Two years ago, on 7 October 2023, 3,000 terrorists easily broke through Israel’s southern border-defense system and killed 1,200 people — including 38 children.
Another 257 were dragged into Gaza’s tunnels.
Even now, two years later, 40 hostages — living and dead — remain in Gaza’s undergrounds.
People were slaughtered in Be’eri, Nahal Oz, Nir Oz, Re’im — kibbutzim of southern Israel.
They were killed at the Nova Festival — a rave where young people had come the night before to dance.
They were killed in Kfar Aza, Sderot, Ofakim, Nerim, Khalidzikkim, Ashkelon.
Twelve hundred people were murdered barbarically.
Many were raped; many mutilated. Some had their heads cut off, others their breasts severed.

Many of those taken — into slavery, into Gaza — perished; many were executed.

Neighbors

Many residents of the kibbutzim were called “the writers.” They lived along the Gaza border, in southern Israel, and believed in creating and peacefully co-existing with a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel.
Palestinians from Gaza often came to them with requests.
From Be’eri to Gaza is less than four kilometers; from Kfar Aza about one and a half.
Locals used their own cars to drive Gazans to Israeli hospitals in the south — including one of the world’s leading oncology centers.
Every New Year the Be’eri kibbutz collected donations to help people in Gaza.
So told me Iran, one of the few survivors I met in that now empty kibbutz — he watches over what remains and cleans what can still be cleaned.

Leaving Gaza, Jews left the synagogues but took the books — took the Torah.
The next day all the synagogues were blown up.

Israel withdrew its army from Gaza in 2005. I was in Israel then. I remember the Israel Defense Forces carrying out Jews who refused to leave their synagogues.
They left the buildings but took the sacred books and Torah scrolls. The day after they left, every synagogue was blown up.

Many of those expelled from the Jewish settlements in Gaza later lived in the very kibbutzim that Hamas burned and butchered on October 7 2023.

The stories of many hostages are well known in Israel.
The entire Bibas family — mother, father, and two small children — was dragged into the tunnels. Those boys were known as “the little red-heads.” Baby Kfir celebrated his first birthday somewhere down there in a tunnel. A year ago I wrote that one wants to believe they are alive — although the chances that infants survived a year underground in concrete, with little food, poor water, darkness, and no air, were minimal. Now we know: the children and their mother were murdered. The bodies were returned; forensic experts found the children were killed with bare hands.
Another horror: four hostages shot point-blank by Hamas as the IDF approached — they could have been rescued.
Not only Jews were dragged into Gaza tunnels: there were Druze, Muslims, Thai and Nepalese workers — they too were killed.

What is happening now — the burning Middle East, the great war — began then, 7 October. The Israelis who lived beside Gaza had done nothing to deserve what Hamas did. Their only “guilt” was being Jews — exactly as it was for the Nazis in WWII, for pogromists in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Russian Empire, and later during the Soviet “fight against cosmopolitans.”

Oasis in the Desert

I came to Israel with journalistic experience. I had covered two Chechen wars. I saw a shell hit a water line queue — a fragment sheared off a boy’s legs. I saw Grozny turned into a ghost city after Putin “restored constitutional order,” just like the photos of Stalingrad where my mother stands on the wreck of a Messerschmitt. I saw the bloody pulp of a family trying to flee Grozny — our Niva drove right behind them. In March 2023 I drove across war-torn Ukraine — from Khmelnytskyi through Vinnytsia, Uman, Kyiv, to Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa. But nothing I had seen or heard before compares to what I saw and heard in Israel.

I was in Be’eri on 30 December 2023. This kibbutz was founded two years before the State of Israel (1946) in the north-western Negev Desert. Settlers made an oasis. Mandarin trees still stand everywhere — only there’s no one left to harvest them. Over a hundred people were killed in Be’eri.

