2024-01-02 07:16:00
At the bottom of the Red Sea, Yamit Avital clears his mind of the war and the trauma of the Hamas attack for a brief moment.
“There is a form of tranquility in the sea, in the depths,” says Ms. Avital, emerging from the turquoise water of the Gulf of Eilat where she dived more than 20 meters deep.
“It’s like you don’t hear anything anymore, only the music of the sea,” she says.
She and her husband Benny are among the survivors of Nir Oz, one of the kibbutz hardest hit by the Hamas attack on October 7 which left around 1,140 dead, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count carried out in based on the latest official Israeli figures.
About a quarter of Nir Oz’s 400 residents were killed or captured on October 7: of these hostages, 25 are still being held in the Gaza Strip.
Since the start of the war, residents of villages and kibbutzim near Gaza have been evacuated to hotels across the country.
Before the eyes of Nir Oz survivors lies the Eilat coral natural reserve and its diving clubs.
“We are ready to give everything we can” to the families of Nir Oz, said Youval Goren, director of the Aquasport club.
And he’s not the only one: the Israel Diving Federation, resort clubs and dozens of volunteers have stepped up to offer scuba diving and freediving courses, where divers dive into water after a single breath.
Many of the novice divers found that this meditative exercise soothed their trauma.
The volunteer instructors, for their part, felt that the diving was therapeutic for the survivors of October 7.
Discovering the underwater environment, physical activity, breathing and body control exercises, exposure to fear and then overcoming it can alleviate psychological pain, according to experts.
Bring back the smile
“We know that being in water and underwater has significant emotional effects,” assured Yotam Dagan, a psychologist who helped the Diving Federation in this initiative.
The feeling of weightlessness, the slowing of breathing and heart rate “significantly reduce stress, not only during the dive but also in the minutes and hours that follow, sometimes even long after,” adds Mr. Dagan.
Ofer Mor, who led the Federation’s project to teach diving to evacuated families at the Snuba center, said the training was “calm and slow” and focused on each person’s individual needs.
“One of the first comments I received was ‘you made me smile again’,” she says.
For the past two months, volunteer snorkeling instructor Shai Wolf has been showing evacuees proper diving techniques and how to “know peace and quiet underwater.”
“It was so moving to see them progress, feel better and prepare to face a new reality,” Mr. Wolf said.
Benny and Yamit Avital, parents of three children, both took up diving in Eilat.
Benny’s brother was killed defending a nearby village of Nir Oz while they narrowly escaped death, barricaded in their personal shelter.
The couple lost neighbors and friends, murdered or still held hostage in Gaza.
“Breath of fresh air”
For Yamit Avital, “this feeling at 23 meters deep, when the lungs collapse, the diaphragm hurts, the throat chokes and the toes tighten brought me back to the feeling I experienced on October 7” , she says.
“To feel all this and return to the surface, take a breath of fresh air, it’s therapeutic and it’s healing,” she explains.
The couple in their forties will soon have to leave Eilat to be temporarily relocated in the town of Kyriat Gat, in the south of Israel, far from the Red Sea.
“We have a long way to go, we know that, but we were lucky to have been welcomed in this hotel by the sea,” concludes Benny Avital.
02/01/2024 06:15:47 – Eilat (Israël) (AFP) – © 2024 AFP
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