Eight-year-old Emily was holed up in the bomb shelter of her friend Hila’s house when Hamas terrorists found the two girls – along with Hila’s mum, Raaya. The doors, like those in many kibbutz shelters throughout southern Israel, had no locks, because death was anticipated from the air, not from killers going home to home. “When they arrived, we just opened up, because if we held the door they would have shot and the bullets would have hit us,” recalls Emily.
It was noon on 7 October last year at Be’eri kibbutz, ostensibly a paradise of a farming community for 1,200 Israelis located 50 miles from Tel Aviv and three from Gaza. Emily and Hila had spent the previous night having a sleepover, watching The Vampire Diaries. They woke to a reality much more bloodthirsty.
Throughout Be’eri, a drama played out repeatedly: men, women and sometimes children clung to bomb shelter door handles to keep out the terrorists, often getting shot through reinforced steel, sometimes fatally, as they tried to spare loved ones the same fate.
Five-and-a-half hours earlier, Hamas had arrived on motorbikes. As neighbours hid as best they could, WhatsApp crackled with incredulous messages. “Where is the army?” “They’re butchering us – come quickly!” We are told that 14 troops arrived by helicopter mid-morning, but retreated after one was wounded. For many hours, the kibbutzniks were on their own.
By noon, homes were on fire, corpses lay in the street and terrorists were hunting Israelis to kill or kidnap. A few doors from Raaya’s shelter, Emily’s dad, Tom, didn’t know the fate of his daughter. Phones were dead and he didn’t dare venture outside.
One Day in October is composed of heartbreaking survivor interviews along with disturbing footage from phones and security cameras. If you want insight into why Israel is doing what it is doing in Gaza and Lebanon, this film may help. It clearly demonstrates that the IDF and Mossad were caught napping on 7 October last year as those they were meant to protect were slaughtered. Never again, one might think.
If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help. Indeed, it does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.
Camera footage from a 4x4, time-stamped 8.01am, includes audio from hysterically excited unseen terrorists as they race to join the killing spree. “It’s time for the nation of Jihad! … I swear to God! … We’ll slaughter them! … I wanna livestream this! We’ve got to show the folks back home!” A comrade assures the speaker they already are: Hamas massacred Israelis for viewers in real time.
Despite such evident evil, I am reminded of Cy Endfield’s film Zulu, with its nameless hordes of African warriors pitted against British protagonists with whom we were encouraged to identify. TV and cinematic narratives often work as othering machines in this way. At its worst, One Day in October, if unwittingly, follows the same pattern.
All our sympathies are with relatable Israelis. A mother texting farewell messages as she dies from gunshot wounds. A girl sending cute pictures of her playing with friends to her mum, who is cowering in a toilet cubicle, hoping the terrorists she can hear breathing outside can’t hear her. By contrast, Hamas terrorists are a generalised menace on CCTV, their motives beyond One Day in October’s remit.
Near the end of the film, Einat, a mother of four, recalls the day she returned to work after the attack. From the print shop window, she looked towards Gaza. Instead of seeing buildings and sky as normal, she saw only black smoke: Israel was bombing Palestinians. “That’s when I understood what war is,” Einat says. “It upset me, for a moment. But when I think about what they did to us, that feeling goes away.” A devastating remark, as if any flickering empathy was quickly snuffed out.
Some 101 kibbutzniks and 31 soldiers were killed at Be’eri on 7 October. Of 32 hostages seized, five were murdered, while three remain in Gaza. So far, since 7 October, 40,000 Gazans have died, many under the black cloud Einat saw from her window.
As for little Emily, she turned nine in Gaza before she, Hila and Raaya were released. Her dad supposed for many days that she was dead.
After her release, Tom was told by psychiatrists not to talk to his daughter about her experiences. Now and again, though, Emily recalls unprompted something awful – such as seeing neighbours’ corpses as she was driven away by kidnappers.
Few have returned to Be’eri, but Tom wants to. If people from Israel’s south don’t return to the kibbutzes that became killing zones last October, he explains, Hamas will have won. Be’eri, founded in 1946, is older than the state of Israel and, for him, the beloved realisation of a socialist, communal way of living. “I’m going back,” he says, defiantly. Fair enough, but I wonder if Emily’s psychiatrists think that is a good idea.
• One Day in October is available on Channel 4
