2023-10-22 22:40:20
Special Envoy to Be’eri (Israel) The houses of the Be’eri kibbutz still have their dishes on the table, as they left them on October 7 when Hamas attacked this and other Israeli communities close to the Gaza border. In this community, 108 residents were killed and an undetermined number were kidnapped, according to the latest official balance, and two weeks later a trail of death remains: houses collapsed by rockets, others with gunshots in the walls, bicycles parked in the doors, half-burnt books, broken windows, overturned sofas, refrigerators full of groceries and, in the courtyards, swings, a bloody mattress… Very close are the cannons with which the Israeli artillery bombards Gaza, which is only a few four kilometers, amid the noise of warplanes. The kibbutz has now become a militarized area where hundreds of Israeli soldiers await the order to invade the Strip.
This small community, where a thousand people lived, is a symbol of the unprecedented blow that Israel has suffered. Rami Gold, one of its residents, speaks from the playground of the nursery school in front of a hundred media from around the world, including the ARA, who have been invited by the Israeli government to visit the site for an hour. “We have to go back and rebuild everything, we will help our people to come back, we will convince them to do it. But they cannot go back until it is a safe place: things in Gaza have to change. Whoever did this has to be punished and if the land invasion is going to take some time, something had to be done.” Since the October 7 attack that killed 1,400 Israelis, Israel has been relentlessly bombing the Gaza Strip, where at least 4,650 Palestinians have been killed, according to the respective governments.
Kibbutzim are communities that were created in the second half of the 1940s, in a project that initially promised to combine Zionism and socialism, based on agricultural or industrial cooperatives. The one in Be’eri was founded in 1946 and its main activity was a large printing house that, among other things, manufactured Israeli driver’s licenses and credit cards.
Before reaching the kibbutz there are large areas of fruit tree cultivation, another source of income, which requires a large consumption of water next to the Negev desert. Unlike most of these communes, which were privatized over the years, the Be’eri kibbutz partly maintained that spirit and was considered by many in Israel to be a place of left-wing people. Gold, a paratrooper veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, explains, with an M-16 rifle slung over his shoulder, that his sister-in-law was “a 70-year-old woman, a pacifist, who twice a week went to the Gaza border to pick up sick people for treatment.” She was also killed in the attack.
“We will not stop until there is nothing left of Gaza”
The man reports that he woke up to the sound of alarms from rockets fired from the Strip, but that they soon discovered that “they were a distraction.” The Palestinian militiamen had made a hole in the fence that encircles Gaza and had also infiltrated the one that surrounds the kibbutz. “I grabbed my rifle and ran over there,” with the community’s 10-man emergency squad. “There were 150 members of Hamas in front of us attacking us with machine guns and hand grenades. I don’t know how some of us survived. All around us whole families were massacred or burned alive – he remembers -. The platoon is designed to hold half hour or an hour until the army arrives, but 10 hours had passed and we ran out of bullets,” he adds.
Ela, a taxi driver from the Israeli town of Ashdod, a little further north, walks among the destruction. Bloody mattresses, half-burnt storybooks on the floor. “They killed and kidnapped women and children. This is what Hitler did,” he proclaims. And he demands revenge: “We will not stop until there is nothing left of Gaza, and I don’t care what the world says. The people there are like animals, the army must kill everyone, including the civilians. They must clean up Gaza “. At the same time, he criticizes Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for not having protected them: “They had everyone in the West Bank to protect the settlers there, but nobody protected the people of the kibbutz.”
It is difficult to understand how the kibbutz families could feel safe in that kind of oasis, so close to the Strip, of one-story houses in the middle of gardens. Unlike the Palestinians in Gaza, every house in this community and others near the Gaza border had by law a panic room to shelter from rockets. But they were designed to withstand explosions, not a militia attack, so the doors could not be locked from the inside, precisely to facilitate access from the outside once the danger had passed. In one of them we find a trail of blood that looks like someone who was dragged outside.
Next to a kibbutz sports center, dozens of Israeli soldiers await the order to enter Gaza. Some are 19-20 years old and say they feel “good vibes” and are ready for whatever it takes. They are convinced that their army is invincible. David Baruch, a major in the Israeli army, directs the operations of the kibbutzim, and explains the situation like this: “If and when we go in depends on the government: it will be when all the pieces are in place; we have plans and we are ready , we will do it at the right time.” He sends a message to Hamas: “Be ready: when we come, none of you will be left.” We ask him what will happen next, and he answers, laconic: “I’ll leave that for the politicians.”
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