At first glance, the atmosphere in Tel Aviv is such that one does not get the impression that Israel is at war. On the promenade of Israel's second largest city, people are jogging, young people are playing volleyball on the beach, just a few minutes after the air raid siren sounded and detonations were heard.
Ela (40) explains that she did not seek shelter because the siren was not loud, which means that danger was expected in another part of the city.
"The situation is not normal, everything has stopped, I am afraid, I am afraid for the Jews," she told "Vijesti" in Tel Aviv, 70 kilometers from the Gaza Strip, where on that day the world media reported that an air attack by Israeli forces on a dense entire Palestinian families perished in the populated area of Jabali.
She said that she does not believe in the government because it does not provide answers, and added: "But maybe there are no answers, no one has answers."
Thousands of rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel since the October 7 attack by Hamas, and the "red alert" app allows citizens to receive precise warnings of incoming airstrikes, after which they must go to shelter within a minute and a half. If you find yourself on the street, the advice is to lie down on your stomach and cover your head with your hands.
A detonation is heard when the Israeli air defense intercepts a rocket from Gaza. The efficiency of the "iron dome" is 93 percent, but the projectile sometimes explodes and the consequences can be fatal.
Ela stopped on the street to record a military band playing on the terrace of a hotel where Israelis evacuated from the south are staying.
"It's because of support and strengthening of morale," said Ela, who lost her job due to the war, as well as a large number of people in the service sector, mainly those who serve foreign tourists.
When one walks into the streets of the city on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, one feels that he is not living to the fullest. Numerous restaurants are closed, and shops and exchange offices have reduced opening hours. The work of schools was also disrupted.
From ordinary citizens on the street to diplomats to Israeli government officials, everyone agrees that Hamas must be destroyed.
Roni (17), whom I interrupted in a conversation with a friend on the beach, says that Israelis have the right to defend themselves. After finishing high school, she will serve the mandatory military service, two years for women and three years for men. Roni says he wants to stay in the army.
“We want to continue living. If we stop, they will win," he says of Hamas.
She and her 19-year-old friend Noam say in unison that no one deserves what happened to them and that they don't want war. They point out that Israel is not waging a war against the Palestinians, but against Hamas.
"I don't feel safe in my house," says Roni. He adds that he hopes that the people in Gaza will also live well, "but they are controlled by Hamas."
Noam, who is from Jerusalem, says that Palestinians hate Jews. Asked if it might be because of the attitude towards the Palestinians, Noam says:
"No, the army is good". She said that she hangs out with both Muslims and Christians.
I ask her what she thinks about an independent Palestinian state, and whether East Jerusalem should be part of it.
"No, they have Gaza," says Noam. "Jerusalem is my beginning and end".
Health officials in Gaza say more than ten thousand Palestinians, including four thousand children, have been killed in the war that began when Hamas killed 1.400 Israelis and took more than 240 hostages.
Amihai Shikli, Israel's Diaspora Minister, says that due to the condition of the bodies, they do not yet have the full number of victims of the attack that took place a month ago. He said that Hamas has made a big mistake, that there is no future for it and that it will have to surrender.
"They will be treated like the leaders of the Nazi regime," says Shikli and adds that the attack on October 7 is a wake-up call for the civilized world and Europe.
The agony of the abducted families
At every step in Tel Aviv there are posters with the figures of the abductees, from small children to old people, with the message "Return them now".
The families of the abducted and missing have established a forum so that their message can be heard as far as possible. They gathered the best team of psychologists, journalists, and lawyers to help them in that fight.
Sheli Shem Tov, whose son Omer (21) was at a music festival in the Negev desert where Hamas committed the massacre, says her life stopped at 9 a.m. on October 7, when she was talking to him the first time. Omer was in a panic, he said that shooting could be heard and that people were dying. Based on the location he sent to his family, they saw that the car he got into with his friends to escape was not going in the right direction.
"We saw that they were moving towards the border and entering Gaza. We didn't want to believe it, we thought it was a mistake”.
She said that Omer's friend called her around 20:XNUMX p.m. and said he had to send me a video he got from Telegram. On the video, they saw Omer on the floor of the truck, his hands were tied, Arab voices could be heard everywhere. That's the last time we had any information on him,” Shelley said.
She also said that her son has asthma and that he did not bring medicine with him. "We don't sleep, we don't eat," Shelley said. She hopes that Omer is somewhere underground, in one of the Hamas tunnels - alive.
At least 260 bodies were found at the site of the festival in the Negev desert in southern Israel.
Joni Asher learned that his family had been abducted through a video posted on TikTok from the Gaza Strip, in which he recognized his wife Doron and two daughters in a Hamas pickup truck. Daughters Raz and Aviv are four and two years old respectively and are believed to be among the youngest hostages in Gaza. Their grandmother Efrat Katz was killed before their eyes, and her husband Gadi Mozes was kidnapped.
“The only way I can describe it is hell,” Usher said. “That's the definition of hell.”
"How can I eat when I don't know if my family eats? How can I sleep when I don't know if they are cold or warm?"
Hamas kidnapped 35 children under the age of 10, 18 elderly people. He has freed four civilians so far.
"There is no victory without the return of the hostages," said Joni Asher.
How Hamas sowed death in Kibbutz Kisufim
In Kibbutz Kisufim, a few hundred meters from the border with the Gaza Strip, journalists had to wear helmets and body armor. We were told we had ten seconds to get to the shelter when the siren went off. As we tour the devastated kibbutz, detonations resound all the time.
"They're ours, don't worry," says a defense ministry official.
