rebuild their lives. Some homes will therefore remain as memorials while others make way for new ones, allowing remembrance and renewal to exist together. A saying widely attributed to the Rabbi Baal Shem Tov holds that “remembrance is the secret of redemption.”
Perhaps the defeat of Hamas also lies in rising from the destruction and rebuilding even more, since that is precisely what those who sought to destroy these communities would not want to see. Perhaps redemption begins not by forgetting the darkness, but by refusing to let it have the final word. That is what the resilience of Israelis has taught me—that memory and hope can coexist, and that choosing to live, rebuild and remain can itself become an act of defiance.
I thought about this when I later spoke with Luis Har, who was kidnapped from Nir Yitzhak and held in Gaza before being rescued. Sitting with him at Kibbutz Urim, I asked whether he had ever lost hope in captivity. His answer was immediate: “No. Never. I always saw the light at the end of the dark tunnel in Gaza.”
