October 7 attack: Residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, destroyed by Hamas, want to return home, but it is not easy
Author, Yolanda Nell
Place of work, BBC Middle East correspondent
Message Place, Kibbutz Nir-Oz
In the empty dining room of Kibbutz Nir Oz, birds now coo among the ceiling panels. It was once home to a close-knit Israeli community of 400 people, which was all but destroyed in an attack by Hamas and other armed groups on October 7, 2023.
“We came here, met, ate together. Something was constantly happening here, we celebrated holidays,” recalls Dalit Ram Aharon. Together with Ahi's husband, they show me the kibbutz.
The glass entrance doors, riddled with bullet holes, are a terrible reminder of the fate of the kibbutz residents.
Each family's mailbox still bears the stickers that appeared after the attack three years ago: red for dead, black for taken hostage. “One in four of us has been killed or kidnapped,” says Dalit. “Including children and babies.”
On the third anniversary of the bloodiest day in Israeli history, kibbutz residents are reliving painful memories. Nir Oz is located just 1.6 km from the border with the Gaza Strip and was one of the hardest hit communities.
Time seems to have stood still at the burned-out house of the Siman-Tov family nearby, where a bell still hangs by the door. The photo shows Tamar and Jonathan with their three children: five-year-old twins Shahar and Arbel and two-year-old son Omer.
The parents were shot through the door of the shelter room, a room designed to protect against rockets fired from Gaza, but not machine-gun bullets.
Dalit, who escaped with Ahi and her three children that day after spending almost 12 hours in a secure room in her house, recalls the last messages Tamar sent to neighbors on social media.
“In the morning she wrote to the women’s group: “Is everything okay?” Then, after some time: “They’re shooting at us.” And then, with many mistakes: “We are very badly wounded,” says Dalit. “As far as we understand, the house was set on fire and the children suffocated. The whole family died."
It is estimated that about 500 Palestinians took part in the attack on Nir Oz, which was taken by surprise. The main striking force consisted of militants from the elite Hamas Nukhba unit, but they were also joined by civilian looters, including minors.
In Nir Oz, 41 local residents and foreign workers were killed, as well as six people who fled to the kibbutz from a nearby party.
76 people were kidnapped from a kibbutz in Gaza, including the bodies of nine dead. Another 14 hostages captured alive subsequently died in captivity.
The last surviving hostages from Nir Oz returned to Israel on October 13, 2025. The remains of the last hostage to die, Amiram Cooper, were returned two weeks later.
We walk among the greenery, and there is an unusual silence around us, broken only by the singing of birds and the meowing of hungry stray cats. Dozens of fire-damaged houses - simple one-story buildings typical of Nir Oz - have already been demolished. All that remained of them were rows of reinforced concrete protected rooms, which that day could not save the people in them.
The Aharon couple want some of the destroyed houses to be preserved as evidence of what happened. “We fully support this,” Ahi says. “People need to see what happened here, see the destruction, the naked hatred that was shown here.”
They show the site where kindergarten teacher Maya Goren was killed and makeshift memorials for three of the seven members of the kibbutz self-defense unit who died fighting Hamas militants.
The results of the IDF's investigation into what happened at Nir Oz showed just how serious the military's failure to respond was. The army, overwhelmed by the unprecedented simultaneous attack on more than 20 towns and several military installations, did not come to the aid of the kibbutz residents during the attack.
On October 7, the first Israeli troops entered Nir Oz, approximately 40 minutes after the last Palestinian attackers had abandoned it. Almost every family on the kibbutz faced murder, violence, including sexual violence, rape, robbery or kidnapping.
A Dalit woman stops at a tree planted years ago by her parents, one of the founders of a kibbutz known for its agriculture and peace activists. Dalit's parents were not physically harmed during the October 7 attack, but both died just a few months later.
Next door is the small house of Shiri Bibas, the mother of red-haired children - Ariel, who was four years old, and nine-month-old Kfir. All three were kidnapped from their home and became symbols of the Israeli hostage tragedy in Gaza.
“This is the hardest house for me because Shiri was a very, very close friend,” Dalit admits. “She was like a sister to me.” We even became pregnant at the same time - I with my daughter, and she with Ariel. Our children also became best friends. We joked that one day they would get married."
“Shiri was a very cheerful, cheerful woman, a mother,” Dalit says. “She lived a simple life. She didn't hurt anyone."
Shiri's husband, Yarden, was released by Hamas in February 2025 as part of the Gaza ceasefire. However, Shiri herself and her two sons, who were being held by another armed group, died.
Hamas claimed they were killed in an airstrike early in the Gaza war. But Israeli forensic experts who examined the bodies after their return later in February said the hostages were killed in captivity and then their bodies were violated.
Many bereaved residents of Nir Oz, including Yarden Bibas, decided not to return to the kibbutz. However, 20 houses have already been repaired or rebuilt, and several former hostages have returned to live here.
Among them are Gadi Moses, one of the founders of the kibbutz and the oldest surviving male hostage freed during the Gaza war, and Yair Horn, who stops to talk to the Aharons as he passes by on a golf cart. Dalit and Ahi are also determined to return.
“We will return for the memory of Shiri and those who were not given the opportunity to continue living here, for the memory of my parents, to preserve our roots, and for the sake of my children. Because this is our home,” says Dalit.
However, Dalit, Ahi and their children, who now live in an apartment in a town north of the kibbutz, will have to wait another two years before Nir Oz is fully restored and opened for the return of residents.
“Terrorists entered 97% of the houses and burned almost half of them,” said reconstruction project manager Amy Palmor. “This is now the only place in Israel that needs to be almost completely demolished and redeveloped.”
One of the biggest challenges, she says, is rebuilding the kibbutz so that returning residents still feel like it's home, but without forcing them to relive the trauma in the new environment.
“This is a very big and very painful discussion,” Amy says. “Some people say: ‘If I come back here, I want everything around me to be calm and nothing to remind me of what happened. I don’t need reminders - I already remember the people I lost every day.” Others object: “They are already trying to deny what happened. If we demolish the last destroyed houses, who will then even believe that it happened?”
During the attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, when an estimated 6,000 Palestinians crossed the border into the Gaza Strip, some 1,200 people were killed and 251 people were taken hostage.
Israel's subsequent war with Hamas has killed more than 74,200 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry. The UN considers its total death toll to be reliable.
Despite a US-brokered ceasefire that brought the last hostages home a year ago, the violence has not stopped. Israel strikes Gaza almost daily. Almost the entire population of the sector - 2.1 million people - was forced to leave their homes, and much of the territory lies in ruins. US President Donald Trump's peace plan is at an impasse.
This anniversary of the attack marks the first time that there are no more hostages left in Gaza.
“It’s a huge relief,” says Dalit. Ahi believes that now is finally the time to focus on her own psychological rehabilitation.
“Until the hostages returned, we couldn't think about anything else,” he says. “Now it’s time to think about yourself, about what you’ve lost and what you need.” Now it’s time for us to rebuild as much as possible.”
