On short trips back to his Kibbutz Nir Am, less than two miles from the Gaza border, Ami Rabin makes sure to water not only his yard, but also that of his neighbors.
“I tell them that their plants are doing great. It’s not always true, but what else am I going to say? I need to keep them connected, so they feel there’s somewhere to come back to,” Rabin, a 70-year-old father of four who was born in Nir Am, told The Times of Israel in his yard, which is dominated by a pecan tree that grew from a sapling that he had planted there 40 years ago.
Rabin and his wife, Nicole, have been living in a hotel in Tel Aviv for the past two months. They are among some 125,000 people from kibbutzim, moshavim, towns and villages near Gaza and Lebanon whose populations were evacuated following the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel on October 7.
“Life here isn’t too bad, but we really want to go back; we talk about it every day,” said Ami Rabin.
Like many other evacuees, the Rabins are trying to maintain their connection with the community and lifestyle they had to leave, while simultaneously resuming some normalcy in their lives as internally displaced persons whose date of return remains unknown.
The populations of at least eight of the evacuated locales in the Gaza border area – including Magen, Yad Mordechai and Miflasim – are slated to remain in hotels until the government deems it safe for them to return to their homes, which since October 7 have come under frequent rocket fire from Gaza.
Some populations, like those of Be’eri and Kfar Aza, which are staying in hotels in the Dead Sea area and near Tel Aviv, respectively, will have to wait longer to return, until the state repairs extensive damage sustained to buildings in both kibbutzim in the deadly onslaught on Israel by some 3,000 Hamas terrorists, who murdered more than 1,200 people, amid other war crimes and atrocities, and abducted 240.
Those hailing from Re’im, Nir Oz and Nirim are slated to move temporarily into housing complexes inside cities (Tel Aviv, Kiryat Gat and Beersheba, respectively).
Related: After Oct. 7, entire kibbutz temporarily resettles in two newly built Tel Aviv towers
The population of Be’eri, the largest affected kibbutz, is slated to move into Kibbutz Hatzerim, near Beersheba, and those from Nahal Oz have already moved into Mishmar Ha’Emek near Afula.
The government body entrusted with coordinating this effort is the Tekuma Authority, which the government established in October, naming it after the new official name of the region known as the Gaza Envelope.
This month, the Authority, headed by Moshe Edri, a retired Israel Defense Forces brigadier general and head of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, received a budget of NIS 18 billion ($4.97 billion) for the years 2024-2028.
A spokesperson for the Authority declined a request for an interview by The Times of Israel. But people involved with rebuilding and populating the region said that the goal and expectation of the government is not only to restore the pre-October 7 population, but to facilitate a significant increase in the number of Israelis living in the communities near Gaza by 2028.
Additionally, the government is investing funds to help individuals return to some evacuated southern municipalities.
Families stand to receive as much as NIS 21,000 ($5,800) a month if they return to their homes situated 4-7 kilometers (2.5-4.3 miles) from the border with Gaza, according to a decree that the Defense Ministry is promoting, the Kan public broadcaster reported Wednesday.
Some evacuees have returned even without a cash incentive, including multiple families from Netiv Ha’asara near the south of the Gaza Strip.
Other evacuees have found alternative housing independently to the rest of their evacuated communities.
Yasmin Ra’anan, a member of Kibbutz Be’eri, recently moved to Nevatim, a moshav near Beersheba, preferring it to staying with the rest of Be’eri’s survivors who are concentrated in hotels in the Dead Sea. She is thinking of returning to Be’eri even as she settles in Nevatim for a period many believe will take at least a year before the kibbutz is ready to be inhabited again.
“You pray and tell yourself that this is all just ‘stuff’, while what matters is that we are alive,” Ra’anan, a 56-year-old mother of three, said of the move. But she’s experiencing “an intense sense of missing what used to be, and who used to be there, while knowing that it will never be the same. And it burns your heart every time anew,” she added.
Many communities have recreated versions of their education frameworks for school and kindergarten-age children, which allow nuclear classrooms to remain together, often with the same teachers, operating independently inside local schools or other infrastructure.
