Landing, Israel – Little has changed in the home of Miri Gad Messika's parents since two years ago, when Hamas-led gunmen swept into the tiny community less than three miles from the eastern edge of Gaza, killing more than 100 people and kidnapping 32 others.
Perch notes from the fighting that day that the walls are still damaged, and the shadow of bullet-beaten tiles crackles with every step of Messika. To the side lay a stuffed panda doll, dusty and discarded on what was left of the kitchen counter.
“We've always said this place is 99% heaven and 1% hell,” Messika said, her eyes sweeping across the room before looking out into the Raston Courtyard.
Miri Gad Messika, a Beer resident who was at the kibbutz on the day of the October 7, 2023 massacre, is shown in her parents' destroyed home on the second anniversary of the attack.
(Yahel Gazit / for time)
Part of Heaven was a place she had known all her life as a third-generation resident of Piv, with its printing press and basketball team. Hell? It was the periodic rocket attacks during decades of flare-ups between the Hamas militant group and Israel that would send residents racing to their safe rooms.
“But we knew how to manage it,” she said. “We just went into the safe room and closed the door. That's all.”
But 10 minutes after the fateful Saturday morning of October 7, 2023, Messika knew it was a “historic event.”
Visitors point to photographs of their loved ones who were killed at the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023.
(Yahel Gazit / for time)
“We weren't prepared for this kind of thing,” she said.
On Tuesday, the second anniversary of the attack, Messika and others across Israel remembered the day that sparked the country's longest war, shattering Israelis' long-held sense of security and renewing it all over again. The scars endure like the lingering smell of soot in her parents' house.
According to Messika, four beer residents remain in Hamas hands, but none of them are alive, adding to the killing of 102 people – almost 10% of the Kibbutz's population. And while several hundred residents have returned to live here, most remain in alternative housing while awaiting a reconstruction project to repair the 134 homes destroyed in the attack, including Messika.
Messika is building a new home and is adamant that she, her husband and their three children will continue to live here among the community of survivors. But there are days – like Tuesday – when she wakes up with a migraine that makes her “want to never wake up.”
“How do you process the loss of 102 people?” she said.
The Hamas operation began around 6:29 a.m. and included rockets and drones, paragliding commandos and teams of fighters riding in pickup trucks and motorcycles from Gaza across southern Israel. By the time it was over, about 1,200 people had been killed, two-thirds of them civilians, Israeli authorities say, and about 250 had been kidnapped.
There is hope here and throughout the region that a war may soon break out. Last week, President Trump introduced 20 point world plan since then it has been accepted – for the most part – Hamas and IsraelField Final negotiations are taking place this week in Egypt, with the expectation that all the hostages – 20 who are alive and 28 thought dead – will be handed over in the coming days.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged U.S. support for Israel in a statement Tuesday and said the peace proposal “offers a historic opportunity to close this dark chapter and create the basis for lasting peace and security for all.”
But even if that happens, said Shosh Sasson, 72, there was a sense of something that had been irrevocably broken.
“I never thought that such an attack would happen here. We always felt safe. But now the ground beneath our feet feels shaky. Yes, even now, because the problem is not over,” said Sasson, who came with her husband to pay their respects in a shelter that has become shy on the highway outside Beer.
Her husband Yaakov agreed. “For the future it will always be like this. Our neighbors don’t want to live on friendly terms with us,” he said.
Nearby in Reim, site of the Nova music festival where about 300 concertgoers were killed, visitors walked through a memorial site displaying posters of the victims and descriptions of their final moments.
I never thought that such an attack would happen here. We always felt safe. But now the ground beneath our feet feels shaky
– Shosh Sasson, Israeli citizen
A few yards away, a tour group from Oegles' Wings, an organization that encourages Christians to visit and support Israel, listened to 26-year-old Chen Malka as she described her experience surviving the Nova attack. When she finished, the priest led the prayer with his hand on Malki's head as others raised their hands to the sky.
“We pray for the destruction of Hamas and the destruction of the evil just a few yards away from us in Gaza, father,” he said.
As he spoke, there was an explosion in the distance, and then another. One of the wing organizers, Orlov, assured the group that this was “Israeli activity in Gaza. Something to worry about.”
Standing beside the mass of people was 55-year-old Kati Zohar, who continued a vigil in front of a memorial for her daughter, 23-year-old Bar, who was killed, while trying to alert police that Hamas fighters were nearby, Zohar said.
She and her husband moved four months ago to the city of Sderot – 20 minutes away – to be near their daughter's memorial.
“Every time I feel like I miss her, I come here and sit with her, drink a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, talk to her… because this is the last place she was alive and happy,” she said.
Although once a happy person, “I'm not happy anymore, and I don't think I will be again,” she said. “Part of me is missing.”
Her sadness, Zohar said, was matched by her disappointment that the Israeli army did not do more to stop the attacks and save her daughter, and her anger that the war was still going on with hostages who still had not returned even as the world turned against Israel.
Israel's campaign since the attack has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians so far, most of them civilians, has left almost 170,000 wounded and has all but destroyed the enclave, even as almost all Gazans are now displaced. The United Nations, human rights groups, experts and many Western governments accuse Israel of committing genocideField
Israel denies the charge, despite facing unprecedented levels of opprobrium.
“Everyone says Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, so what Gaza did in Israel on October 7 is not genocide?” Zohar said.
She added that she did not believe that peace with the Palestinians of Gaza was possible. “If they're not sending missiles, they're drones or balloons, or else October 7,” she said.
“We are not trying to harass them, we are not sending missiles or drones,” she added. “We say: 'Let's live in peace, you live in peace.' But they don't want it.”
ACLED, a conflict monitor, released a report on Tuesday detailing attacks in Gaza by the Israeli military since October 7, 2023. The report counted more than 11,1110 air and drone strikes; More than 6,250 shellings, artillery or rocket attacks and about 1,500 armed clashes.
Bury resident Messika felt similarly disillusioned about the prospects for peace. Before the war, the residents of Kibuzzim tried to help the Ghazans by hiring them for work or accepting them for medical treatment. And she remembered her father telling her about going to Gaza to eat falafel – “He used to have the best falafel, he always said” – and buying food from his plant-based markets. But ideas about helping the Ghazans were born out of naivety.
“We know there are no innocent civilians in Gaza… They hate us,” she said, adding that Trump's plan, which includes disarmament of Gaza, was the right decision. Messika was still discussing with other residents whether all of the damaged houses should be demolished, or if some should be preserved as a memorial.
“Some people say we can't go back to live near a place like this. It would be like living near Auschwitz,” she said. But for her, it was a matter of turning Oct. 7 into a learning opportunity. Without this, she insisted, there would be no suffering. Although the Kibbutz Council said it would continue with the demolition, she appealed and awaited a new verdict.
“The next generation they need to learn and see with their own eyes to get through this,” she said. “It's not enough to make a website or a memorial. This is a testament to history, for what happened to our friends. And I don't want it to be destroyed.”
About 10 miles away, in Sderot, people flocked to a mountain on the edge of town that over the years has become a popular vantage point for views of Gaza, complete with a telescope – cost: five shekels – for a closer look at the landscape. Suddenly, in the distance, a large cloud of smoke blossomed somewhere beyond the destroyed edge of the Gaza camp.
Some raised their smartphones to record video. Others nodded in appreciation and praised the Israeli military's “work ethic” during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Behind them, children played in the afternoon sun.
