All but one of the Israeli hostages released Friday were taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz, an Israeli village near the border with Gaza where Hamas militants took more than 70 people on October 7.
Family members said they were grateful that the 12 hostages taken on the kibbutz were repatriated to Israel, but it was just a “drop in the bucket,” Larry Butler said. 73 years old, to a resident of Nir Oz who survived the attack. Of the 215 hostages remaining in Gaza, around 30 percent are from Nir Oz.
Per capita, Nir Oz is the Israeli village most affected by the October 7 assault.
On that day, around 100 residents of Nir Oz were killed or kidnapped, a quarter of the village’s pre-war population.
On Friday evening, survivors felt some sense of salvation as 12 of their neighbors and relatives – from 85-year-old Yaffa Adar to 2-year-old Aviv Asher – were taken to safety by the Red Cross across the Egypt to Israel.
“Is this my grandmother?” shouted a young girl after residents identified Margalit Moses, 78, their neighbor from Nir Oz, who was waving at them from a Red Cross vehicle.
But this elation was tempered by a broader sense of loss.
“There are children here without parents, parents without children and grandparents with grandchildren but no parents,” Mr Butler said.
“Do you see the baby over there?” he said, pointing to a newborn baby cradled in a woman’s arms. “The husband is in Gaza. »
The village was founded in 1955 as a collective farm whose members pooled their resources and income.
The village’s surviving residents describe their hometown as a left-wing community, dominated by people who hoped for peace with Palestinians across the border in Gaza, even as most Israelis were losing hope in a peace deal. negotiated peace.
Mr. Butler, a Philadelphia native who fought in Vietnam as a Marine, moved to Nir Oz in 1974 because the community — some of which soldiers became peace activists — adopted it at a time when Americans turned their backs on veterans.
But after the Oct. 7 attack, Mr. Butler said his commitment to peace had been shaken.
Thirty of Mr. Butler’s friends were killed and 60 were kidnapped, he said.
“I trusted them,” Mr. Butler said of his Palestinian neighbors. “I was completely wrong,” he added.
After much of the village was destroyed on October 7, most of the survivors moved en masse to a hotel in Eilat, a resort town on the Red Sea.
The mood at the hotel quickly swings between normalcy and sorrow.
Earlier this week, groups of Nir Oz children ran barefoot through the hotel lobby, seemingly oblivious to the trauma around them.
Suddenly, a boy of about 10 interrupted his play. “What is that? I hear shooting,” he said, imagining a semi-automatic weapon that only he could hear.
Thursday evening, when uncertainty over the impending hostage agreement was at its height, Idan Cunio, 8 years old, approached his mother, Paula Cunio, 38 years old, to tell her that he had learned on the news that his twin cousins were going to be released.
“He just says what he wants to be true,” Ms. Cunio said.
The Cunio family has four members still in captivity: David Cunio, 33, his partner Sharon Alony Cunio, 44, and their twin daughters Emma and Yuli.
Sharon’s sister Danielle Alony, 44, and her daughter Amelia, 5, were released Friday.
Irit Lahav, 57, who has spent most of her life in Nir Oz, said being together at the hotel had brought the community closer together. “We were already like family,” she says. “But now it’s more of a family embracing each other.”
However, residents of Nir Oz were recently warned that their stay in Eilat was coming to an end.
In mid-December, they will be moved to an apartment complex in Kiryat Gat, a small, little-known town in central Israel, for a year. It would jeopardize the community fabric that the kibbutz has worked so hard to maintain, residents said.
“Who are you going to meet, just your neighbors in the building?” » asked Ms. Lahav.
For Ms Lahav, a keen triathlete, the five-minute walk from the hotel to the Red Sea is an improvement on the hour-long journey from Nir Oz to the Mediterranean.
Despite this, his training has been interrupted because his bike is still chained to Nir Oz. The attackers left it intact, but they stole Ms. Lahav’s keys, and it is still too dangerous to call a locksmith to cut the lock.
In Kiryat Gat, Ms. Cunio plans to spend her time figuring out what happens next. “We’re starting from scratch,” she said. “The life we had before is over.”
The community will reserve rooms for the hostages, but until they are released, Ms. Cunio is unsure how they will fit into the kibbutz’s future.
One thing is certain, Ms. Cunio said: She and many other survivors will not return to the kibbutz. “There’s nowhere to go back,” she said.
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
