‘This Is Where I Want to Be’

When Ayelet Khon moved again to the Kfar Azza kibbutz together with her husband two months after the brutal Hamas-led assault of Oct. 7, the very first thing she did was hold a string of rainbow-colored lights up on the entrance patio.

At evening, when darkness drenches this neighborhood, the twinkling colours are the one lights seen.

“We are going to keep these lights on and never turn them off — even if we’re out for the evening — they are lights of hope,” Ms. Khon mentioned she advised her husband, Shar Shnurman.

Eight hundred individuals used to dwell right here, together with households with youngsters who scampered about within the evenings. Everybody who survived the assault was evacuated on Oct. 8. Since then, their houses have been darkish. Even the streetlamps are gone, mowed down when tanks plowed by means of the slim lanes because the Israeli Military arrived to defend in opposition to the attackers.

Ms. Khon, 56, and Mr. Shnurman, 62, are the one residents who’ve returned to date. At evening, the silence is eerie, punctured episodically by the thunderous sound of bombs exploding in Gaza.

Some individuals might imagine they’re loopy, coming again right here, simply the 2 of them, Mr. Shnurman mentioned. However to him, coming house was pure.

“We came back for the most basic reason: This is our home,” mentioned Mr. Shnurman, a gregarious big of a person. “This is where I want to be. It’s the most logical thing, to want to be home.”

He nonetheless thinks of this spot, a stone’s throw from Gaza, as a chunk of paradise, or, because the locals who lived underneath the specter of missiles for years put it, “99 percent heaven, 1 percent hell.” Half of the houses had been broken within the assault, however nature has continued on its merry method. The swordlike leaves on the squat palm bushes put on the intense inexperienced sheen of the desert winter, and thick bougainvillea vines that cling to homes spill purple flowers all about.

It’s a communal settlement with no neighborhood. The eating corridor that served sizzling lunch on daily basis is closed, and the final retailer is shuttered. There is no such thing as a mail, and there aren’t any on-line deliveries. To purchase groceries, it’s worthwhile to depart the kibbutz. Ms. Khon, an acupuncturist and therapeutic massage therapist, can’t work; her consumer base was the kibbutz, and nobody is round.

About 200,000 Israelis had been evacuated after Oct. 7 from cities and farming communities like Kfar Azza that abut the Gaza Strip and had been hit onerous throughout the assault, and from villages close to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, the place shelling by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah intensified on the similar time.

The federal government has put displaced residents up in resorts and is footing the invoice for his or her meals. However extended evacuations of this scale have by no means occurred earlier than in Israel, and with the warfare now getting into its fifth month, the unstated query on everybody’s thoughts is whether or not anybody who lived close to Gaza will ever really feel it’s protected sufficient to return.

Some displaced residents from Kfar Azza mentioned it was untimely to even take into account returning earlier than the federal government authorised resettlement in cities inside 2.5 miles of the border with Gaza, the place the Israeli Military has been waging a warfare to destroy Hamas. Mr. Shnurman and Ms. Khon didn’t ask for permission to return, though the military’s regional Gaza division has mentioned that residents fascinated by returning have the choice of doing so, based on a navy spokesman.

Greater than 60 Kfar Azza residents had been among the many roughly 1,200 individuals in Israel who had been murdered on Oct. 7, and a few 18 males, girls and youngsters from the kibbutz had been among the many roughly 240 who had been kidnapped. Hamas continues to be holding 5 hostages from the kibbutz.

“We are not going home until the hostages are back home,” mentioned Ronit Ifergen, 49, a mom of three from Kfar Azza.

So Ms. Khon and Mr. Shnurman, who hasn’t resumed his manufacturing unit job but, spend their days collaborating in what has grow to be a well-liked pastime in Israel: cooking for troops within the space who’ve heard about his barbecue and her banana bread by phrase of mouth.

They’re by no means solely alone. Kibbutz members who do their navy reserve responsibility on-site cease in for warm goulash, and journalists and others usually come to see the devastation with their very own eyes: the charred row of homes the place the younger adults lived, the bullet holes in kitchen cupboards, the upended mattress underneath which Doron Steinbrecher was hiding when she was kidnapped.

Images present Ms. Steinbrecher together with her lengthy blonde hair pulled again, smiling for the digicam, carrying a shiny gown for an evening in town. She continues to be being held hostage in Gaza and regarded gaunt and fearful in a video launched on Jan. 26 by her Hamas captors.

Ms. Khon was having her morning espresso on the patio on Oct. 7 when she heard a barrage of missiles that turned the sky overhead a chalky white. The noise was so loud that Mr. Shnurman thought a helicopter had landed on their home.

They checked on their next-door neighbor, whose husband was away, after which hunkered down of their bed room that doubles as a protected room. Twenty minutes later, the neighbor’s husband referred to as and mentioned he couldn’t attain her. May they test in on her once more?

“Shar went over, and when he got back, he told me, ‘They murdered Mira,’” Ms. Khon mentioned. “I said, ‘That’s not funny.’ And he said, ‘I’m not joking.’”

The couple suppose the one motive they survived is as a result of their unit and the neighbor’s unit are hooked up, and the terrorists should not have recognized there was one other household within the complicated.

“I realized then, we’re in a fight for our lives here,” Mr. Shnurman mentioned. “There was a war going on outside our window. And where was the army?”

It took 30 hours till Israeli troopers rescued them from their protected room, the place that they had no meals, water or electrical energy. They stored their voices down whereas listening to the sounds of gunfire and shouting in Arabic exterior. Once they emerged, they noticed our bodies and bullet casings all around the kibbutz, and the air was crammed with the stench of blood and burned houses.

Like everybody else, the couple had been evacuated to a lodge north of Tel Aviv. However they didn’t know what to do with themselves there. They love cooking and feeding individuals, and so they didn’t also have a fridge. So on Dec. 10, the fourth evening of Hanukkah, they moved again to their snippet of paradise.

Mr. Shnurman goes for a stroll each morning. “Every day I pass the houses of the dead, and every morning, I cry all over again,” he mentioned. “And then I come home, and I know: This is the right place to be.”

Different residents can’t bear the considered returning. “My mother visited just once, and she hugged me and burst out crying, and said, ‘I’m scared to death just being here,’” Ms Khon recalled. “For me, it was the opposite. The desire to go home was greater than the fear.”

Coming again to the kibbutz meant that life received, Mr. Shnurman mentioned. “We beat the death that knocked on our door,” he mentioned.

“Our strength as Jews is that after the Holocaust, we didn’t say, ‘No fair.’ We pulled ourselves up and built a country,” Ms. Khon mentioned. “We beat Hamas by coming back here. They came and said, ‘We’ll uproot you,’ but they failed. We came back to our home. Our victory is that we’re staying here.”