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by Oren Ziv for 972Mag
Oct 12, 2023

Saturday, 6:30 a.m. Sirens are wailing across Israel’s south and center, but I only wake up in Tel Aviv when a friend — another photojournalist — calls. In my sleep, I can tell that something’s started at the Gaza fence; as a photographer, I’m used to getting ready fast, and I try to understand what’s going on while running to the car.

In recent years, I’ve covered every war that Israel has waged on the Gaza Strip, but we realize while driving south that something different is happening this time. On Route 6, we see smoke rising from a number of villages, but decide to continue to Sderot. Reports of militants invading a number of Israeli communities near the fence are starting to trickle out.

Without understanding the extent of what’s happening in Sderot, we drive toward the city but get stopped at a checkpoint. A police officer aims a cocked gun at us. We make a U-turn and head toward Ashkelon, where I’ve covered no small number of rocket attacks. The situation is far worse this time. The smoke in the distance makes clear there are a number of affected areas, some without enough rescue workers, or any at all; they need to prioritize where to go first. In less affected areas, residents are putting out fires by themselves with hoses.

. . .

The scenes in the kibbutz are indeed extremely difficult. Much of it has been destroyed; mostly the youth living quarters. Security and rescue forces are clearing out bodies and weapons, still searching the area. Many were killed in their beds, or as they were just waking up. The breach in the gate from which the Palestinians entered hasn’t been repaired, and a trail of burned vehicles, weapons, bodies, and personal belongings show the path that the attackers took inside the village. In the background, behind the village gates, smoke rises from Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza. When the rocket sirens aren’t wailing, you can hear the fighter jets and artillery.

The following day, with the reports from Kfar Aza taking hold around the world, we join another press tour — this one in Kibbutz Be’eri. There, too, the damage is considerable: more than 100 killed, homes destroyed completely from rocket fire, and off-road vehicles, weapons, and bodies scattered everywhere.

Some of the homes have been left open, and from the outside you can see how a regular morning was abruptly cut off: food on the table, a fan still whirring, laundry hanging on a line, photographs on the fridge. Here, as in Kfar Aza, even amid all the destruction, it’s hard to fathom the extent of the horror.

All week, I’ve been getting messages from friends and families stuck in their homes and unable to get to the south, searching for any information about what has happened to their loved ones. In the first few days, no one from the authorities spoke to them.

A friend from Gaza recounts that a family member of his, a teenager, got through the fence after the assault began, like many young people who weren’t part of the organized assault — since then, he’s been missing. A security official said that a lot of the Palestinian dead are not fighters but youth who entered through the breached border fence. One report from Kfar Aza shows a number of them standing in a line with bikes and camping equipment that they stole, heading back into the strip.

Paying the price for crimes they didn’t commit
The very first news event that I photographed was in 2003 at the age of 17: a Palestinian blew up a bus full of passengers in Haifa, murdering 23 people, many of them quite young. I heard about the attack through friends at school, rushed home, got my film camera, and headed to the scene.

Before I left, I managed to call my mother to update her, and she told me not to go. But when she realized I was going anyway, she just asked me to be careful. It was a difficult scene — a burned out bus, bodies covered in shrapnel. When I went home later that evening, I discovered I knew two of the victims, who attended the high school next to mine.

Those were the days of the Second Intifada, when 1,500 Israelis and 4,000 Palestinians were killed over five years. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s mantra that “there is no partner” for peace among the Palestinians, alongside the horrible violence experienced in those years, led many to the conclusion that there is no solution to this conflict besides more and more violence, producing a sharp rightward shift in Israeli politics. The Zionist left almost completely disappeared, and, outside the radical left, for a very long time no one went out into the streets to protest or demand an alternative horizon.

Twenty years later, more Israelis and Palestinians have been killed in a matter of days than in any of those five years. The public’s position has shifted even more dramatically to the right, if that were possible. As my colleague Orly Noy wrote earlier this week, even many on the left are demanding revenge and calling to “erase” Gaza.

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