“Welcome to what’s left of Kfar Aza,” says Zoha Shbak. He’s a lawyer, but looks straight out of the Israeli TV show Fauda, with his tanned stubbly pate, automatic weapon casually slung over his black military T-shirt.
He briefs us at the palm-fringed bus stop of the kibbutz before he shows us the sights. The armoury. The concrete shelters — chocolate teapots when it came to Hamas terrorists, as they had no doors. Ditto safe rooms you couldn’t lock from the inside. The incinerated houses, pocked by hundreds of bullets, the burst and bloodstained mattresses. The house where his son’s best friend, Netta Epstein, was murdered aged 21. He has a tattoo now of the two boys he has known since birth on his right shoulder blade. “My only tattoo,” he said. “They were born a week apart.”
