‘The land is full of blood’: An Israeli kibbutz where Oct. 7 never ends

KIBBUTZ BEERI, Israel - Just after sunrise, Yasmin Raanan squatted on a white stool in her cluttered garden, packing soil into one of the potted plants she is trying to nurse back to health.

She spends most of her days out here, where there is more light and life than inside the house, its doors still riddled with bullet holes from the day she and her husband spent barricaded in the safe room listening to their neighbors being killed.

Just over her shoulder is the gate the men in black poured through almost a year ago, by motorcycle, in trucks and on foot, on a rampage that claimed the lives of 132 residents, visitors and soldiers in Beeri. Thirty others were dragged away as hostages. Of the 10 who remain in captivity, only three are believed to be alive.

The gate is repaired now and topped with new concertina wire. But most wounds are still fresh here - one of the deadliest places on Israel’s deadliest day. Raanan is among a few dozen residents who didn’t wait for the kibbutz to rebuild - or for the war next door to end - before coming home.

She lives now among charred houses, along streets chewed by tank treads, everything shrouded, especially at night, in a ghostly silence, broken only by the occasional thunder of shells or the thump-thump of machine-gun fire from Gaza.

As she pulled dead leaves from a limp plant, an armored vehicle trundled by on the lane just outside the fence, emerging dusty from a corridor the Israeli military has cut through the center of the battered Palestinian enclave. A road that used to carry little but Beeri’s tractors is now the gateway to war.

This community, like Israel, is stuck in the purgatory of Oct. 7. The country yearns to move on, but the calendar refuses to turn. Dozens of hostages are still held in Gaza, and more than 140,000 Israelis remain displaced from their homes near Gaza or along the Lebanese border. After a surge of unity following the attacks, Israel is riven by divisions and fears of economic collapse. Faith in the government has cratered. War has become the background noise of whatever future is coming.

“We don’t mind the booms,” said Raanan, who speaks Arabic and grew up visiting Palestinian friends and going to the beach in Gaza, once a bicycle ride away. “We have to stop Hamas.”

Raanan’s husband, like most of Beeri’s surviving residents, refuses to stay here. But after just a few weeks in the cramped hotel on the Dead Sea where the town’s uprooted families were given refuge, Raanan came back in December, missing her garden and the kibbutz she had given her adult life to. The town was still full of soldiers then; they were still finding bodies in the surrounding orchards.

Earlier this year, Natasha Cohen, another Beeri returnee, saw her dog, Koda, approach with a bone that turned out to be a human femur. “It was proper war here,” she said.

Raanan, 56, looked across the street at a blackened house, frozen in a death grimace. “Everything is still broken,” she said.

The government is beginning to pay for the demolition of damaged houses as part of a five-year, $5 billion relief project, but it won’t rebuild structurally sound buildings. Will anyone want to live in the house around the corner where a father was killed and his 9-month-old daughter shot in her mother’s arms?

Raanan shrugged. “Whatever happens, this is our home.”

But within that declaration are the questions that continue to haunt Raanan, her kibbutz and her country: What will happen? And when?

‘Believers in peace’

Before Oct. 7, Beeri was populated by peaceniks. The kibbutz organized retirees to drive Gazan medical patients to hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Palestinians worked in its fields and local businesses.

“They worked with us, they were our neighbors,” Natasha said. “We could have had peace.”

There are few here, or anywhere in Israel, who still believe that. Israel’s war on Hamas has killed tens of thousands of people and trapped more than 2 million in a grinding cycle of displacement, hunger and disease. Last week, Israeli ground forces entered Lebanon for the first time since 2006, hoping to push Hezbollah fighters from the border and return Israelis to their homes in the north. Near-daily raids against militants in the West Bank have become more intense and more deadly. Tehran’s latest missile strike last week sent millions of Israelis fleeing for cover.

“We are in the midst of a campaign against Iran’s axis of evil,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday. “These are days of great achievements and great challenges.”

The Defense Ministry has proposed increasing the yearly reserve duty from 18 to 42 days for soldiers and 55 days for officers. The economy has contracted sharply, as reservists struggle to balance careers with front-line duties.

