At 6:31 A.M. on Saturday, October 7th, Gal Cohen’s morning run was interrupted by a flurry of rockets. Cohen, who lived in Kibbutz Be’eri, barely three miles from Israel’s border with Gaza, was used to the projectiles, and to the sound of their midair interceptions by Israel’s missile-defense system. But this barrage was unusually loud and intense. His dog, running beside him, went wild. Cohen, who is fifty-eight, bald, and soft-spoken, returned home and went to pick up his daughter—who also lived in the kibbutz and who, his wife had told him, was frantic. On the way over, Cohen spotted two men on a motorcycle, carrying rifles. They wore camouflage uniforms and “those green Hamas bandannas,” Cohen told me this week. Ducking his head out of view, he spoke to the kibbutz’s chief security officer, Arik Kraunik, by phone to report what he’d seen.
After talking to Cohen, Kraunik drove toward the kibbutz’s front gate to assess the situation. Armed with a rifle and a pistol, Kraunik managed to kill seven armed men, according to his son, but while he called for backup more militants arrived and fatally shot him. At 7:11, a group of armed men ran through the front gate, which had swung open. Other gunmen soon followed on motorbikes.
Kraunik is believed to be the first civilian casualty of Be’eri—perhaps of the entire war that Hamas launched against Israel that morning, which is so far estimated to have killed more than four thousand people, in Israel and in the Gaza Strip. On that first morning, more than a hundred militants stormed Be’eri.
By the time Cohen and his family had huddled in the safe room of their home, a message had gone out on the internal kibbutz network: “Terrorist infiltration.” Residents were advised to lock all doors and windows. But the safe rooms—which became mandatory in all buildings constructed in Israel after the Gulf War of 1991—were meant to shield residents from bombs and missiles, not terrorist attacks; their steel doors usually cannot be locked from within.
Text messages began to ping on Cohen’s phone; the most desperate ones came from the neighborhoods closest to Gaza:
Cohen later asked a friend what the attackers looked like. “Like they had just come out of the gym. With crazy joy in their eyes, like they were high on something,” he was told. The Hamas-led forces moved from house to house, murdering residents or taking them hostage.
A few minutes from Cohen’s house, a baby-faced twenty-four-year-old named Dan Alon crouched with his parents and his brother in their own safe room. They were “without electricity, in terrible heat, with no water and barely any air,” he recalled. Hours went by. Then he heard cries of “Allahu akbar” drawing near: the militants were inside his house. Soon Alon heard loud knocks on the safe-room door. Alon, his brother, and their father heaved their weight against the door frame, as the invaders pushed back. “This is the war of our lifetime,” he recalled his father saying. After what felt to him like hours, the militants retreated; relief filled the room. But then, Alon said, he heard the “whoosh of a conflagration.” The steel door was hot to the touch, and getting hotter. This was part of a method the militants used that proved terrifyingly effective: when they encountered a safe-room door they couldn’t open, they torched a spare tire and wheeled it indoors, often forcing the families to flee. Alon and his family grabbed towels, which they had kept inside the room, and took turns urinating on them. Then they spread the towels on the floor to ward off the flames.
“Somehow, somehow, the fire stopped,” Alon said.
Other families were less fortunate. As homes burned, many made the decision to escape by jumping out of windows. One couple, Rinat and Chen Even, leaped from their second floor with their four children. They landed safely and took cover in the bushes, but the militants were lying there in wait. The couple and their two teen-age boys were fatally shot. They used their bodies to shield the two youngest children, who managed to survive.
Cohen heard the cries of those two children, and is haunted by them. “Those who jumped out were either killed or taken hostage,” he told me. “It was all premeditated.”
Be’eri was founded in 1946, two years before the creation of the Israeli state. To its residents, this fact was aphoristic: the kibbutz always seemed a step ahead. It established a famed printing house, which prints all driver’s licenses and many credit cards in the country, and the kibbutz flourished. Residents lived in neat, white, tile-roofed homes, with miles of uninterrupted farmland stretching to the east. In recent years, as other communes in Israel were privatizing land or declaring bankruptcy, Be’eri had twelve hundred members and a long wait list of young couples desperate to move in.
Still, it was impossible to forget that to the west was Gaza. When an air-raid siren sounds in Tel Aviv, residents have a minute and a half to seek shelter before the rocket strikes; in Be’eri, they have seven seconds.
