If it weren’t eerily deserted, Kibbutz Beeri (Israel) might seem quite normal – at least at first glance. First, a shaded square, a theater, and the giant refectory of this community village, located in the northwest of the Negev. Further on, well-kept houses, splendid trees, all vegetation on which an early spring has already put flowers.
And then, suddenly, chaos. In just a few meters, just one street, the visitor falls into a gray and black nightmare, the color of ash and soot. Here and there, only shards of ceramic glow faintly in a crushed landscape, made of ripped roofs, twisted beams, broken tiles. The interiors are so charred that it is difficult to recognize the outline of the objects. You have to squint to guess that this thing curled up on the ceiling of a bedroom was once a fan. Or distinguish, under this pile of broken plates, a dishwasher with the door torn off. Everywhere, time has frozen, leaving overturned relics, children’s bicycles, basketball hoops and garden chairs along the streets.
In front of this rubble, photos of the dead and the hostages who lived there were hung, in what the survivors unanimously describe as a ” heaven “. An Eden at the gates of hell, certainly – Gaza, under blockade since 2007, is less than four kilometers away – but, over time, the 1,200 inhabitants had integrated this paradox. Thanks to Iron Dome, the Israeli air protection system, no rocket coming from Palestinian territory had ever fallen on houses or injured anyone. At the call of the sirens, everyone went to their shelter with armored windows, often transformed into a sewing workshop or a child’s bedroom. In most cases, these rooms contained no provisions, not a bottle of water, much less weapons, and not even a lock. Even today, most explosions in Gaza do not startle anyone, as if they were just background noise.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, however, death did not come from the sky and shelters often turned into traps. At dawn of this Shabbat day, which was also that of the 77e anniversary of the kibbutz, it was by taking dirt roads that the attackers engulfed in the well-kept gardens, up to the homes where families gathered for the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah. By the hundreds, Hamas fighters crossed all the barbed wire fences, those of Gaza and those of the nearest localities, to burn, pillage, kill civilians and soldiers seized while jumping out of bed.
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