“We’ve never had a worse crisis in Israel,” said Dan Ben-David, an economist at Tel Aviv University who, like many Israelis, volunteered in Beeri as a teenager. “We are still in a stranglehold.”

Like most Israelis, Beeri survivors blame their government not just for Oct. 7, but for failing to reach a cease-fire deal in Gaza that would bring home the remaining hostages. But many have also made their peace with Israel’s longest military campaign since 1948, even as it keeps expanding.

Though the United States and Israel’s Arab neighbors have demanded that a path to Palestinian statehood be part of any resolution to the conflict, support for such a move within Israel has fallen to its lowest level in decades. A July poll found just 21 percent of Israeli Jews favor a two-state solution, a 13-point drop since Dec. 2022.

Across Israel and the occupied West Bank, views have hardened and suspicions have deepened: Only 10 percent of Israeli Jews and 6 percent of Palestinians agreed it was possible to trust the other side.

“Most Israelis are not talking about a solution of any sort,” said Dahlia Scheinlin, a Tel Aviv pollster. “They don’t talk about reaching a final status with the Palestinians, they talk about winning the war.”

Beeri, too, has changed.

“We were believers in peace,” Natasha said. “We don’t have that belief anymore.”

The ‘old school’ kibbutz

Beeri always stood out among Israel’s kibbutzim. It was founded, coincidently, on Oct. 6, in 1946, one of a string of secular Jewish agricultural collectives launched in the Negev while the British weighed options for partitioning Mandatory Palestine.

On Oct. 6 last year, the kibbutz held a celebration to mark its 77th birthday, an event that brought dozens of visitors and former residents to town for that fateful weekend.

The community had flourished for decades, a shady, flower-filled oasis of tidy frame homes. A small print shop that members started as a side business in the 1950s boomed into a high-tech industry, employing 400 people to print custom checks and most of Israel’s driver’s licenses - bringing unexpected prosperity to the socialist commune.

The kibbutz movement, a uniquely Israeli experiment, has waned in recent decades as many communities shifted away from shared ownership. But Beeri remained true to its roots, one of only a few dozen kibbutzim to maintain a strictly communal lifestyle. Members, whether farmers or physicians, turned their incomes over to the group and received living expenses in equal shares. Major decisions were put to a vote. Homes, cars and the dining hall’s three meals per day were supplied by the collective.

“We are proud of being old school,” said Gal Cohen, Natasha’s husband, who is overseeing Beeri’s restoration as its recently elected general manager. He was born on the kibbutz, the son of a Jewish immigrant mother from Yemen.

The Cohens sat on their back porch overlooking the perimeter fence. In the evening sun, parrots flew overhead and a flatbed truck carrying an Israeli tank rolled by. A convoy of jeeps followed.

The kibbutz has asked the Israel Defense Forces to use a different route into the combat zone, just as the Cohens asked the soldiers to move out of their house when they came back in December.

“We appreciate everything the army is doing to protect us,” Natasha said. “But we have to have our kibbutz back.” She is discomfited by the ballooning number of shrines and memorials that families have set up to honor the victims of Oct. 7. One goal of those who have returned is to keep the community’s worst day from defining its future.

“We need to have a memorial, absolutely,” she said. “But not on every street. Nobody can live in Auschwitz.”

Gal looked across the fence toward the kibbutz cemetery, a few yards outside the perimeter, unreachable without permission from the IDF. Only recently did the military start allowing Beeri’s Oct. 7 dead to be buried there. That has meant second funerals, as many as five on some days, for the dozens of victims who were temporarily interred elsewhere in the chaotic aftermath of the attack.

“Starting on October 8, we’ve been on a mission from God to bring Beeri back” Gal said.

“A god you don’t even believe in,” his wife teased. Like most Beeri residents, the Cohens are not religious. Natasha, raised as a Christian in South Africa, met Gal as a volunteer on the kibbutz in 1990. They raised three children here, including a 23-year-old daughter who served in the Israeli Air Force.

The majority of residents are not ready to return, Gal acknowledges. Some might eventually feel comfortable moving back to a new neighborhood of houses the kibbutz is clearing land for on the side farthest from Gaza. Others may never again want to live so close to whatever Gaza becomes.