It was founded by socialists who believed in working together, since Jews in Europe had no right to own land. They could, say, build a porcelain factory in Vienna, but it could be seized at any moment (as Putin now seizes Western businesses) because the land wasn’t theirs. When they came to Palestine they were happy to work the land themselves. Among them were professors, teachers, rabbis. Together they turned this part of the Negev into an oasis of mandarin groves, vineyards, and profitable workshops — including a printing plant that produced plastic bank cards and driver’s licenses for all Israel. The industry subsidized the farming losses, making Be’eri a wealthy kibbutz.

In its western part every house is burned. Between them fruit trees still stand; over-ripe mandarins litter the ground. Symbols mark the walls: diamonds for where a body was found, another diamond for a hostage taken; circles show where army, police, or medical teams worked. Inside the charred houses — burned sinks, sooted fridges, a bottle of red wine left from the Simchat Torah feast the night before; toothbrushes on sinks, charred furniture, children’s toys, clothes. In Be’eri, nearly one in ten residents was killed.

A similar scene in Kfar Aza, just 2–3 km from Gaza. There three rows of houses near the western gate were burned. Young singles lived there. Vinyl records still hang on walls; now portraits of the dead or abducted hang beside them. Eighty people were killed, nineteen taken hostage. The IDF arrived after more than a day; another two days to liberate the kibbutz. Now these places are almost empty. In Be’eri I met ten volunteers, including a young man from South Africa, and the kibbutznik Iran, a tall, thin dark-skinned Israeli who laughed when told that elite U.S. universities teach that “white Jews oppress brown Gazans.” He held a broom in one hand and an automatic rifle slung behind him.

It’s a wild feeling to walk through murdered life. Entire families killed.

Survivors from Be’eri were first housed at a Dead Sea hotel, then in a kibbutz near Be’er Sheva. They don’t know when they’ll return — they would be living in a cemetery. The Kfar Aza people are somewhere near Eilat and the Red Sea.

The Black Mark

I spoke with many people — from Gaza and the West Bank, Israelis, a dentist Vlad Dvoris who identified the dead by their teeth, pathologists who handled charred bodies, psychiatrists, Islamic scholars, officials. I tried to understand the nature of this barbarity.

Preparing to go to Israel I expected to write about rape as a weapon of war. But I could not collect firsthand evidence: victims refuse contact, as do their psychiatrists. A former Google executive recorded a few women; The New York Times published an investigation, much contested. Israel is a deeply patriarchal society; rape is a black mark even for victims. Police still investigate but often lacked DNA samples; even when signs were obvious, evidence was not collected. Rabbi Gitelman of ZAKA (Disaster Victim Identification) told me volunteers saw that Jewish men lay face down — they too were sexually assaulted.

Specialists explained: in this region sexual violence against women and men carries a symbolic meaning — a sign of conquering an entire nation. As one psychiatrist said, “They were not raping individuals — they were raping the Jewish people.”

Israel had never faced so many bodies in one day. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (19 days long) around 3,000 people died — here 1,200 in a single day. Dvoris, a peaceful dentist and reservist, worked six days straight identifying victims at the Shura military base. He kept a diary to stay sane: it began, “We are all afraid of death.” Translating it into Russian left me shaken for weeks.

A forensic pathologist told me of a father and son tied together with barbed wire and set on fire; residue in their throats showed they were alive when they burned.

Ilya, Leor and Gali

I met Ilya Tarashinsky in Tel Aviv — 47, born in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in Israel 27 years. His 15-year-old son Leor was killed in Be’eri; his 13-year-old daughter Gali taken hostage; his first wife Celiah murdered; his second wife Ryuma, mother of the children, survived. He sat in a café in Ramat Aviv rolling handmade cigarettes, smoking constantly. He looked on the edge of madness.

He had his children that weekend — their mother lived nearby. At 6:30 a.m. the siren sounded. He told the kids to run to the mamad (safe room). He grabbed an iron — the only “weapon.” Messages appeared in the kibbutz chat: white cars racing in, men with guns and green headbands. “Hold half an hour, the army is coming,” they wrote. The IDF arrived eight hours later.

