“My life feels like someone exploded a grenade in it. I lost everything,” said Shachar Tzuk, a resident of Kfar Aza who lost friends and members of her extended family on Oct. 7.
As Israel prepares to mark the anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of 22 southern communities, murdering 1,200 and kidnapping 251 into Gaza, journalists converged on the ravaged kibbutzim as part of a Government Press Office tour.
Tzuk, who spoke to JNS near the Gaza border on Monday, has not returned to live permanently on the kibbutz but visits her parents there once a week and leads tours to shed light on the plight of her community.
In Kfar Aza, located 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) from Gaza, Hamas massacred 64 people and kidnapped 18, five of whom remain in captivity. The youngest fatality on the kibbutz was in middle school, the youngest hostage was three years old. She was returned along with 104 other hostages as part of a week-long ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in late November.
During their assault, hundreds of terrorists booby-trapped the kibbutz. To this day, some neighborhoods remain closed to the public.
“We still find from time to time explosive devices that the terrorists left behind, or unexploded IDF grenades,” Tzuk told JNS. “Don’t go off track, don’t go into houses. We can’t guarantee they won’t collapse on you.”
The faces of Keith Siegel, Doron Steinbrecher, Emily Damari and Ziv and Gali Berman, the five hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza, are everywhere, on the walls of both half collapsed and intact houses.
Tzuk herself wore a denim hat with the words “Emily” and “Kfar Aza Bring Them Home” on it.
“On the last day the swimming pool was open at the end of the summer, I vividly remember her playing with her nieces and nephews, taking them and throwing them in the water,” recalled Tzuk.
Prior to Oct. 7, nearly 1,000 people lived in Kfar Aza. Today, 50 residents have returned to the eerily quiet kibbutz. Tzuk, who currently resides in a hotel in Tel Aviv, rarely enters the house she used to live in.
“The first time I went inside, I tried to salvage my shoes. I bought really nice shoes. We went on a trip to Norway. It took me a while to break them in,” she said.
“I moved things and my parents started screaming at me, afraid if I touched something it would explode. It was painful to go inside. The place was trashed. I found feces on my couch. We know the terrorists tried to violate the furniture on purpose,” she added.
On Oct. 7, Tzuk was away with her family at a bed and breakfast 30 minutes from Kfar Aza when her sister in law’s brother Shani started calling.
“I picked up the phone and he whispered ‘everyone is dead.’ He said his mom and dad, Dorit and Aviv Wertheim, were dead and that there were terrorists in the kibbutz,” she said.
In the early hours of the attack, Tzuk’s sister in law, who served as a medic in the army, received phone calls from people living in the kibbutz’s “young generation” neighborhood, who were under attack.
“I looked at her and realized she couldn’t help all of them, physically or emotionally. Growing up in a kibbutz, we’re all like brothers and sisters. How could she help all of them? At the time she didn’t even know the truth about her own parents,” said Tzuk.
“I started to reach out to friends, medics, paramedics and doctors, gathered phone numbers and passed the info,” she continued.
Tzuk and her sister in law made maps for Israeli forces, marking high ground, locations of critically wounded and known locations of terrorists to help guide them in real time.
On the tour, Tzuk stopped at the house of Ram and Lili Itamary, who were murdered on the day and are survived by their two children, the house of the Kutz family, where all five relatives were murdered, and the Goldstein-Almog family house, where the father Nadav and eldest daughter Yam were while the rest of the family was kidnapped into Gaza.
After the attacks, Tzuk’s mother joined the kibbutz’s eulogy committee, and her father helped organize the stream of funerals following the attacks.
This Oct. 7, Tzuk will spend the morning at the memorial service for her sister in law’s parents, and in the evening she will take part in the kibbutz’s memorial ceremony in Kibbutz Shefayim.
“I mark Oct. 7 every day. There is no day passing by without me reliving it in one way or another,” she said.
“Normalizing acts of ‘resistance’ like rape is an abomination. If we start normalizing these sorts of actions, it will soon hit Europe and the rest of the Western world,” she added.
In nearby Kibbutz Nir Oz, the only kibbutz the army arrived at on Oct. 7 once the terrorists had already left, JNS met Ola Metzger. Out of 220 homes and houses on the kibbutz, only seven weren’t violated by Hamas.
Metzger, who led the tour in Nir Oz, began by her own house where she, her husband, her children and her niece spent nearly 10 hours in their safe room until the IDF arrived.
