The traffic of just another business day. The gas station open. A young woman learning to drive in a parking lot. If someone offline were to observe the scene, they would think that life in the Kfar Aza kibbutz and its surroundings was going on normally. But this community is only three kilometers from Gaza, and as you enter it that feeling becomes ambiguous.
Kfar Aza was one of the places hardest hit by the Hamas massacres of October 7, with 64 residents killed and 19 kidnapped. Some families and residents of the 900 who lived on the kibbutz have returned to their homes that were left unharmed. However, most of those who visit them, now without helmets or vests, only stay a few hours, and those who lived in the “young generation neighborhood” area, located next to one of the fences attacked by the militants.
Its rows of small apartments bear witness to the devastation: structures burned and covered in soot; objects scattered inside and outside the houses, disordered rooms, broken glass, bullet holes and even the smell of a dead dog. They are all reminiscent of the pain, still present almost four months later.
A pain that is also heard in the neighboring Gaza Strip. It is raining, but the thunder corresponds to the bombs that Israel continues to launch harshly in the north, and the hum of its planes and drones are from here one more reminder that on the other side there is no contemplation, only death, hunger and destruction exacerbated by the Israeli siege.
Amit Soussana is a link between these two realities. She is one of the eleven Kfar Aza hostages released by Hamas in November, the only one from the “young” neighborhood who has been able to return, something that “breaks her heart” and makes her feel “guilty for being there, and they are not.”
Although it is the third visit he has made to his home, one of the most damaged, it is the first time he has decided to speak publicly about his 55 days of captivity, a period in which he was the entire time “under emotional and physical terror” and “ feeling that every moment could be the last.”
In her story, which she maintains with heavy breathing and a broken voice, she remembers that the kidnapping was “very violent,” that they took her “on foot” to the border after resisting as much as she could “until eventually they tied my feet.” and arms.” An hour-long journey in which they beat her “brutally,” leaving her “face and body bruised and swollen.”
During those almost two months, Soussana claims she was moved from one place to another, always supervised by “heavily armed” guards who “abused me and the other hostages,” both physically and psychologically. With little food and supervised “even when using the bathroom,” she says that one of the places she was was a “tomb-style” tunnel, 40 meters underground, where it was “difficult to breathe” and she felt “ like being buried alive.”
For Soussana and the hostages’ relatives, returning to Kfar Aza and showing it to journalists or visitors from around the world is a way to keep attention on the 136 kidnapped people (a figure that includes four people held captive since 2014) and to demand greater international pressure to achieve his release.
Although it is his fourth return to the kibbutz, Liran Berman assures that “it still feels unreal” and like part of “a horror movie” when he tours the neighborhood where he grew up and where his twin brothers Ziv and Gali lived, today held in Loop. But that does not stop him from coming “to remind me of what happened here, preserve the memory of the deceased and keep the world’s attention on my brothers.”
A few houses away, Dor Steinbrecher looks at her sister Doron’s apartment. She had not been back since October 7 and, although she admits it is “hard”, she considers it “important that people come and see the terrible things that Hamas did”.
And Kfar Aza has also become a kind of museum, a pilgrimage point to understand the dimension of that Black Saturday, to which local and foreign visitors arrive on private tours for which a permit from the army is required. A practice that grows alongside the debate about what to do with the attacked kibbutzim, whether to maintain them as spaces of memory or rebuild them.
Right now, Dor cannot think of discussing a restoration, “until my sister and all the hostages return, nothing else matters.”
Liran, meanwhile, affirms that “we need to rebuild this place” and predicts that “some will return, once the fighting is over and Hamas no longer governs our neighbors.” And when that day comes, he says he continues to believe in “coexistence with the Palestinians.” Of course, with sad suspicion and distrust in his tone, because in his opinion that will only be possible “with the few who are not really involved.”