Hamas tried to force the door; then set fires — black, toxic smoke filled the room. Leor moaned, “Dad, I’m hurt.” Gali’s pajamas were soaked with his blood. Bullets riddled the door. Leor struggled to breathe. Ilya threw a mattress against the door, then saw Gali open the window — a burst of gunfire. He pushed her out and jumped after. He saw her lying still, thought dead. He ran. “I became a wild animal,” he said. “I abandoned my children and ran.” He hid in a vineyard until he heard Hebrew voices at 2 p.m. and realized he was saved. Later he found his wife alive; they learned Gali had been taken hostage and freed after eight weeks. She said she was kept in a Palestinian home where the women resented her but did not touch her.

Devil’s Advocates

Now I want to tell you about my conversation with Palestinians. One question tormented me. Let’s assume, perhaps Palestinians do have reasons to hate Israelis. Let’s assume they view them as enemies—that is, they feel they are in a state of war. I understand that since 2005, when Israel—Ariel Sharon was prime minister then—decided to withdraw the Israeli army from Gaza, it was assumed the Palestinian Authority would administer Gaza. But the following year there were elections, and Hamas won. After that, there were never any more elections in Gaza. Hamas pushed its political rivals from the Palestinian Authority off rooftops. That was their method of political struggle.

To be fair, one must admit Hamas set up a fairly decent healthcare system in Gaza, where a visit to a doctor cost one dollar. Obviously there weren’t specialists of the caliber you find in Israel, so when people fell gravely ill—especially with cancer—they went to Israel. They also went to Israel for work. Water and electricity also came from Israel.

Which made my question even more painful: where did such barbarity come from? Why cut off women’s breasts? Why rape with metal tools? Why chop off men’s heads with shovels? Why burn children alive? No interpretation of Islam permits or encourages this.

I asked a Palestinian from the West Bank, and then another from Gaza, about this. I asked why their compatriots behaved so barbarically toward their enemies—even if they didn’t know they were butchering, raping, and killing those very “writers” who had fought for Palestinian rights.

Both of my interlocutors replied that it was a lie. I gave examples; I told them the forensic pathologist’s story from the Institute of Forensic Medicine and other accounts that are impossible to publish. They said it was all lies, inventions of Jews and Jewish media. The one on the West Bank invited me to come meet him. He set the meeting at the Cave of David. I didn’t go. I had no desire to end up as yet another hostage in the tunnels. With my interlocutor from Gaza we spoke over Zoom—naturally with no video—through an interpreter. I promised him I would quote his answers exactly (see here). “I wasn’t there,” he said, “and I won’t deny that terrible things happened. But I ask you: what is the cause? Who incited and abetted the growth of this violence? Isn’t it the Israeli occupation? Why does everyone believe what Israeli media say, while we—the victims—are treated as liars? Is it really that they always tell the truth and we always lie? That’s impossible. I will not defend barbarism, I will not defend violence, but Israel weakened the Palestinian National Authority. Who killed the peace process? Who killed Palestinians’ hopes? Who has been blockading the Gaza Strip all these years?” He also said that people listen to victims on the Israeli side, but “I am a victim too. My son, a child of 14, was gravely wounded and nearly died—and he is not to blame for anything. I am not a militant, and my son is not a militant and will not take up arms. My home—my family’s home—was completely destroyed. I move from place to place. What is my guilt?”

This man could not give his name. I know it, but of course I will not publish it.

How could it happen that the world forgot so quickly about October 7—about the 1,200 who were murdered, raped, mutilated, burned alive? How did it happen that the world came to feel compassion only for the “thousands of dead Palestinians”?