“The people who came to my house didn’t try to shoot us. They tried to open the safe room, they stole our knives, our computers, the TVs, whatever they could, even money. I even heard children stealing things from my kids,” said Metzger.
Metzger’s mother in law, Tami, was released in November while her father in law, Yoram Metzger, was murdered in captivity. His body was retrieved from Gaza by the IDF in August.
“When she arrived at the tunnels, she met him there, and they were together all the time. When Tami was released she came back and told us about Yoram and his condition. We never thought it would take so much time to conclude another deal,” Metzger told JNS.
“We were informed in June that Yoram was murdered along with five other hostages. In August, his body was extracted from Gaza and we had the funeral,” she continued.
“For us personally, it feels like a little bit of a closure, but only for our small family; we’re not forgetting that there are so many others. Twenty-nine people that I’ve known personally very well for 30 years. It’s not final closure, it cannot be,” she added.
Metzger led journalists to the home of Johnny and Tamar Siman Tov, who were shot to death by Hamas terrorists while their three children burned. Their dog survived.
Then, the group followed Metzger to the ruins of a burned-out kindergarten, where Ariel Bibas celebrated his fourth birthday months before he was kidnapped by Hamas along with his nine-month-old brother Kfir and mother Shiri. His father Yarden Bibas was taken separately. There, JNS met Yifat Zailer, Shiri’s cousin.
On Nov. 29, the IDF announced it was investigating Hamas claims that Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were dead.
“I am here to remind everyone that a crime against humanity was committed on Oct. 7,” said Zailer.
“I ask myself if Ariel and Kfir remember their father. I ask myself if they are even alive. Noone can give us that answer. This entire family vanished and no one is talking about it anymore,” she continued.
“Something broke inside of me on Oct. 7. I never believed this kind of cruelty and violence could be justified as an act of freeing Palestine. I believed in freeing Palestine my entire life, in a two-state solution. This is how you free Palestine? By kidnapping a nine-month-old baby from his home?” she asked.
“We cannot legitimize terror, we cannot legitimize jihadi groups who only cherish death,” added Zailer.
Asked by JNS how she envisions an uncertain but hopefully upcoming reunion, Zailer responded that “I’ll hug them and never let go.”
Amid the ruins, the greenery of the kibbutz sticks out. Metzger told JNS that residents of the kibbutz are looking to preserve the special plants and flowers of Nir Oz’s botanical garden. Former captive Yelena Trufanov also visits the kibbutz, to feed the cats who found refuge there.
The last house JNS visited in Nir Oz was that of of Bat-Sheva Yahalomi.
Batsheva, her daughter and her baby managed to escape as they were being kidnapped by Hamas.
Her son Eitan, 12, was released from Hamas captivity on Nov. 27. Eitan was forced to watch videos of Hamas’s atrocities, threatened at gunpoint and beaten when he cried. Yahalomi’s husband, Ohad, marked his 50th birthday in captivity and is one of two dual French-Israeli citizens held by Hamas.
In January, a propaganda video released by a Gaza terror group, the al-Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, showed Ohad speaking to the camera. The video claimed that he had died in captivity.
“The army doesn’t know to tell us whether it’s true. We don’t know if he is alive. We prefer to believe he is. I am not naive. I have prepared the children. He is a very strong man even though he was injured. I hope he will be back,” Yahalomi told JNS.
“The two hardest things are not knowing about Ohad but also knowing how they treated the children; I can’t think about how they treat the men. We didn’t choose this war, we were forced to fight. It was not even a fight, they came into our houses and took us, women, babies, children and old people, in our pajamas,” she continued.
Speaking to JNS about her son Eitan, Yahalomi said he is very busy with their new lives in Kibbutz Haogen.
“At night, we see the signs of trauma. He goes to sleep very late because he doesn’t want to think before sleeping. He has nightmares, his hair is falling out. He doesn’t want to talk anymore about what he went through, but he is busy and that is important,” Yahalomi told JNS.
“We are okay, we survived, but we can’t heal until this ends. The wound is still bleeding and we must close it before continuing our life,” she added.
Yahalomi was invited to spend Oct. 7 in France by French President Emmanuel Macron.
“I just want to remind people how it began and to ask them to help us to press on Hamas to end this war and bring back the hostages. We need the world’s help,” she said.
