If it weren't strangely deserted, Kibbutz Be'eri might seem perfectly normal – at least at first glance. First, there's a shady square, a theater and the giant dining hall in this community village in the north-west of the Negev Desert. Further on, there are well-kept houses, splendid trees and greenery to which an early spring has already added flowers.

Then, suddenly, there's chaos. In just a few meters, a street away, visitors are plunged into a black and gray nightmare, the color of ash and soot. Here and there, only ceramic shards gleam faintly in a crushed landscape of gutted roofs, twisted beams and broken tiles. The interiors are so charred that it's hard to make out the contours of the objects. You have to squint to guess that this curled-up thing on a bedroom ceiling was once a fan. Or to distinguish, beneath this heap of broken plates, a dishwasher with its door ripped off. Time has been frozen everywhere, leaving overturned relics, children's bicycles, basketball hoops and garden chairs along the streets.

In front of the rubble hang photos of the dead and hostages who lived there, in what the survivors unanimously described as a "paradise." An Eden at the gates of hell, to be sure – Gaza, under blockade since 2007, is less than four kilometers away – but the 1,200 inhabitants had come to understand the paradox. Thanks to Iron Dome, Israel's aerial protection system, no rockets from the Palestinian territory had ever fallen on the houses or injured anyone. Whenever the sirens sounded, everyone went to their shelters with armored windows, often transformed into sewing rooms or children's bedrooms. In most cases, these rooms contained no provisions, not a bottle of water, even had fewer weapons, and not even a lock. Even today, most explosions in Gaza do not startle anyone, as if they were just background noise.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, however, death didn't arrive from the skies, and these shelters were often transformed into traps. In the early hours of this Shabbat, also the 77^th anniversary of the foundation of the kibbutz, the attackers overran the well-kept gardens by taking the dirt roads, coming right up to the homes where families were gathered for the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. Hundreds of Hamas fighters crossed all the barbed-wire fences, in Gaza and the nearest settlements, to burn, loot, and kill civilians and soldiers seized straight from their beds.

Funereal calm

In Be'eri, the toll of the massacre was terrible. So much so that the kibbutz quickly became a symbol, with 96 civilians killed, in addition to police officers and Israeli army soldiers. Not to mention the 26 hostages, 11 of whom have still not been released and at least five of whom are reported dead. Furthermore, dozens of houses – around 120 of the 350 in the 70-hectare village – are now completely unusable.

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