By midday that Saturday, Thomas Hand had decided that if the Hamas gunmen were coming for him, they would not find him hiding. At sixty-three, Hand is lean and slight, with graying ginger stubble. Born in Ireland, he arrived in Be’eri in 1992 for three months “and stayed ever since,” he told me this week. Farm life suited him. He fell in love with a kibbutznik woman. The couple had two children, and, though they later separated, Hand stayed, taking a job in the printing house. Eight years ago, he became a father for the third time, raising his daughter Emily by himself after her mother died from cancer.
On the day of the attack, Hand was home alone. Emily had slept over at a friend’s house, and Hand couldn’t reach her. He called his ex-wife. “Go into the safe room, and, if you hear them, hold the door handle with both hands,” he told her. Then he unscrewed the mosquito net of his kitchen window and grabbed his 9-millimetre pistol. “I put a bullet in the chamber, and took it off safety, which you never do,” he said. “I knew they’d get me, but at least I’ll take a few out.”
He pointed his gun outside, rested his elbow on the kitchen counter, and peered out the window, waiting. His whole body shook. Like Cohen, he was receiving text messages: “Where’s the Army?” “This is hours!” ‘They’re in my house.” The electricity soon went out—the militants had disconnected the power lines. Nine hours passed. Hand kept thinking that he and Emily could have made it to Haifa by then.
At one point, he heard a faint scratching noise. His ex-wife’s pinscher was clamoring at his door.
“Schnitzel!” Hand called out to the dog, grateful for the company. Then he realized that this was not a good sign. She would never have allowed the dog out of the safe room.
Members of the kibbutz’s security team, which numbered a dozen people, were the first line of defense when the militants attacked. The wounded were brought into Be’eri’s small clinic, which was quickly overwhelmed. Amit Mann, a twenty-two-year-old paramedic, provided triage as best she could.
“They’re bleeding here in front of me,” she texted her sister at 11:28 A.M. “Where is the army?”
Shortly before 2 P.M., Mann sent her last messages home. “I hear them outside,” she wrote. “They’re here.”
With gunfire blaring, Mann answered a phone call from her sister. She had been shot in the legs, she cried. The militants were standing over her. Then the line went dead.
While Mann was at the clinic, Nira Herman Sharabi, a fifty-four-year-old nurse, felt helpless inside her safe room, where she was hiding with her husband, her three teen-age daughters, and her eldest daughter’s boyfriend. Friends and neighbors were calling her, asking in hushed voices how to treat gunshot wounds.
Herman Sharabi guided them with simple instructions. Her demeanor is kind and sensible, her eyes piercing; a deep line furrows her brows.
One caller was a little girl, the daughter of a friend of hers. “Mommy is breathing but not talking,” the girl whispered, as Herman Sharabi advised her on how to lay her mother down.
Another call came from a nephew, who had been at a rave in the desert when dozens of gunmen ringed the site. He asked if he could seek cover in the kibbutz.
“Don’t come,” Herman Sharabi told him. Militants had captured Be’eri, too, she said. (News later arrived that he had been killed.)
Suddenly, the door of the safe room burst open. Three men in black shouted in Arabic for the family to come out. They ransacked the house while the Sharabis stood in a corner, terrified and silent.
“Sayara, sayara,” the men said, and pantomimed holding car keys.
Herman Sharabi didn’t know how to respond. “How do I explain that there are no keys in the kibbutz, that we share everything?” she told me.
The family was led outside, barefoot and in pajamas, and told to sit. The eldest daughter, who is seventeen, wore only shorts and a sports bra, until one of the militants grabbed a t-shirt from a clothesline and handed it to her. Herman Sharabi was later told that the militants likely belonged to the group Islamic Jihad, whose interpretation of Islam is “more proper,” as she put it.
“It was a miracle in heaven that we fell on the faction we did,” she told me, aware that, elsewhere in the kibbutz, other groups of armed men had carried out acts of rape and torture.
On the doorstep of a nearby home was a pile of ammunition. The militants “were armed to their teeth,” Barak Hiram, a brigadier general in the Israeli Army, later said. “They had rocket launchers, R.P.G.s, a lot of Russian equipment, AK-47s, anti-human mines, claymores.”
The Sharabis were told to sit with their neighbors—Tal Shani, her teen-age son, and her two younger daughters—as the militants pulled down a flag that had been hanging in the Sharabis’ back yard as part of recent anti-government protests. One tore it in half, shouting, “Idbah al yahud”—“slaughter the Jews”—while making a slashing motion across his throat, Herman Sharabi and Shani recalled.
