2023-11-13 06:15:15
A huge, charmless lobby, plastic plants, fake marble and seventeen floors of rooms facing the salty shores of the Dead Sea: at first glance, nothing has changed at the David Dead Sea Resort in Ein Bokek, vast hotel complex where reservations are generally in full swing in the fall.
However, behind this decor, everything has changed since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. The establishment is always crowded, but armed guards monitor the entrance, the bar has lowered its curtain and the customers are not laughing in the corridors. Gone are the vacationers in swimsuits. In their place, 900 residents of Be’eri occupy the place, after having been evacuated from their kibbutz, on the edge of the Gaza Strip.
In this place usually given over to pleasure and carelessness, entire families today mourn their deaths and their ruined lives. Overnight, their village was transformed into an apocalypse landscape, then a military zone. Of the 1,200 people in the community, 86 were murdered, thirty taken hostage and two disappeared. Not only have a good third of the houses been completely charred, but those that are still standing are devastated and uninhabitable. Here, the funeral followed the funeral in October. Each person we meet is mourning a parent, a friend but also their life before, when horrible memories did not haunt their minds.
At the David Dead Sea Resort, in Ein Bokek (Israel), where families from Kibbutz Be’eri are temporarily housed, November 10, 2023. LUCAS BARIOULET FOR “THE WORLD”
Like them, 220,000 Israelis had to leave their homes in the days following October 7. Those who resided around Gaza, of course, but also those in the northern localities, on the border with Lebanon. Kiryat Shmona, a town of 23,000 inhabitants, turned into a ghost town, deserted when rockets began to rain from the neighboring country. South and North combined, some displaced people were able to find refuge with relatives or in makeshift accommodation, but around 125,000 of them are still in hotels.
Traumatized, disoriented people
The result is that in Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem and in all the tourist sites of Israel, the establishments are overflowing with traumatized, disoriented people, torn from their ordinary existence. To the point that the appearance of certain localities is disrupted: unlike tourists, the displaced do not leave after a few days.
Everywhere, it was necessary to find solutions to send children to school, help their parents resurface, register requests for lost or destroyed identity papers and treat the sick. On the shores of the Red Sea, in the city of Eilat, a branch of the Beilison hospital in Petah Tikva (northeast of Tel Aviv) even opened to cope with an influx of 60,000 displaced people, or more than the total population of this famous seaside resort.
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