“It will be a different kibbutz,” he said. “But we will be here.”

‘Why did no one come?’

Gal was one of the first residents to see Hamas fighters approaching at 6:30 on that Saturday morning. He was starting an early run outside the fence when air raid sirens warned of rockets from Gaza, a common occurrence here over the years.

As he hurried back, he saw two men in black camouflage on a motorcycle. Natasha, hearing the bike, thought they must from the Nova music festival that was just winding up on the southern edge of the kibbutz. By the end of the day, at least 364 of the revelers would be dead.

When Gal recognized the riders’ green Hamas bandannas, he sprinted to his daughter’s nearby apartment. On the way, he called Beeri’s security team; its chief officer rushed to the main gate, where he became one of the first people killed.

“They looked right at me,” Gal said of the motorcycle riders.

Gal and his daughter made it back to Natasha, and the three, plus the dog, rushed to their safe room.

Around the corner was Raanan, who watched dozens of fighters pour through the gate they had blasted open. She fled to her own safe room with her husband and grandson. They heard the shots from next door that they believe killed their neighbor.

Soon she heard shots in her own house, and men began pulling on the safe room’s steel door. A few weeks before, though, Raanan had installed an extra deadbolt, a $5 precaution that she credits with saving their lives.

With her Arabic, she came to understand that Hamas was using her house as a field base, distributing weapons and deploying fighters around the kibbutz. When the family emerged late in the day after Israeli soldiers had finally arrived, they found clusters of gold jewelry and passports the militants had taken from other houses, other victims.

“Where was the army?” Raanan asked for what must have been the thousandth time since that day. “Why did no one come?”

The Israeli government has yet to undertake a comprehensive inquiry into the intelligence and military failures that allowed Hamas to carry out the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Netanyahu and his allies have deflected calls for a review, saying any reckoning must wait until the war is over.

But the army has begun its own narrow probes, starting with Beeri. In a report released in July, commanders acknowledged failures of planning and readiness that meant almost eight hours passed before enough troops arrived to gain control. It took almost three days to clear the kibbutz.

“The IDF failed in its mission to protect the residents of Kibbutz Beeri,” investigators concluded flatly. The commander in charge issued a formal apology to residents and resigned.

[Countries around the world commemorate anniversary of Hamas attack on Israel]

A month after the attacks, residents blocked Transportation Minister Miri Regev, a Netanyahu ally, from visiting the community. Now, Beeri is refusing to participate in the official Oct. 7 anniversary events, which Regev is in charge of organizing. Like other Gaza border towns that were attacked, Beeri is planning its own commemoration.

“We have all lost trust in the government,” Natasha said.

That evening, she walked to the kibbutz dining hall. To pass through Beeri with her is to hear a numbing inventory of death.

“That is where my friend was murdered,” she said at one spot. “All four of them were killed,” at another.

In recent weeks, some of the first damaged homes were demolished, leaving flat patches of desert where burned hulks had stood.

“It does begin to feel like healing,” Natasha said, looking at the space where the bookkeeping office had stood. “I have to make myself remember what was there.”

The four bookkeeping staffers were killed and all the files destroyed. Beeri’s chief financial officer remains captive in Gaza. Natasha has helped fix the accounts, including canceling 700 of its residents’ credit cards, all in Beeri’s name. Restoring the kibbutz is like crisis-managing an enormous extended family, she said.

The dining hall used to be the center of their shared life. It was shuttered for months, but has reopened and can be busy at lunchtimes, when workers from the printing plant join the dozens of volunteers who still flock to Beeri on weekdays.

But at night, it is all but deserted. Only two tables were occupied when Natasha walked in.

“We had 350 kids living here before,” she said. “The kibbutz was a noisy place.”

‘My best friend was murdered’

The next day, a few more displaced residents returned, but only for a few hours. They came with trucks to gather belongings from their deserted homes to use in the temporary town of prefabricated houses that the government opened for them in late August, on the outskirts of a kibbutz called Hatzerim, 18 miles away.