The militants then told the three males in the group to stand. They tied their hands with shoelaces and shoved them into a small vehicle. Herman Sharabi and Shani pleaded with the militants not to take them, but one of the militants cocked his gun. The women burst into tears as the car sped off.
“Take me,” Shani cried out, as her son was driven away.
For some residents of Be’eri, help came early that evening; for others, it was after midnight. They fell weeping on their liberators’ necks, or greeted them cautiously, unable to believe that they had been saved. All the Be’eri survivors I spoke to recalled hearing the sounds of Hebrew outside as the most profound source of relief.
With militants still swarming the area and many lying in ambush, soldiers combed house after house, and freed the families trapped inside. Yossi Landau, an emergency worker, later recounted some of the harrowing sights he had witnessed in Be’eri that day: the body of a pregnant woman whose belly had been cut open, her infant still inside; children burned alive; the bodies of a couple who had been handcuffed to each other and tortured in front of their children, with one of the man’s eyes gouged out. Landau has spent more than thirty years recovering bodies after terrorist attacks. “I’ve never seen anything like this level of abuse,” he said on Israeli television.
Outside, the suffocating smell of smoke mixed with the stench of death. With the electricity gone, it was hard to see anything. Still, the soldiers asked parents to shield their children’s eyes as they led the families to the kibbutz’s front gate, with gunfire continuing to blast in the background. Shani walked with her daughters, staring at the ground ahead of her. Walking beside her, Herman Sharabi covered her own daughters’ eyes, but she “couldn’t help peeking,” she told me. Piles of bodies were strewn all over her neighbors’ lawns.
From the kibbutz, the survivors were shuttled by buses to a hotel on the Dead Sea. They arrived there at 6:30 on Sunday morning—exactly twenty-four hours after the massacre began. The bodies of a hundred and eight kibbutz members were recovered from Be’eri the following day. Thomas Hand was told that his ex-wife and his daughter Emily were among them.
“I went, ‘Thank God,’ ” Hand told me, sobbing. “I actually punched the air. It’s a weird thing, in a normal world. But this isn’t a normal world.” A quick death seemed a lesser evil, he explained, than what might occur in captivity.
Shani’s teen-age son was one of an estimated two hundred people who were taken hostage. For her, that is the preferred option. “At least we have that hope that he’s alive,” she said. Herman Sharabi’s husband and her daughter’s boyfriend were also taken captive. So were ten members of Shaked Haran’s family, who disappeared from Be’eri. What remains of their house is a charred skeleton; its red shutters are the only spot of color left. “But there was no blood, and that gives us hope,” Haran told me on Monday, her eyes bloodshot but her voice firm. Among the hostages were her parents, her sister, her brother-in-law, and her niece and nephew. On Wednesday, her father, Avshalom Haran, was declared dead.
I met the survivors of Be’eri at the Dead Sea hotel this week. They were wearing clothes donated by volunteers, and some were in too-big flip-flops. You could tell them apart from the hotel’s other guests by the absent look in their eyes and the way they clung to their relatives. The sparkling sea outside was an almost obscene departure from the stories they carried with them, and will continue to carry.
All of the people I spoke to said they wanted the hostages brought back at any cost. Speaking about Hamas, they repeated one phrase over and over: “It’s either us or them.” But many also mentioned the pain of the Palestinian families living on the other side of the border—who are victims of Hamas rule and of Israeli bombardments. One of the people taken hostage was Yarden Roman-Gat, a physiotherapist who spent years working in East Jerusalem, treating Palestinians. “We’ll have to build something out of the wreckage of these two peoples,” her brother told me.
Only on the question of the future of the kibbutz did they hesitate and differ. Some said they would like to go back and rebuild their homes, but they were certain that this couldn’t happen under the current security arrangements. For years, the Israeli government had neglected the southern communities, minimizing the threat from Hamas and ignoring the plight of Gaza. Now, many survivors have the sense that, as one put it, “Be’eri is over.”
Hand fantasized that perhaps the survivors can all move elsewhere. “We can rebuild the kibbutz next to the sea somewhere,” he said. Smiling through tears, he added, “Get some motorboats, a Jet Ski. It’s not the worst way to live.” ♦
This article has been updated to include new information about Emily Hand.
