Gaza Envelope

A day with a survivor of the Re'im music festival massacre

It has been a busy week here in Israel with a series of meetings as well as attending various events. There is material for a few longer and deep digging posts and they are in the works, but for now I just wanted to summarize my visit today with guide Amit, a Nova Music Festival survivor, to the Gaza Envelope. This is basically the Israeli border area that surrounds Gaza where all of the October 7th attacks took place.

In the morning we drove down to Sderot, a community of some 33,000 people that is less than a kilometre away from the actual Israeli-Gaza border. Before entering the town we climbed a look-out post to see the area and the nearest Gazan towns right across the border, Beit Hanoun and Jabalia. As Amit commented, the IDF was ‘very active’ in the area today and the ‘muffled bangs’ and sonic booms I described earlier were pretty loud being so close to the actual hostilities.

After that we drove into the town were most residents have since returned and some readers will remember my comments earlier this week on the many playgrounds here. Well, in Sderot they are fully re-purposed for war, this particular piece looks fun on the outside, but it is actually made of reinforced concrete and doubles as a bomb shelter. All houses and apartments here have built-in shelters, nothing is left to chance. But on October 7th these defences were only partially useful: in addition to rockets Hamas forces were actually roaming through town.

Some of you will also recall my post ‘Tinoket’ on the two young girls saved with their mother being shot behind the wheel of her car. We now know that the mother purposely drove to Sderot’s police station in the hope of finding safety, not knowing that it was captured by Hamas fighters who held on to the place for the better part of the day. Israeli forces in the end attacked and in the process destroyed the building and this is what it looks like today:

These are the buildings from across the road from where Israeli fighters fired on the Hamas captured police station.

After that we carried on to Re’im, the site of the Nova Music Festival where 364 people were murdered and where many women were raped and tortured before they died. Amit spoke of how he and a few lifetime buddies decided to attend the festival and how three close friends would join them later. He told the stories of their lives together, how they grew up, their kids and their aspirations for life. He did a real character development on them with photos and some video (which he keeps private) and so he set the stage to describe what happened on October 7th starting at 6:29AM.

He barely made it out alive with three of his friends, the other three - a couple and a friend - hid in a nearby shelter. Fate treated them differently than Amit, Hamas terrorists threw a few hand grenades into that shelter and that ended the lives of his friends, two of whom were married and leave two young kids behind. Amit also shared his stories about his inability to sleep normally and the ever present depression since that day. His therapist encouraged him to revisit the site and to keep talking about it and that is what he is now doing as a guide.

The Re’im site itself today leaves you speechless. It is a site of mass murder and the horror of that day is palpable. There are no graves, just makeshift memorials. Many come to commemorate and pray at the site, there was one young female soldier who was on her knees wailing in front of one of the shrines. As I walked around the site there were simply no words. A deep and unprecedented sad numbness. Emotions come later; tears welled up when we were back on the bus driving away from the site. At least that was my experience.

We drove past the various Kibbutzim that were attacked, and ended the day at the car graveyard. Some 1600 cars were attacked and destroyed and authorities have gathered all of them on one spot in order to clean them of human remains and adjudicate the insurance claims for each car. Yes, mundane administrative tasks are part of this process too.

We know now that Hamas has announced it will gladly do this again and again. With help from Iran. Until there are no Jews left in the Middle East. But that is for another day to discuss further.

I was taken by Amit and what must be in psychological terms be ‘survivor’s guilt’. He managed to take the listener into October 7th and his journey after that. And with explosions and military convoys around us it was not all that difficult to surmise that we are still in the middle of that long and bloody journey. Still Amit and I shook hands and were able to produce a smile. Life goes on or as some of survivors of the music festival say, “We will dance again”.

Thanks for joining and thanks in particular to the new paid subscribers and those that have renewed. We’re on a journey here and I am so pleased you are all a part of that. And: keep the comments and feedback coming.