Yoel Friedman loaded children’s bikes into a van outside the two-story house that has been empty since the night of the 7th, when the army escorted residents out under fire. Above him loomed the terrace where he stationed himself for hours that day, using his automatic rifle to shoot at the darting figures in black. He killed at least one, he said, raising his shirt to show his own bullet wound.

Then, he pulled up a video on his phone, showing the bodies of three fighters lying near his door - killed by a sharpshooting neighbor a couple of houses down.

The militants had already killed residents of two homes on the block, Friedman said, and were headed toward the safe room where his wife and five children were sheltering.

“I owe him a lot,” he said of his neighbor.

The flashbacks return every time he visits, Friedman said, but he is still ready to move back to Beeri - either into this house or one of the 50 the kibbutz is planning on the other side of town. But his wife doesn’t feel safe here. For now, they will live in the treeless grid of modular homes in Hatzerim.

Another neighbor, Shani Miles-Itach, came out of the house next door. The 55-year-old has been living in her house for months because it’s closer to her job as a social worker. Like many, her family is split, with most only willing to visit Beeri occasionally. She’s not sure if they will ever return for good.

She points down a path to where her own childhood home had been and where her father’s body was found.

“The house was burned, but they said he was shot first and bled to death,” she said, sipping a drink in the shade of her porch. Near her front door were symbols spray-painted by army searchers - an ominous rune of shapes and numerals - signaling her house was free of booby traps and contained zero bodies. On the home of her closest family friends, though, the number was four.

“The mother, the father, both kids,” Miles-Itach said, her eyes welling. “My best friend was murdered, my daughter’s two best friends were murdered. The land is full of blood.”

She grew angrier as she talked, expressing dread for her father’s second funeral, which was approaching, but also frustration over the failure to free the hostages and the betrayal by Palestinians in Gaza that she had counted as friends. She still gives money to several Gazan families, she said, but her dreams of peace are shattered.

“They came to my bat mitzvah,” Miles-Itach said of her friends in Gaza, holding up her hands. “Now can we even negotiate with them? Hamas cannot remain.”

A dog belonging to one of her neighbors, who was also packing up household goods, loped by. After a year cooped up in a hotel room, he was exulting in his old haunts. “He loves being home,” Miles-Itach said with a smile.

‘A place of trauma’

The next morning, Natasha’s cellphone rang as she walked toward her office in the farm headquarters. One of Beeri’s 30 guest workers from Thailand was in a bad way again.

“More nightmares?” she asked. “I’ll be right there.”

The kibbutz had 15 Thai workers boarding a year ago. All of them survived the attacks and, after a few months, all of them returned.

“I’m surprised any of them came back,” Natasha said. There are 30 here now, taking up more of the farm chores that Gazans used to do.

At the long bunkhouse with stacks of bagged Thai rice and cabbages, she sat next to a weary man on a futon, her hand on his shoulder as they took turns with Google Translate. He wanted to go home, he told her.

She put the Thai-speaking labor contractor on speaker and they agreed to find the soonest flight. Natasha headed back to her office, passing the cattle tender with the M16 over his shoulder.

Beeri’s farms were the fastest to recover. The fields directly between the kibbutz and Gaza remain a closed military zone, but planting and harvesting have resumed across hundreds of acres.

“Shalom,” Natasha greeted the big head-shaven farm manager, 65-year-old Moti Barak, He was the first of Beeri’s residents to come back, returning to start repairs just days after the attack.

“I was in the hotel for a day and a half, and I knew it wasn’t for me,” he said.

It was hard work for one man. So many of the pipes that fed the fields had been crushed by tanks that it took him two days to turn off all the valves.

Barak found bodies in some of the houses, and in the lemon orchard too. His wife still won’t return.

“It’s much better now,” he said.

The cows are being fed. There are mangos, grapes and wheat growing. The attacks ruined last year’s peanut harvest, but the crop is back now, tended by a farmer who lost his leg on Oct. 7 and spent six months in the hospital.

A fighter jet screamed overhead, causing Koda to bark at Natasha’s side. A heavy-caliber gun sounded. Probably a helicopter gunship, Barak guessed.

“Beeri has not recovered,” Barak said. “I have not recovered.

“This is still a place of trauma.”

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Ilan Ben Zion contributed to this report.