Yuval Haran stood in the blackened, torched expanse of what was once his parents’ dream house in Kibbutz Be’eri. The only visible color came from a row of photos propped up on the rubble-strewn ground, showing Haran’s seven family members who were abducted to Gaza.

The location of the kitchen where his parents once loved to cook was now identified by the crumpled shell of a stove and a dishwasher, its door wrenched open, the interior and ground littered with broken shards of dishes.

A stray cat sat on the dishwasher door, licking itself in the ruins of the destruction wreaked by Hamas terrorists as they detonated the home with explosives.

“It’s not easy for me to take people into the house where my father was killed,” said Yuval, referring to Avshalom ‘Avsha’ Haran, murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7, “but it’s important to me that people know what happened here. And this is just one house. Every house here has a story, a story that’s an entire world in and of itself.”

When terrorists attacked, 12 members of the extended Haran family were spending the Simchat Torah holiday weekend together, including Yuval’s parents, Avshalom and Shoshan Haran, Yuval’s sister, Adi and her husband Tal Shoham, their two children, Yahel, 3, and Naveh, 8, and Yuval’s aunt Sharon Avigdori and her 12-year-old daughter Noam.

Shoshan Haran’s sister and brother-in-law, Eviatar and Lilach Kipnis, were also part of the weekend plans, said Haran of his aunt and uncle, whose house, now torched as well, is down the street, and who were “the most hospitable people on earth.”

By the end of that brutal, black Shabbat, when hundreds of Hamas terrorists attacked Be’eri, killing more than 100 people and taking 25 captive, Yuval’s father, Avshalom, 66, was dead, as were his aunt and uncle, and his uncle’s caregiver, Paul Castelvi.

Yuval, 37, and his partner, Annalee, were not home in Be’eri that Shabbat. They were, by chance, at a music festival near Eilat, “as far away as you could be,” he said.

Early that morning, during the rocket barrage that marked the start of the assault, said Haran, his father got everyone into the safe room while his mother prepared hot chocolate for the grandkids. It quickly became clear that it was not a regular rocket attack, as news came on that terrorists had attacked the kibbutz and were burning people and torching houses, assaulting families and gunning them down in cold blood.

Yuval’s father took a kitchen knife and stood outside the house’s safe room until Yuval’s mother and sister convinced him to join them inside.

“They heard voices and terrorists laughing outsideץ They saw the bullets whistling by,” said Yuval.

After hours of hiding under the bed in the room, following the massacre unfolding through text messages and what they heard outside, the family decided to give themselves up to the terrorists, said Yuval.

The last words the family heard his father say were, “That’s it, it’s over.”

The family was yanked out of the safe room through the window by the gunmen, with his mother and sister, niece and nephew, aunt and cousin summarily separated from his father and brother-in-law.

The terrorists tried to separate the two children from their mother, Adi, but she fought to keep them with her. Then all six were marched to the kibbutz fence, just down the block, past the homes of their friends and neighbors.

“They saw what was happening all around them,” said Yuval, who heard the details much later, after some of his family was released from captivity.

The hostages were walked in the direction of Gaza, toward the kibbutz fields where the sun can be seen setting every evening — considered one of Be’eri’s most coveted views.

“This is one of the prettiest places in the kibbutz. It’s absurd, because my wife and I would go into fields to watch the sunset nearly every evening,” said Haran. “It’s a dissonance that you can’t imagine.”

For an entire week, Yuval had no information on the fate of his family. For the first few days, he thought perhaps they were all still hiding, and tried to get security forces to check on their house. His father’s body was then found, and the rest of the family was identified as held captive in Gaza.

Yuval and his younger sister Shaked mourned their father, burying him on October 18 in Omer, the Beersheba suburb where he was born and raised. Yuval quickly became the face of his hostage family, his features drawn and sorrowful, as he and others carried a long banner at protests and marches featuring the faces of members of his family — those who had been killed and those taken hostage to Gaza.

Forty-nine days after the attack, on November 25, six of those relatives were released as part of a temporary ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas: Yuval’s mother, sister, niece and nephew, his aunt and cousin.

“Having them come back gave me so much strength,” he said.

Yuval’s brother-in-law, Tal Shoham, a therapist by trade, the “quietest, gentlest soul,” is still in captivity, and Yuval is not allowed to share the few details that he does know.

“I have to believe he’s alive,” said Yuval. “When they were all there, we didn’t know anything, and I said that as long as I didn’t know anything, I could believe they would return and that’s what I believe about Tal — but every day that passes makes it harder.”

Haran continues to front the family’s fight for Tal, showing and talking about his parents’ home and kibbutz, guiding all visitors around — from journalists to Jerry Seinfeld.

The story of this family’s experience on that brutal Saturday is the story of Be’eri, a 77-year-old kibbutz founded in 1946 in which the fourth generation since its founders are now raising their own families.

They used to think of this place as heaven on earth. Now, said Haran, who is sticking close to his family in Herzliya, where they are being hosted, he is not sure any of them will return to Be’eri. Even if they do, it probably will not be for a long time yet.

“We’re on hold, from October 7,” he said. “We’re just waiting for Tal.”

His sister, Adi, grew up with Tal, who was raised in nearby Kibbutz Holit, and they were in the same grade at the regional school. So was Itay Svirsky, a friend and next-door neighbor also visiting that holiday weekend, and who was also taken captive, while his divorced neighboring parents, Orit and Rafi, were murdered.

“Everyone else in this neighborhood was killed,” said Haran. “I can talk about it without mentioning the names, but if I think about who lived in each house….,” Haran swallowed hard, looking down, unable to finish the sentence.

Until October 7, Yuval and Annalee lived across the way from his paternal, octogenarian grandmother, who survived the massacre while in her own home. She is now in a nursing home in Beersheba.

Every home in Be’eri was occupied by someone Haran knows. In fact, as the kibbutz’s IT manager, he has been to every one. He even coined the passwords for most of residents’ computers.

He spent three years living outside Be’eri, in Tel Aviv, but decided to come back with Annalee and live on the kibbutz. Adi and Tal had also lived in Be’eri when they were starting their family but could not handle the rocket barrages and had moved up north three years ago. They were visiting for the weekend when terror struck on October 7.

A slight distance from the ruined houses, parts of the kibbutz still look as they always did — a calm, manicured community that thrived with the help of its successful local business, Be’eri Print. Yuval’s father, an economist, served as the CEO of the Kibbutz Economies Group, and was involved in directing the print business.

Yuval’s mother Shoshan is the founder of Fair Planet, an internationally acclaimed project that helps farmers, providing an estimated one million Africans with a reliable source of food.

Touring the community, Yuval stopped at the kibbutz cultural hall, where a row of newly completed and dedicated metal sculptures depict several kibbutz founders, including his maternal grandmother, Rena Havron, who was born in Israel, met her husband and then founded Be’eri.

She died two years ago and her husband, Yuval’s grandfather, died last year.

They were true kibbutzniks, said Yuval, so accustomed to communal living that his grandmother “didn’t even know how to boil an egg.”

“I’m so glad they didn’t see this,” said Yuval. “The kibbutz will return, people will return. I’m not sure we will. People were killed outside my front door whom I’ve known my whole life.”