On that "Black Shabbat", everything started around 6.35:XNUMX a.m., when residents thought they heard rockets from Gaza, which they were used to, and expected them to pass quickly. However, hours passed and they did not know what was happening, they thought that the police and the army would react...
Many from the kibbutz hid in safe rooms in their homes for hours while some fought the attackers outside. Extremists went from house to house, killing families and friends. Some were shot and some were burned alive. In some houses, entire families were killed or kidnapped.
Hamas had an impeccable battle plan that it executed without fail. First, they cut the communication channels in the kibbutz so that the security team could not communicate with each other and call for help.
There were about 130 people in the kibbutz. Eight civilians and six Thai workers were killed, while at least four people were kidnapped and taken to Gaza. The twisted wreckage of burned cars can be seen all over the kibbutz. In the houses that were not destroyed by the fire, traces of violence and fighting are visible. There are blood stains on the floor and walls. The doors to the safe rooms are riddled with bullet holes. Children left toys, swings, bicycles, balls on the lawns.
Kibbutzim are mostly secular left-wing communities founded in 1946, with the idea of creating a collective, egalitarian agricultural commune. They act as ideal places for family life.
The safe rooms in the kibbutz homes, as in other communities attacked on October 7, were built to protect residents from rockets from Gaza, not from a ground attack by dozens of heavily armed militants. Reinforced with reinforced concrete and explosion-proof windows, these rooms often serve as children's bedrooms. Many locals found refuge in them that day when the extremists invaded, on foot, on motorcycles and in cars.
However, because they are designed as missile shelters, they generally cannot be locked from the inside, for security reasons. Most of those who managed to survive held the doorknobs so tightly that the attackers could not enter.
Ambassador to Moldova Joel Lyon, currently acting deputy spokesman for Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that there were between 80 and 100 extremists, and that it was difficult for the kibbutz's security forces to retaliate against them.
Lyon said that a six-month-old baby was also abducted and that Israel's strategy is clear: "Stomp on Hamas, because if we don't eliminate it, it will come for you." He said they have no choice in attacking civilian targets because Hamas uses them to launch strikes, and that Israeli forces are calling on civilians to evacuate.
He says that by using human shields, Hamas commits a double war crime and represents a greater evil than the Islamic State because it kills children.
Ben Valaus of the Israeli military's international law department, which provides non-stop legal advice to the military, says the Israeli military forces (IDF) do their best to respect international law and minimize civilian casualties.
When asked by "Vijesta" about the attack on Jabalia, Valaus said that the Palestinians were given two weeks to leave the north of Gaza. He pointed out that they sacrifice a lot of elements of surprise and operational advantage and that the target was a senior Hamas commander. Asked about the precise number of victims, he replied that they never receive that information from Gaza.
Joel Lyon is asking reporters not to take pictures of the soldiers' faces because Hamas is using OSINT (open source data collection and analysis) to track them down.
Along the road to Sderot, now a ghost town, you can see the scorched earth left when the army forced Hamas to retreat. In Sderot, where the street fights were fought, 35 thousand people used to live, and now about two.
Lyon showed gruesome footage of crimes committed by Hamas - from the massacre of children to the rape of women to the beheading of men. He showed photographs of burnt bodies, including a child who could not be identified.
The other side of the story remained behind the border, which Hamas cunningly broke through and shocked the enemy, but thereby exposed to even greater suffering the Palestinian civilians who found themselves on the way of Israel to crush the militant group.
Zurof: There is no two-state solution
Dr. Efraim Zuroff (75), Holocaust historian and director of the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told us in Jerusalem that the October 7 massacre was motivated by anti-Semitism in Europe, the US and around the world, which is why they are very concerned.
"What has been happening for years is not a fight for territory but a religious war motivated by a fanatical version of Islam," said Zurof.
He does not see a normal state of peace in the immediate future.
When asked by "Vijeta" about a two-state solution for the Middle East conflict, Zurof said that it does not currently exist because "the moment the Palestinians get a state, rockets will fly to the airports, to every possible place in Israel."
"Based on the conditions on the ground, with the leadership of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, there is no two-state solution, it is a figment of Biden's imagination," Zuroff believes.
"The solution is to get rid of the terrorists and get a different leadership, when the Palestinians really want to live peacefully with the Israelis."
The streets of Jerusalem are deserted, and those who have lived there for decades say they do not remember the sight of the eerily empty holy city. There are no tourists, only a few shops are open, and on every corner there are soldiers and policemen with long pipes.
"us or them"
Residents of Kibbutz Magen were evacuated to hotels in Ein Bokek on the Dead Sea, where they function as one big family. The hotel lobby looks like a huge living room. Children are playing unconscious war, while parents, grandparents do their best to create a semblance of a normal life for them.
Among them is Goran Mekić, born in Belgrade, who lived in Magen for decades.
When asked if, when the situation calms down, he will return to the kibbutz, Goran said:
"I cannot live in a kibbutz knowing that my daughter is going to a party, that my son is going to a friend's house, that my children are playing near the fence, and that on the other side is Hamas... This is a question of either them or us. I'm not talking about Palestinians, I'm talking about terrorists," he said.
30 years ago, when he came to the kibbutz, everything, he says, was different.
"Workers from Gaza came to us, we went there, we socialized, until 2006 when Hamas took over".
Mekić is shocked because the kibbutz community that advocated the most for a peaceful solution to the conflict was attacked.
Yočeved Lifšić (85), who was released by Hamas for health reasons, is a peace activist who for years helped sick Palestinians from Gaza to reach hospitals in Israel with her husband. Lifšić and her 85-year-old husband Oded were kidnapped from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. Oded is still detained.
Bonus video:
