The stench of death still pervades Kfar Aza, an Israeli kibbutz on the periphery of the blockaded Gaza Strip. The street closest to the barbed wire border fence, just 50m away from the three-mile (5km) buffer zone that separates the territories, previously housed the kibbutz’s volunteers. These young adults lived in around 40 small homes designed for single occupancy, staying for a few months at a time to explore the socialist and environmental principles typical of a kibbutz lifestyle.
As there are several communal bomb shelters in the vicinity, the houses were not designed with safe rooms in which to wait out rocket attacks. Even if they were, the occupants would not have escaped Kfar Aza’s fate on 7 October, when Hamas burst out of its cage.
What came next has forever changed the region. Four weeks after the Palestinian militant group’s horrifying attack that killed 1,400 Israelis across southern Israel, there is only silence in this community, previously home to 750 people, perforated by blasts of nearby Israeli artillery fire and a warning of an incoming anti-tank missile.
Several Kfar Aza homes are too damaged to enter, their roofs caved in and insides burned out. Others show clear signs of struggle; blood-soaked sofas and mattresses are still propped up against doors and shattered windows.
Family photographs, splintered guitars, and books and tchotchkes thrown from shelves lie among broken glass, while bread left on the countertop and the contents of fridges rot in the desert heat. Fat yellow pomelos wait on the branch, but no one is coming to pick them; beneath the tree, spent bullet casings clink and chime underfoot. Posters protesting the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul and advertising a tennis tournament remain up, relics of a different reality.
“It’s not the physical damage I am worried about. I think the psychological damage will be much harder to repair,” said Hava Dann, 34, one of the few Kfar Azar residents who visit most days to look after the kibbutz’s animals and check on the now-dormant local plastics factory.
“I think people will come back, but it depends on what happens in Gaza and whether the situation remains the same with Hamas in charge. No one can face that.”
Around 7am on Saturday 7 October – the Jewish holy day of Shabbat and Simchat Torah, the last of the autumnal high holidays – about 70 Hamas fighters attacked Kfar Aza from four directions, getting through Israel’s defences by blowing up security cameras, automated weapons systems and motion detectors before mowing down the fence with bulldozers or flying over on hang gliders. They then fanned out using pick-up trucks and motorcycles.
Heavily armed men destroyed the kibbutz’s gate and headed first to the home of its security director, killing him, leaving the community even more vulnerable as the wave of terror began. Rocket-propelled grenades were used to force entry to homes, and fires lit to suffocate residents or drive them out, to be murdered outside instead.
In one house, said Simcha Dizengoff, a first responder with the Zaka emergency response service, who arrived at the scene on 11 October after the Israel Defence Forces finally regained control of the village, a birthday cake still sat on the table from the weekend. Following the unmistakable smell of burned flesh, his team found the bodies of two adults, two children and their grandmother in the safe room, hugging each other on the floor in the corner. The family were now reminiscent of the dead of Pompeii, he said; it was impossible to separate their corpses into body bags.
In another Kfar Aza house, a woman, naked from the waist down, had been bent over a bed and then shot in the back of the head. When the team tried to move her, a live grenade rolled out of her clenched hand.
At least one child, aged about six, had been killed by a knife plunged into his skull. Several other victims appeared to have been beheaded.
“I picked up body after body,” Dizengoff said. “In 32 years of volunteering and responding to car crashes and terrorist attacks I have never seen anything like this.”
A month on from 7 October, many people are still missing and some of the dead have yet to be identified; Israel has drafted archaeologists to help determine what are human or animal remains amid the ruins. In total, it is thought that 50 members of Kfar Aza were killed, along with 21 soldiers, and another 17 people kidnapped and taken back to Gaza’s labyrinth of tunnels as bargaining chips. The bodies of 20 Hamas fighters were also recovered from the kibbutz.
There are thousands more stories of unfathomable brutality in 22 kibbutzim, towns, military bases and highways across Israel’s south, where people attending the SuperNova rave in Re’im kibbutz were ambushed as they tried to flee. For many Israelis, the scale of the violence committed against Jewish and Bedouin citizens, as well as dozens of foreign workers, is still difficult to comprehend.
Funerals are still held daily, as more of the dead being examined in morgues are returned to their loved ones, but they bring little solace to a nation grappling with trauma of a magnitude not experienced since the Holocaust.
The lack of progress on the fate of 240 hostages in Gaza, and attempts by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to blame his generals rather than take responsibility for so many intelligence and response failures, have compounded the prevailing sentiment that the state is floundering and unable to keep its people safe. Beneath the weight of grief and shock, anger towards the government is reaching boiling point.
The focus of the new war, already the bloodiest chapter in the entire 75-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has moved to the Gaza Strip, where the death toll from Israeli bombing is put at more than 9,000 people, and 2.3m civilians are suffering from a lack of water, food, and medicine trapped under the most intense airstrikes launched anywhere in the world this century. On Thursday, a week after the ground invasion started, the IDF said its troops had encircled Gaza City in fierce face to face ground battles.
Israeli soldiers, rather than civilians, are now dying. With 23 killed already in ambushes by well-prepared Hamas fighters, the country is expecting military casualties akin to the war of independence in 1948, or the surprise Yom Kippur war launched by Egypt and Syria 50 years and a day before the 7 October massacres.
