Residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the Israeli communities hit hardest during the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, are grappling with how to rebuild as Israel marks the third anniversary of its deadliest day.
The kibbutz, home to a close-knit community of about 400 people, lies roughly a mile (1.6km) from the Gaza border. According to figures cited by the BBC, 41 residents and foreign workers were killed in the assault, along with six people who had fled there from a party nearby. Seventy-six people from the community were kidnapped to Gaza, including nine bodies, and 14 hostages seized alive were killed in captivity.
Dalit Ram Aharon, who survived with her husband Achi and their three children by hiding in their shelter for close to 12 hours, points to the postboxes beside the bullet-marked glass entrance doors of the dining hall. Stickers added after the attacks identify each household: red for those killed, black for those taken hostage.
“That’s one out of four of us: murdered or kidnapped,” she told the BBC, saying the toll included children and babies.
Birds now nest among the ceiling tiles of the deserted dining room, which was once the centre of community life. “We used to come and see each other, eat together. There were lots of activities here, also holidays to celebrate,” Dalit recalled.
Nearby, the burnt-out home of the Siman Tov family stands untouched, a wind chime still hanging by the door. A photograph shows parents Tamar and Yonatan with their three children: five-year-old twin girls Shahar and Arbel, and two-year-old Omer. The parents were shot through the door of their bomb shelter, which was built to withstand rockets fired from Gaza rather than gunfire.
Dalit remembers the last messages Tamar sent to a neighbours’ social media group. “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 said.
“From what we understand, they torched the house and the children died from suffocation, so all the family was killed.”
An estimated 500 Palestinians joined the assault on Nir Oz, led by fighters from Hamas’s elite Nukhba force but also including civilian looters, some of them children, according to the BBC.
The findings of the Israeli Defense Forces investigation into the events at Nir Oz underscored how the army, thrown into disarray by the simultaneous assault on more than 20 communities and multiple military posts, failed to reach the kibbutz. On 7 October, the first soldiers arrived some 40 minutes after the last attackers had left. Nearly every household experienced killing, violence including sexual assaults and rape, looting and kidnapping.
Dozens of fire-damaged homes, simple one-storey buildings, have since been torn down, leaving rows of reinforced concrete safe rooms that failed to protect residents. Dalit and Achi want some damaged houses preserved as evidence of what happened.
“We really support that,” Achi said. “People should see what happened, should see the destruction, the pure hatred that happened here.”
The couple point out where teacher Maya Goren was killed in the kindergarten, and the makeshift memorials for three of the seven members of the kibbutz security team who died fighting Hamas gunmen.
Dalit pauses at a tree planted long ago by her parents, who co-founded the kibbutz, known for its farming and its peace activists. They survived the attacks physically unharmed but died months later.
Beside it is the small home of Shiri Bibas, mother of ginger-haired Ariel, four, and nine-month-old Kfir. The three were taken from their home and 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 said. “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.”
“Shiri was very, very funny. She was a happy person – a mother,” Dalit added. “She lived a simple life. She never did anything to anyone.”
Shiri’s husband, Yarden, was released alive by Hamas under a Gaza ceasefire deal in February 2025, but she and her sons, held by a different armed group, were killed. Hamas blamed an air strike early in the Gaza war, while Israeli forensic experts who examined the bodies after they were returned later that February said they had been murdered by their captives and their bodies mutilated.
Many of the bereaved from Nir Oz, including Yarden Bibas, have moved away permanently. With 20 houses renovated or rebuilt, however, a number of former hostages have returned, among them Gadi Moses, another kibbutz co-founder and the oldest living male hostage released during the Gaza war, and Yair Horn. Dalit and Achi are determined to come back 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 said.
The family, currently displaced in an apartment in a town further north, faces a two-year wait before Nir Oz fully reopens.
“Terrorists penetrated 97% of the households and burned down almost 50%,” said 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 said redesigning the kibbutz so that it feels like home without inflicting new trauma on those who return is a difficult balance.
“It’s a huge debate – a very painful debate,” she said. “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 viewed 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 population has been displaced and much of the territory lies in ruins, while US President Donald Trump’s peace plan is at an impasse.
In Israel, questions remain over accountability for the security forces’ failure to prevent the attacks. People from Nir Oz back a comprehensive state commission of inquiry and retain major security concerns.
Survivors, including the Aharons, live with post-traumatic stress. Dalit recalled that her eldest son, Uri, turned nine on 7 October 2023, the day the family hid in their bomb shelter. “He told me, ‘Mum, I don’t want to die on my birthday,'” she said. “You know people don’t understand that we still live this horrible day.”
This anniversary is the first with no hostages remaining in Gaza. “It’s a very big relief,” Dalit said. Achi said the time had come to concentrate on personal healing.
“Until the hostages came back, it was the only thing on our mind,” he said. “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.”
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