Residents of kibbutz destroyed in 7 October Hamas-led attacks grapple with how to rebuild

Residents of kibbutz devastated in 7 October Hamas-led attacks struggle with how to rebuild

Dalit Ram Aharon and her husband Achi say they want to return to Nir Oz “in the memory” of the friends they lost in the 7 October attacks

Birds now nest and coo among the ceiling tiles in the abandoned dining hall of Kibbutz Nir Oz, once the lively centre of a tightly knit Israeli community of 400 people that was shattered by the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023.

“We used to come and see each other, eat together. There were lots of activities here, also holidays to celebrate,” says Dalit Ram Aharon, who is giving me a tour with her husband, Achi.

At the glass entrance doors, pocked with bullet holes, there is a grim reminder of what happened to the residents who are still missing.

Each household’s postbox carries stickers placed there after the attacks three years ago: red for those killed, black for those taken hostage. “That’s one out of four of us: murdered or kidnapped,” Dalit says. “Including children and babies.”

As Israel observes the third anniversary of its deadliest day ever, it is another painful moment of reflection for the kibbutz’s residents. The community lies just a mile (1.6km) from the Gaza border and was among the hardest hit.

Time seems frozen at the nearby charred home of the Siman Tov family, where a wind chime hangs by the door. A photograph shows Tamar and Yonatan with their three children, twin girls Shahar and Arbel, five, and their two-year-old son, Omer.

The parents were shot through the door of their bomb shelter, which was meant to protect against rockets fired from Gaza, not gunfire.

A red sticker on a postbox indicates those who were killed in the Hamas attacks; black indicates those who were taken hostage

Dalit, who survived with Achi and their three children by hiding in their own shelter for nearly 12 hours that day, remembers the final social media messages Tamar sent to neighbours.

“On that day in the morning, she wrote in the woman’s group, at the beginning, ‘Is everyone fine?’ Then, at another point, she wrote, ‘They are shooting us.’ And after that she wrote with a lot of mistakes, ‘We are very injured,’” Dalit tells me.

“From what we understand, they torched the house and the children died from suffocation, so all the family was killed.”

An estimated 500 Palestinians, led by Hamas’s elite Nukhba force fighters but also including civilian looters, some of them children, took part in the assault on unsuspecting Nir Oz.

Forty-one Nir Oz residents and foreign workers were killed, along with six people who had fled to the kibbutz from a nearby party.

Seventy-six people from the kibbutz were taken to Gaza, including nine bodies, with 14 hostages taken alive and killed in captivity. The last living hostages from Nir Oz were returned to Israel on 13 October 2025, and the remains of the last deceased hostage, Amiram Cooper, were brought back two weeks later.

As we walk through the greenery, it is hauntingly quiet apart from birdsong and the mewing of hungry stray cats. Dozens of fire-damaged homes, once simple one-storey buildings in Nir Oz, have now been demolished, leaving only rows of reinforced concrete safe rooms that failed to keep people safe.

The Aharons want some damaged houses left standing as evidence of what happened. “We really support that,” Achi says. “People should see what happened, should see the destruction, the pure hatred that happened here.”

The couple point out where a teacher, Maya Goren, was killed in the kindergarten, and the improvised memorials where three of the seven members of the kibbutz security team were killed after fighting Hamas gunmen.

The findings of the Israeli Defense Forces investigation into what happened at Nir Oz highlighted how the army — thrown into disarray by the unprecedented simultaneous assault on more than 20 communities and multiple military posts — completely failed to come to the rescue here.

On 7 October, the first soldiers arrived in the kibbutz about 40 minutes after the last Palestinian attackers had left. Almost every household endured killing, violence, including sexual assaults and rape, looting and kidnapping.

Dalit stops to show me a tree planted long ago by her parents, who were co-founders of the kibbutz, known for farming and peace activism. They survived the 7 October attacks physically unharmed but died just months later.

Next door is the small home of Shiri Bibas, mother of ginger-haired boys Ariel, four, and nine-month-old Kfir. The three, taken from their home, became symbols of the Gaza hostage crisis.

“This is the hardest house for me because Shiri was a very, very good friend of mine,” Dalit says quietly. “She was like a sister. We even got pregnant together - me with my daughter and her with Ariel. They became best friends also. We used to laugh that they were going to marry.”

Dalit says Shiri Bibas, who was killed along with her two children after being taken hostage, was “like a sister”

“Shiri was very, very funny. She was a happy person - a mother,” Dalit says. “She lived a simple life. She never did anything to anyone.”

While Shiri’s husband, Yarden, was freed alive by Hamas in a Gaza ceasefire deal in February 2025, she and her sons — held by a different armed group — were killed.

Hamas blamed an air strike early in the Gaza war for their deaths, but Israeli forensic experts, who examined the bodies after they were returned later that February, said they were murdered by their captors and their bodies mutilated.

Many of the bereaved from Nir Oz, including Yarden Bibas, have left for good. But with 20 houses renovated or rebuilt, a few former hostages have returned to live there.

They include Gadi Moses, another kibbutz co-founder and the oldest living male hostage released during the Gaza war, and Yair Horn, who pauses to speak with the Aharons as he passes by in a golf buggy. Dalit and Achi are determined to return as well.

“We’ll come back for the memory of Shiri and for the people that didn’t have the chance to live here, and for the memory of my parents, and to continue our roots, and for my children, because this is our home,” Dalit says.

But she, Achi and their children — currently displaced and living in an apartment in a town farther north — face a two-year wait for Nir Oz to reopen fully.

“Terrorists penetrated 97% of the households and burned down almost 50%,” says Emi Palmor, director of the rebuilding project. “Now it’s the only place in Israel that has to be completely demolished and completely replanned.”

She says it is difficult to redesign the kibbutz so it feels like home without triggering fresh trauma for those who return.

“It’s a huge debate – a very painful debate,” Emi says. “Some people say, ‘If I come back here, I want the entire area to look serene. I don’t have to be reminded because I remember every day the people I lost.’ Other people say, ‘There is such denial – if we will take down the last houses, who will ever believe?’”

About 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage after an estimated 6,000 Palestinians crossed the Gaza border during the attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023.

The war that followed between Israel and Hamas has killed more than 74,200 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose overall figures are regarded as accurate by the UN.

Despite the US-brokered ceasefire deal that brought the last hostages home a year ago, violence has continued, including near-daily Israeli attacks on Gaza. Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.1 million people have been displaced and much of the territory lies in ruins. US President Donald Trump’s peace plan is at an impasse.

For Israelis, questions remain about accountability for the failure of Israel’s security forces to prevent the 7 October attacks. People from Nir Oz support a full state commission of inquiry and still have major security concerns.

Survivors, including the Aharons, are living with post-traumatic stress. Dalit recalls how her eldest son, Uri, turned nine on 7 October 2023 — the day they spent hiding in their bomb shelter. “He told me, ‘Mum, I don’t want to die on my birthday,’” she says. “You know people don’t understand that we still live this horrible day.”

This anniversary of the attacks is the first with no hostages left in Gaza. “It’s a very big relief,” Dalit says. Achi says the time has now come to focus on healing personally.

“Until the hostages came back, it was the only thing on our mind,” he says. “Now you have the time to concentrate on yourself, on what you lost, what you need. Now it’s our recovery or some kind of recovery as much as we can.”