Israelis living near the southern and northern borders – approximately 120,000 people – have been subject to unprecedented evacuation orders. The authorities fear an escalation in the hostilities with the powerful Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, on top of ballistic missiles launched towards Israel by the Houthi militia in Yemen. The conflict has already become a regional one, drawing in Tehran and its allies.
Most evacuees are now living in upmarket hotels in Tel Aviv or the tourist spots of Tiberias and Eilat, at the government’s expense. They have been told they cannot expect to return home until the beginning of next year at the earliest, while their temporary new homes are chaotic with deliveries of aid supplies and bored children.
The only community hit by Hamas that has been allowed to stay in their homes is the conservative working-class town of Ofakim, home to 32,000 people, which lies outside the closed military zone. Blackhawk helicopters hover overhead, and dozens of soldiers patrol its damaged streets and new checkpoints. Many residents, however, have chosen to leave anyway.
The Guardian visited Ofakim the day after the Hamas attacks. The trail of destruction wreaked by the militants was easy to follow.
It was discovered later that dozens of militants were still hiding in the area, some only captured or killed three weeks later. Two white Hamas Hilux pick-up trucks, surrounded by scattered fatigues, first aid supplies and ammunition, had been abandoned on Herzl Boulevard, one of the engines still running, and another car was set alight after a rocket hit.
The IDF now believes that the Hamas fighters were trying to seize Ofakim’s police station, as they did in Sderot, but were derailed by armed residents and off-duty police. Instead, about 10 of them turned the nearby quiet residential Ha-Tamar Street into a battleground, going from house to house to kill and capture. About 50 civilians and security forces were killed.
In an orange house halfway up Ha-Tamar, five men forced entry through the the back door at the home of Rachel and David Adri, a couple in their 60s, seizing their phones and smashing windows to use as sniping positions. Earlier that morning Rachel had called her son, a policeman, to say she had heard shots in the area. After Hamas arrived, Rachel, who speaks some Arabic, engaged them in small talk for the next 20 hours, making food and even bandaging one captor’s hand, stalling for time until help arrived.
When she thought she could hear Israeli police in the garden – among them her son, who had briefed his colleagues about the structure of the house - Rachel put her head in her hands, pretending she had a headache, spreading out her fingers and thumb across her forehead to indicate that five men were inside.
“I knew that if they are hungry, they are angry … They pointed a weapon at me and also threatened a grenade. I told them I had to inject insulin, trying to distract them from the fact I have children who are police officers,” she told Israeli media.
During the Guardian’s return visit to Ofakim, there were candles and posters left in tribute to the two special forces officers who died rescuing the Adris. The couple are now in Tel Aviv; their bloodied home has been emptied of its belongings, a hollowed-out symbol of the horrors the town suffered.
Little in Ofakim has been repaired. On Ha-Tamar Street, most of the houses are still pockmarked with bullet holes, shot-up cars remain parked outside, and traditional Sukkot tents from the September holiday have not been taken down.
The Elkhazovs – Yuri, 55, Rosa, 52, and their children Elena, 25, and George, 23 – live across the road from the Adris. The family first realised something deeply frightening was happening on 7 October when a gunman carrying a rocket-propelled grenade and wearing the bright green insignia of Hamas rang the doorbell at about 7.30am. After seeing him through the intercom camera, they huddled behind the kitchen wall for 17 hours until the shooting was over, bullets piercing their windows and door.
On Wednesday afternoon, like the rest of the country, the Elkhazovs were glued to the television news. Rosa expressed anger and frustration at the world’s response to what is now known in Israel as Black Saturday.
“We came from the Soviet Union, but look at what happened in Dagestan. We could never go back there,” she said, referring to the angry mob in the Muslim-majority Russian republic that rioted at an airport last week after rumours spread that a flight from Tel Aviv was bringing Jewish refugees. “There is nowhere else for Jews to go. The only country that stands with Israel is America.”
As she spoke, Israel’s Channel 12 cut to a story about Latin American countries breaking off diplomatic relations and withdrawing ambassadors in protest at Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
Sderot, where Hamas took hostages in the local police station and engaged Israeli forces in a two-day battle before the IDF blew up the building, was evacuated three weeks ago; the town of 28,000 is now empty apart from street cats.
On a panoramic ridge facing west on the edge of town, home to a nursery school, Sderot’s residents used to gather during the four previous wars between Israel and Hamas since the group seized control of the strip in 2007. They had cheered and whistled as the bombs rained down on Gaza’s trapped civilians, sipping beers and settling in as though watching a fireworks display as the conflicts unfolded less than a mile away in Beit Hanoun, a town in the strip’s north-east corner.
The ridge, known to journalists as “the hill of shame”, on Wednesday afternoon only hosted a handful of television crews filming the aftermath of airstrikes and huge plumes of dust thrown up by the movement of Israeli tanks. The IDF continues to pummel the tiny territory in its mission to destroy Hamas.
The scene was quieter than previous days, but no less deadly: as Israeli troops move deeper into Gaza, the fighting has begun to shift to the ground, in what is likely to be gruelling house to house combat, complicated by the presence of thousands of civilians and Hamas’s vast network of tunnels.
A fire from an earlier airstrike that the IDF said hit a weapons depot was still burning, sending columns of black smoke into the orange Mediterranean sky; one Israeli cameraman, who said he was sympathetic to the plight of Gaza’s people, let out a long, sad sigh.
Israeli victory in Gaza remains an undefined – and unclear – possibility. The only certainty is more bloodshed in the days and weeks to come. Nothing here will ever be the same again.
