10/7

A collection of intimate stories about the Israeli victims in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

With contributions from Cohen, Haaretz journalist Yaron has interviewed countless people and their families to craft this moving look at the lives and harrowing deaths of Israelis and guest workers on 10/7. The author alternates the heartbreaking, immediate profiles with some history of Israel as well as of the kibbutzim, the small activist, agricultural communities where many of the victims were struck. “The terrorists of Hamas murdered and destroyed the very communities that did more than any others to promote peace between the two peoples,” she writes. Moreover, in story after story, Yaron relates how many victims of 10/7 descended from Holocaust survivors or had moved to Israel for their safety. Beginning with Sderot, she notes how this southern city of immigrants has suffered from Hamas’ onslaught of rockets for many years and how 50 of its citizens were killed on 10/7. A group of elders on a minibus to a Dead Sea resort, many of whom were refugees from the Soviet satellite states, were gunned down on the streets; in Ofakim, one of Israel’s poorest cities, 49 residents were murdered. The author visited Bedouin communities in the Negev, where missiles rained down on the vulnerable residents, as well as the Kibbutz Alumim, where a group of Nepalese students working the fields were killed. The most horrendous toll of all was the 364 people murdered at the Nova music festival site (another 40 were kidnapped). “In the minds of many Israelis, including leading politicians,” writes Yaron, “disengagement from Gaza was the original sin, and a direct line connects Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the strip to the far-right Judicial Reform and massacre eighteen years later.”

Haunting eyewitness accounts of one of the decade’s most catastrophic events.