The absolute sense of hopelessness washed over me when, three weeks later, I returned from Israel to the comfortable campus of an elite U.S. university. When colleagues asked, “So, how were the holidays?”—these were winter break at American universities—I answered that I had been in Israel. In response I received a telling silence, as if I had said something improper. Just like in the USSR, where the word “Jew” was studiously avoided; they would say “persons of Jewish nationality.” How could it be that the world so quickly forgot October 7, the 1,200 people murdered, raped, mutilated, burned alive? How did it come about that the world felt compassion only for the “thousands of dead Palestinians”? Yes, we must feel compassion for them and demand an end to the war. But this world managed to forget that deep underground—shielded by those very “peaceful Palestinians”—hostages sit in tunnels, without light, without fire, without communication. The little red-heads were there. Two boys. Their father and mother. The father is alive. Their grandmother and grandfather were killed. Their mother was killed too. And then the little ones were killed as well. And another hundred hostages besides. Children, teenagers, women, the elderly… Israelis will bring back every one of the dead; they must be buried—such is the law. But how many will come out alive? And those who do—will they be able to live a normal life?

Being Strong

On October 7, 2023, the barbarians came out of Gaza—cutting, killing, raping—and the Middle East went up in flames again. Many Americans, especially American leftists, including university professors, believed Israel made a mistake—that it should not have gone into Gaza. I was told: try to understand, the Middle East is not the U.S. or Europe. It is the Middle East; strength is respected here. Israelis said: they attacked us and carried out this massacre precisely because they decided Israel had grown weak. Books will, of course, be written about how it could have happened that Israeli intelligence—despite warnings, despite data indicating that Hamas, 2,000 militants, were clearly training and preparing—somehow missed it all. The very same intelligence that carried out, one after another, stunning operations to eliminate Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon—and later in Iran. How could it be that in Kibbutz Be’eri, with five military bases around it, people waited eight hours for rescue? There was, of course, a small kibbutz self-defense unit—but they didn’t even manage to reach their weapons. And what could 30 or 50 people do against a well-armed horde?

In Chechnya I was told: in the early 1990s, when the war was on, Chechens took their own elderly up into the mountains, and in Grozny remained Russian elderly, including a nursing home where there were many Jews evacuated there during World War II. Much has been told of how the Israelis sent planes and evacuated everyone. In the same way they evacuated elderly Jews from Donetsk. One Ukrainian oligarch, Kolomoisky, paid for several kilometers of a “road of life,” arranging with Russian and Ukrainian troops so ambulances could take out the elderly. And here, in Israel, people waited for their army—for their defenders—for hours and days. Somewhere they waited eight hours, as in Be’eri; somewhere two full days, as in Kfar Aza. How could this have happened?

Polls showed 80% of Gaza residents supported Hamas. But knowing the regime that existed in Gaza, it’s clear Gaza residents had no real options for resistance. The tunnels Hamas built are a very expensive project. And the incredible amount of weaponry that ended up in Gaza was paid for with aid from the European Union, the United Nations, and various Arab states—behind which stands Iran.

Over two years of war in Gaza, tens of thousands of people have died—both militants and civilians; children died; trucks delivering food to Gaza were shot up; Palestinian stringers working for various Western media organizations were killed. Gaza, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists—only ruins. In Europe there is an unprecedented wave of antisemitism, unseen since World War II and the Holocaust. The actions of Israel’s government are being imputed to the entire 15-million-strong Jewish people still scattered across the world. “Grant every nation the right to have its own scoundrels,” Ze’ev Jabotinsky once wrote. They do not hear; again they do not hear. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, there was an attack on a synagogue in England—two were killed. The BBC and CNN hardly mention the hostages. Tens of thousands are leaving Israel: just now a Jewish school for five thousand pupils opened in Cyprus. Of course, in Israel there are religious fanatics who want war “to the last Palestinian,” but hundreds of thousands of Israelis take to the streets in protest, demanding that Netanyahu’s government end the war. How is one to comprehend, make sense of, live through all this?

*Yevgenia Albats is designated as “foreign agent” in Russia.