“It’s a ghost town,” said Noam Sagi as he returned to the Nir Oz kibbutz for the first time since his mother, Ada, 75, was abducted by Hamas gunmen.
He had arrived from London to continue campaigning for the release of the 240 hostages who were snatched from their homes on 7 October, but he also wanted to make sense of what happened to Ada, who last messaged her family at 9.24am on what some in Israel now refer to as “Black Saturday”.
Sagi, 53, was trying to piece together the horrifying clues he has uncovered in her home, now bloodied, pockmarked with bullet holes and littered with spent casings.
“This was mum’s little heaven,” he said, outside on a lush patio now blemished by a pool of blood. “I expect mum to come with a hug and apple cake and coffee and loads of kisses. But what you see is just devastation and she’s not here. Her absence is really, really loud. The birds continue, it’s still green, but there is a void.”
Inside, he stepped over shattered glass and broken furniture. A trail of blood led from the safe room at the back of the house to the front door.
“When I see the bloodstains and the signs of struggle, it brings the story alive in my head. I see her, I feel her pain, I feel her terror,” he said.
For someone reimagining their mother’s anguish, Sagi was remarkably composed as he looked around the home where Ada, a retired Arabic teacher, had lived for 54 years.
Ada’s house was looted after her abduction and Sagi, his wife, Michal Cohen Sagi, 53, and his brother-in-law Sharon Sela, 47, were trying to find her treasured possessions among the chaos.
He entered a bedroom where Ada’s six grandchildren often stay. “This is not just blood,” Sagi said, pointing to several thicker drops running underneath a picture of a bird painted by his son. In another bedroom, a drawing by Ada’s youngest grandchild had two bullet holes in it.
At the safe room – and the scene of Ada’s abduction – there are a pool of blood by the entrance and smears on the door handle.
“We didn’t find bullet holes in the safe room, but something happened here,” said Sela. “I don’t know if it’s from a gun or a knife. We did find a bullet casing.” He said he could not understand why the gunmen would harm Ada when they had already breached the safe room, which did not lock, and she was effectively already captive.
Sagi knew before he came here that the Israel Defence Forces had found blood in the house, but was not aware of the extent. “The first thing that comes to my mind is the extent of her injuries and what the situation is now. My mum is very, very strong mentally. She’s very positive. But I’m worried about her physical health. She has a lung condition and this is her lifesaver,” he said, picking up Ada’s inhaler.
Despite the horrifying scene, Sagi was trying to remain positive. “I feel, in a weird way, lucky because we have something to see and to understand. And we know that mum is kidnapped and not dead. There are a lot of places that have been burned to the ground and you can’t even bury anyone because they’re just teeth,” he said.
Walking around the kibbutz, he pointed out some of the devastation: a torched house where a woman with motor neurone disease and her carers were terrorised; an empty, burned-out bird cage; a blackened tiny table and chair set for kids.
Sagi, a psychotherapist, grew up on the kibbutz, which lies 3km from Gaza, before moving to London 22 years ago. His childhood memories of playing football and learning to ride a bike here are now tarnished.
A quarter of the kibbutz’s 400 residents were abducted or murdered. The IDF reportedly did not arrive at the scene for eight and a half hours, by which time the terrorists had wreaked havoc and left. Many of the homes here now looked more like mangled half-structures with their roofs caved in and their insides torched.
“This is quite something,” Sagi said as he entered one such home. “What happened is that they drilled into the gas pipes and then turned them in so the gas goes into the house. People either come out and die, or they just then throw a match in and kill them.”
He entered the burned-out home of Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, one of the four hostages who has been released, and her husband, Oded, 83, who remains captive. “They were peace activists,” Sagi said. “Sharone’s dad had medals from the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] for the stuff they did for Palestinians. So [Hamas] took him from a place where he had plaques from Yasser Arafat. They took the best chance for peace.”
Walking along the barbed wire border fence that separates the two territories and was used as an escape route by Hamas, Sagi pointed to a breach in the fence which is now mangled, saying: “You can see how people were taken through the gate here across the border. This is how they took them, on mobility scooters, or in their own vehicles, or on motorbikes. That was the pathway.”
Next was the kibbutz’s communal dining room and kitchen, which had been sprayed with bullets and burned. Inside, Sagi’s friend, Natalie Roitman, whose mother, Ofelia, 77, is being held hostage, had created an art installation.
“In shock and horror and deep sorrow we announce the murder of our beloved community members in Nir Oz on the Black Saturday of 7 October 2023,” said a sign surrounded by names of the dead. Two handwritten names had been added to the wall after a father and a son who were presumed to have been kidnapped were identified as dead by their teeth, Sagi said.
Roitman has also stuck coloured labels on the postboxes of the kibbutz’s families to indicate whether they were dead, kidnapped, or, in two cases, hostages who have been released.
Inside the dining hall, posters of the dead and missing were laid out on tables. But each one was more than just a picture for Sagi. He pointed out his maths teacher, a childhood friend, and a mentor on one table alone.
Sagi was in Israel for just three days, having arrived for an “important” meeting. He didn’t want to elaborate, but said: “There are different angles to what we can do and I’m trying. I feel very much that I can’t sit and wait for the government to do something. It’s on me. I’m trying to meet as many people as I can who can make a difference. I’m trying to do things that will keep the hostages as the main priority.”
Outside a garden rich with bursting pomelos, the conversation was interrupted by successive booms of Israeli artillery fire. “We just need to identify the safe room,” Sagi said.
There did not appear to be anywhere safe in the burned-out home of a grandmother whose slaughter was live-streamed on Facebook.
“I see a skeleton of what used to be life and what used to be a house,” Sagi said. “Everything is burned down to not even rubble. It’s just death, black, nothingness. No sign of a struggle even, no sign of blood or a life that used to be, just signs of destruction and evil. You can smell it.”
Back at Ada’s house, Sagi stressed that the residents of the kibbutz, which is built on collective living and socialist principles, dreamed of peace. He became emotional for the first time, and said: “I can talk to you like a tour guide, but it is too much. It’s so much loss in one place and they deserve only good. They stand for everything that is good – not only in this region, not only in Israel, but in the universe.”
