Hope is not a word readily associated with October 7. Just after dawn, Hamas terrorists broke into southern Israel from Gaza, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of young festival goers and wiping out entire families who lived in small, peaceable communities near the border. It was the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and the Kfar Aza kibbutz was one of its most hellish sites. Amidst the relentless gunfire and grenades, there was another sound. For 14 hours, two babies could be heard crying inconsolably. Guy and Roi Berdichevsky were 10 months old, and entirely alone. The body of their mother, Hadar, was in the kitchen where she had most likely gone to fetch them milk; their father, Itay, lay dead in the “safe room”, a few feet away from his baby boys. On a day when death had dominion, the survival of the twins felt like a miracle, a small piece of joy to set against the nation’s intolerable loss.

In their newly-orphaned innocence, the tiny brothers symbolised a humanity entirely absent in the monsters who had murdered their parents. “And pity like a newborn babe, striding the blast,” says Macbeth. I never really understood what Shakespeare meant by that line; I do now.

Almost a year has passed since the atrocities, and I have travelled to the Shefayim hotel in central Israel to find out what happened to those iconic twins, and to meet their adoptive parents, Ofir and Tom Alon. Ofir (née Rosenfeld) is Guy and Roi’s aunt, the sister of Hadar. Ofir and Hadar were two of six Rosenfeld children born on the Kfar Aza kibbutz; four of the siblings chose to stay on as adults, raising their children around the corner from their parents. (Only a few days before the attack, Hadar and Itay, who lived next door to the Alons, moved to the other side of the kibbutz, a quarter of a mile away, to a bigger house where they had more space for their growing twins.) It was an idyllic set-up in a close-knit rural community of about 900 souls living in small, unpretentious, single-storey houses set in a magical, undulating landscape. Many of the survivors from the kibbutz are now living here in Shefayim, put up by the government temporarily and unable to return to homes which overnight became a charnel house.

Emily Cohen, a British businesswoman who has been rallying support for Kfar Aza survivors, warns me that everyone I meet today will either be a widow, a widower, or will have lost a parent, a child, a sibling or a close friend. A modern, airy place with lots of pale, exposed wood and potted greenery, Shefayim has the feeling of a pleasant civic library, perhaps because it is so hushed. As Tom and Ofir and I talk over coffee at a large table in the reception area, people pass by, moving slowly as if the ground beneath their feet might prove treacherous. Some are still recovering from physical injuries, all have invisible mental scars. I notice many of the residents wearing hoodies or T-shirts emblazoned with a name: Emily (British citizen, aged 28), Doron, Keith, Ziv and Gali (27-year-old twin brothers). These are the Kfar Aza residents who are still held hostage in Gaza. Even if you didn’t know it, you might sense this is the Heartbreak Hotel. 

“On the day before, October 6, we were celebrating my mother’s birthday,” Ofir begins. “All the children and the grandchildren come to be there on the kibbutz and celebrate for her. So it was wonderful, a very special occasion. It turned out to be the last time we would be together, all of us.”

Although the Alons already had three young sons of their own, Ofir says she was in no doubt she wanted to have the twins after their parents were killed. On her phone, she finds me a picture from autumn 2022, when she and Hadar were both heavily pregnant. The sisters stand in profile, proudly displaying their bumps and smiling an identical broad Rosenfeld girls’ smile. 

“Hadar and Itay were expecting the twins when we were having our third. They were together even before birth, really, they were close neighbours, and we’d see them daily, so the special connection started between the children even before they were born.”