'This is where I want to be'
When Ayelet Khon returned to Kibbutz Kfar Azza with her husband two months after the brutal Hamas-led attack on October 7, the first thing she did was hang a series of rainbow-colored lamps on the front patio.
At night, when darkness pervades this community, the twinkling colors are the only visible lights.
“We will keep these lights on and never turn them off – even if we are away for the evening – they are lights of hope,” Mrs. Khon told her husband, Shar Shnurman.
Eight hundred people used to live here, including families with children who roamed around in the evenings. Anyone who survived the attack was evacuated on October 8. Their houses have been dark ever since. Even the street lamps are gone, mowed down as tanks plowed through the narrow alleys as the Israeli army arrived to defend against the attackers.
Ms Khon, 56, and Mr Shnurman, 62, are the only residents to have returned so far. At night the silence is eerie, occasionally interrupted by the thunderous sound of bombs exploding in Gaza.
Some people might think they're crazy to come back here, just the two of them, Mr. Shnurman said. But for him, coming home was a given.
“We came back for the most basic reason: this is our home,” said Mr. Shnurman, a gregarious giant of a man. “This is where I want to be. It makes the most sense: wanting to be home.”
He still considers this place, a stone's throw from Gaza, a piece of paradise, or, as locals who lived under the threat of rockets for years put it: “99 percent heaven, 1 percent hell.” Half of the houses were damaged in the attack, but nature continued happily. The sword-like leaves of the stocky palm trees bear the bright green sheen of desert winter, and thick bougainvillea vines clinging to houses spread purple flowers everywhere.
It is a communal settlement without a community. The dining room where a hot lunch was served every day is closed and the store is closed. There is no mail and no online deliveries. To go shopping, you have to leave the kibbutz. Ms. Khon, an acupuncturist and massage therapist, is unable to work; her customer base was the kibbutz, and there is no one around.
About 200,000 Israelis were evacuated after October 7 from towns and farming communities such as Kfar Azza, which border the Gaza Strip and were badly hit in the attack, and from villages near Israel's northern border with Lebanon, where shelling by the Iran-backed Hezbollah became increasingly intense in 2013. the same time.
The government has placed displaced people in hotels and is footing the bill for their meals. But prolonged evacuations of this magnitude have never happened in Israel before, and as the war enters its fifth month, the unspoken question on everyone's mind is whether anyone who lived near Gaza will ever feel it is safe enough to return to turn.
Some displaced residents of Kfar Azza said it was premature to even consider returning before the government had approved resettlement in towns within 2.5 miles (4 km) of the Gaza border, where the Israeli army has been waging a war to destroy Hamas. Mr. Shnurman and Ms. Khon have not sought permission to return, although the military's Gaza regional division has said residents interested in returning have the option to do so, a military spokesman said.
More than 60 residents of Kfar Azza were among the approximately 1,200 people in Israel killed on October 7, and about 18 men, women and children from the kibbutz were among the approximately 240 kidnapped. Hamas is still holding five hostages from the kibbutz.
“We won't go home until the hostages are back home,” said Ronit Ifergen, 49, a mother of three from Kfar Azza.
So Ms. Khon and Mr. Shnurman, who has not yet resumed his factory job, spend their days partaking in what has become a popular pastime in Israel: cooking for troops in the area who have heard of his barbecue and her banana bread by word of mouth .
They are never completely alone. Kibbutz members carrying out their military reserve duties on site drop by for hot goulash, and journalists and others regularly come to see the devastation with their own eyes – the charred row of houses where the young adults lived, the bullet holes in kitchen cupboards, the upturned mattress under which Doron Steinbrecher hid when she was kidnapped.
In the photos, Ms. Steinbrecher can be seen with her long blonde hair pulled back, smiling at the camera while wearing a sparkling dress for a night out on the town. She is still being held hostage in Gaza and looked thin and scared in a video released by her Hamas captors on January 26.
Ms Khon was drinking her morning coffee on the terrace on October 7 when she heard a barrage of rockets that turned the sky above her head chalky white. The noise was so loud that Mr Shnurman thought a helicopter had landed on their house.
They went to check on their neighbor, whose husband was away, and then hunkered down in their bedroom, which doubles as a safe room. Twenty minutes later, the neighbor's husband called and said he couldn't reach her. Could they check her again?
“Shar went there and when he came back he said to me, 'They killed Mira,'” Ms Khon said. “I said, 'That's not funny.' And he said, 'I'm not kidding.'”
The couple believes the only reason they survived is because their unit and the neighbors' unit are connected, and the terrorists did not know there was another family in the complex.
“That's when I realized we're fighting for our lives here,” Mr. Shnurman said. “There was a war going on outside our window. And where was the army?”
It took 30 hours for Israeli soldiers to rescue them from their safe room, where they had no food, water or electricity. They kept their voices low as they heard the sounds of gunfire and shouts in Arabic outside. When they came out, they saw bodies and bullet casings everywhere in the kibbutz, and the air was filled with the stench of blood and burned houses.
Like everyone else, the couple was evacuated to a hotel north of Tel Aviv. But they didn't know what to do with themselves there. They love cooking and feeding people, and they didn't even have a refrigerator. So on December 10, the fourth night of Hanukkah, they moved back to their piece of paradise.
Mr. Shnurman goes for a walk every morning. “Every day I pass the houses of the dead, and every morning I cry again,” he said. “And then I come home and I know: this is the right place to be.”
Other residents cannot bear the thought of returning. “My mother only came to visit once, and she hugged me and burst into tears and said, 'I'm terrified to be here,'” Ms. Khon recalled. “For me it was the opposite. The desire to go home was greater than the fear.”
Returning to the kibbutz meant life won, Mr. Shnurman said. “We defeated death that knocked on our door,” he said.
“Our strength as Jews is that after the Holocaust we did not say: 'Not fair.' We pulled ourselves up and built a country,” Ms Khon said. “We defeated Hamas by coming back here. They came and said, 'We will uproot you,' but they failed. We came back to our house. Our victory is that we stay here.”