“The ability to keep classrooms together is key to mental rehabilitation,” said Nadav Tzabari, a member of Nahal Oz who works as a teacher and is living in Mishmar Ha’Emek with his partner, Rotem.
The hosting community “is going out if its way to welcome us,” Tzabari said. “They tell us their home is our home. But I distance myself from that idea, because I need to preserve the feeling that my home, Nahal Oz, is my home,” said Tzabari, 34, whose actual home — his housing unit in Nahal Oz — was largely destroyed by rockets from Gaza.
Back at one of the hotels where Be’eri survivors are staying, the David Dead Sea Resort & Spa, the guests last week treated the staff to a dinner they had prepared for them at the hotel’s kitchen. It was a gesture of gratitude for the caring service that many staff have shown the guests from Be’eri for over two months, said Haim Jelin, one of the guests from Be’eri and a former member of Knesset.
Elsewhere, other guests are critical of both the hotels where they’re staying and the government’s handling of placement.
Several hundred guests from Sderot are engaged in a public row with the management of the U Splash Resort in Eilat after the hotel staff told the Sderot guests they would be moved to another hotel to make room for evacuees from Nir Yitzhak. U Splash said it was merely complying with the policy of the government and the municipality of Sderot.
“Moving hotels would destroy all the community work we’ve done here for our children,” Jacky Jeladi, an evacuee from Sderot, said of the plan. “We won’t be evacuated again. From here, we’ll only go back home to Sderot,” he wrote on Facebook earlier this week.
Most of Sderot’s population of about 27,000 people is scattered in multiple hotels in Eilat, Tel Aviv and beyond.
In addition to evacuees from the south, nearly half of all evacuees are from the north, where Hezbollah rocket attacks have prompted the evacuation of multiple border communities, including Kiryat Shmona, a city of more than 20,000 residents.
In Nir Am, as in other places, some residents intend to move away from the restive region, noted Rabin, a shooting range operator who used to head the kibbutz’s local security team. “There are families who have said they are moving away. It doesn’t mean they will actually do it, we’ll see in a few months. But I expect some people, especially from the younger generation, are not going back. It was a traumatic event,” he said of October 7.
Ami and Nicole, however, will be among the first to return, he vowed. “I was brought up by the pioneers who established Nir Am in 1946. I live on the border of the kibbutz, overlooking Gaza,” said Rabin, who participated in the defense of Nir Am on October 7. It ended with multiple killed terrorists and no fatalities from Nir Am’s population of about 700 people.
This history, Rabin said, “informs how we think of the place. It carries a responsibility. You can’t expect a family that moved here seven years ago for quality-of-living reasons to see things the same way,” he added. “We will return and hopefully lead the way for as many young folks as possible.”
In the meantime, the Rabins, and many other evacuees living in hotels, are getting used to something resembling a routine that, despite its many limitations, offers also some perks.
“There are activities. Courses given by volunteers. Ceramics classes,” said Rabin, who is taking a photography course at the Leonardo Boutique Hotel Tel Aviv.
The couple’s room is “rather small,” he said. The food is “not too great,” Rabin added when asked about it, explaining that lunch and dinner are provided by a catering company with a somewhat oily cuisine. “But we go out to restaurants and catch the occasional concert in Tel Aviv. We miss Nir Am terribly but big city life has its appeal. It might be difficult to get Nicole to leave the city,” Rabin said jokingly.
Nir Am’s younger residents, including many families and one of the Rabins’ daughters, are staying at a more central hotel, the Herods Tel Aviv, which has luxury amenities including a spa and beachfront location. Ami and Nicole Rabin enjoy the facilities of that hotel, too, whenever they babysit their grandchildren there, he said.
Yet the couple’s favorite activity in Tel Aviv is to imagine their return to Nir Am with the rest of the kibbutz, he said.
“We can picture the whole kibbutz arriving in buses, returning to done-up homes and the old pathways, unloading trolleys and weeping with joy. That’ll be a much more interesting story than how we pass our days at hotels.”