2 years after Hamas-led attack, an Israeli town struggles to rebuild

BEERI, Israel  — Little has changed in the house of Miri Gad Messika’s parents from two years ago, when Hamas-led militants blitzed into this tiny community less than three miles from Gaza’s eastern edge, killing more than 100 people and kidnapping 32 others.

The scorch marks from the fighting that day still mar the walls, and the underbrush of bullet-shattered tiles crackles with Messika’s every step. To the side lay a stuffed panda doll, dusty and discarded on what remained of a kitchen counter.

“We always used to say this place is 99% heaven and 1% hell,” Messika said, her eyes sweeping across the room before looking out into the ravaged courtyard.

Miri Gad Messika, a Beeri resident who was in the kibbutz on the day of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, is shown at her parents’ destroyed home on the second anniversary of the attack.

(Yahel Gazit / For The Times)

The heaven part was the place she knew all her life as a third-generation resident of Beeri, with its printing press and basketball team. Hell? That was the periodic rocket attacks during the decades of flare-ups between the militant group Hamas and Israel that would send residents racing into their safe rooms.

“But we knew how to manage that,” she said. “We just went into the safe room and closed the door. That’s it.”

But 10 minutes into the onslaught that fateful Saturday morning on Oct. 7, 2023, Messika understood it was “a historic event.”

Visitors point to photos of their loved ones who were killed at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023.

(Yahel Gazit / For The Times)

“We weren’t prepared for such a thing,” she said.

On Tuesday, the second anniversary of the attack, Messika and others across Israel recalled the day that sparked the country’s longest war, shattered Israelis’ long-held sense of security and entrenched anew the hatreds and divisions long a part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The scars endure like the lingering smell of soot in her parents’ home.

Four Beeri residents remain in Hamas’ hands, but none are alive, Messika said, adding to a tally of 102 people who were killed — almost 10% of the kibbutz’s population. And while a few hundred residents have returned to live here, most remain in alternative housing, awaiting a reconstruction project to repair the 134 houses destroyed in the attack, including Messika’s.

Messika is building a new house and is adamant that she, her husband and their three children will continue to live here among the community of those who survived. But there are days — like Tuesday — when she wakes up with a migraine that makes her “want to never wake up.”

“How do you digest the loss of 102 people?” she said.

The Hamas operation began around 6:29 a.m. and involved a rocket and drone barrage, paraglider commandos and teams of fighters fanning out on pickups and motorcycles from Gaza across southern Israel. By the time it ended, about 1,200 people were killed, two-thirds of them civilians, Israeli authorities say, and roughly 250 people were kidnapped.

There is hope here and across the region that there may soon be a denouement to the war. Last week, President Trump presented a 20-point peace plan that has since been accepted — for the most part — by Hamas and Israel. Final negotiations are underway this week in Egypt, with the expectation that all hostages — the 20 who are alive, and the 28 thought to have died — will be handed over in the coming days.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a statement Tuesday, pledged U.S. support for Israel and said the peace proposal “offers a historic opportunity to close this dark chapter and to build a foundation for a lasting peace and security for all.”

But even if that were to happen, said Shosh Sasson, 72, there was a sense of something having been irretrievably shattered.

“I never thought an attack like this would happen here. We always felt safe. But now the ground under our feet feels wobbly. Yes, even now, because the problem is not finished,” said Sasson, who came with her husband to pay their respects at a shelter-turned-shrine on the highway outside Beeri.

Her husband, Yaakov, agreed. “For the future it will always be like this. Our neighbors don’t want to live with us in a friendly way,” he said.

Nearby in Reim, the site of the Nova music festival, where about 300 concertgoers were killed, visitors walked around a memorial site, featuring posters bearing images of the victims and a description of their last moments.

A few yards away, a tour group from Eagles’ Wings, an organization that brings Christians to visit Israel and support it, were listening reverently to 26-year-old Chen Malca as she described her experience surviving the Nova attack. When she finished, a priest led a prayer, putting his hand on Malca’s head as the others raised their hands to the sky.

“We pray the destruction of Hamas and the destruction of evil, just a couple of yards away from us over in Gaza, Father,” he said.

As he spoke, an explosion boomed in the distance, then another. One of the Eagles’ Wings organizers reassured the group that it was “the Israeli action activity in Gaza. It’s nothing to be worried about.”

Standing apart from the mass of people was 55-year-old Kati Zohar, who kept vigil before a memorial for her daughter, Bar, 23, who was killed as she was trying to warn police that Hamas fighters were nearby, Zohar said.

She and her husband moved four months ago to the city of Sderot — a 20-minute drive away — so as to be near their daughter’s memorial.

“Every time I feel that I’m missing 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.

Though once a happy person, “I’m not happy any more, and I don’t think I will be again,” she said. “A 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 by her anger that the war was still going on with the hostages still not returned even as the world is turning against Israel.

Israel’s campaign since the attack has so far killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, left nearly 170,000 wounded and all but obliterated the enclave, even as almost all of Gaza’s residents are now displaced. The United Nations, rights groups, experts and many Western governments accuse Israel of committing genocide.

Israel denies the charge, even as it faces unprecedented levels of opprobrium.

“Everyone is saying Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, so what Gaza did in Israel on the 7th of October, it’s not genocide?” Zohar said.

She added that she did not believe peace with Gaza’s Palestinians was possible. “If they’re not sending missiles, it’s drones, or balloons, or another 7th of October,” she said.

“We’re not trying to disturb them, we’re not sending missiles or drones,” she added. “We say, ‘Let us live in peace, you live in peace.’ But they don’t want that.”

ACLED, a conflict monitor, released a report Tuesday detailing attacks in Gaza by the Israeli military since Oct. 7, 2023. The report tallied more than 11,110 air and drone strikes; more than 6,250 shelling, artillery or missile attacks and about 1,500 armed clashes.

Messika, the Beeri resident, felt similarly disillusioned about the prospect of peace. Before the war, kibbutzim residents tried to help Gazans, hiring them for jobs or and taking them for medical treatments. And she remembered her father telling her about going to Gaza to eat falafel — “It used to have the best falafel, he always said” — and buying produce in its vegetable markets. But notions of helping Gazans were born of naivete.

“We know that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza…. They hate us,” she said, adding that Trump’s plan, which involves disarming Gaza, was the right solution. Messika was still debating with other residents whether all the damaged houses should be torn down, or if some should be preserved as a memorial.

“Some say we can’t come 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 that, she insisted, the suffering would all be for nothing. Though the kibbutz’s council said to go ahead with the demolitions, she appealed and was awaiting a new verdict.

“The next generation, they need to learn and see with their own eyes, to walk through it,” she said. “It’s not enough to make a website, or a memorial. This is evidence for the 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 city’s edge, which over the years has become a popular vantage point for a glimpse 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 bloomed somewhere beyond the destroyed edge of Gaza’s Nuseirat camp.

Some lifted their smartphones to record video. Others gave an appreciative nod and lauded the Israeli military’s “work ethic” during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Behind them, children played in the afternoon sun.