Shir Matias wants to move back to the Holit kibbutz but doesn’t know if she will be able to bear it. Now 23, she grew up in this tiny community in Israel’s farthest south-west tip, and its flower-lined paths hold some of her happiest memories.
It is also the place where her parents were murdered by Hamas gunmen on 7 October 2023, and her brother Rotem was badly injured. Their mother, Shachar, used her own body to shield him from the bullets, saving his life in a last act of love.
“I do miss Holit. It’s a big question that I ask myself every day, whether I can go back to live there. It seems like I don’t have an answer, and I don’t think I will be able to get one until I try,” she said.
The kibbutz residents were a small, close knit group of about 230 people, ripped apart by the massacre two years ago. Fifteen were killed, including two Thai farm workers, and another six taken hostage. Survivors were all evacuated that same day, when the army arrived in the afternoon.
Barred from returning to their homes for nearly two years, most have since been living in hotels and temporary houses. More than 1,000 cows in the kibbutz dairy are the only permanent residents of a place now given over to ghosts and memories, its entrance guarded by a single bored soldier.
The playground is covered with two years of dust, paths and patios are overgrown, and the quiet that originally drew residents here is eerily absolute, apart from when Israel bombs Gaza. It is so close, little more than 1 mile away, that big explosions have enough force to crack the ceiling plaster and shake the wires loose in the empty homes.
Now the government has authorised the community’s return, and together they have set a date of next July, after the Israeli school year ends. For Nir Sultan, whose parents-in-law were also killed here, that feels both too soon and too far away.
The attack was the deadliest since Israel was founded, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians, including – according to Israeli government data – 39 children. Another 251 were taken hostage, the youngest a nine-month-old baby.
“It seems like a brave thing to do, to return,” Sultan said. “On the one hand I don’t know if it’s enough time, on the other hand I want to come back today, I want to be home.”
Holit is starting construction of a new kindergarten, intended as a bold vote of confidence that life can return and a tool particularly to draw young families.
They are advertising for new residents, and have already had some interest from people willing to consider moving in despite the tragedy and the terror, or perhaps because of it. “Maybe they understand that if we aren’t here, it will be a problem for Israel,” said Sultan.
Originally established in the 1970s as a settlement in the Sinai peninsula when the area was under Israeli occupation, Holit moved to its current location after a peace deal that restored Egyptian control of the Sinai.
It is part of a string of communities along the edge of what Israel calls “the Gaza envelope” – because of the way it wraps around the thin strip of Palestinian territory along the coast – that are now grappling with how to rebuild and whether to come home.
Founded as part of a state-building project that aimed to contain Gaza by populating its borders, many were rooted in secular, leftwing Zionist tradition. Victims of the 7 October attacks included a large number of peace activists working for coexistence and a Palestinian state.
Matias’s parents were among the founders of a bilingual school that taught children in Hebrew and Arabic under the slogan “Jewish-Arab education for equality”.
Their neighbour Hayim Katsman, killed protecting another resident, was an academic and activist who spent weekends trying to protect Palestinians in the occupied West Bank from violent settlers.
His sibling Noy Katsman has repeatedly pleaded that his brother’s violent death should not eclipse his life’s work, and the family’s grief should not be used to justify inflicting pain on Palestinians.
Over the last two years in Gaza, Israeli attacks have killed more than 67,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians, and its blockade created a famine. Genocide scholars, rights groups and a UN commission of inquiry say Israel is committing genocide.
The attack had a different impact on Sultan, a mother of three who thinks Israel’s war is necessary. She still sometimes feels astonished that her family escaped alive after hours hiding in a room without a lock. Her husband held the door shut as gunmen repeatedly tried to force their way in, and she tried to keep their young boys quiet.
“My dream was that Gaza would open up, and there would be peace,” she said. “Now I think only for myself, that I need to save myself and my kids. If I want my kids to grow up properly, I can’t let it happen again. And they (Hamas) said it will happen again.”
“Chaim [Hayim] Katsman believed in coexistence, and what did it get him?” she added. “So it’s hard to think differently right now.”
The trauma of Holit and other communities attacked on 7 October holds a grim fascination for some Israelis who were isolated from the direct horrors of that day.
Sometimes unannounced visitors turn up at the community dairy and ask manager Lior Klajman: “Tell us how you survived,” a brutally casual request to relive a day of intense fear and losses that he finds infuriating and disrespectful.
Others have come to wander through survivors’ temporary housing in a nearby kibbutz, treating their upended lives like a visitor attraction, “just walking there with their dog in the afternoon, to look at us like we are in a zoo”, he said.
Sultan once snapped at people gathered to watch her do laundry, letting out a loud mock lion’s roar and telling the stunned group: “If you look at me like I am in the zoo, I’ll act like an animal.”
Visitors who travelled to this area in order to remember 7 October can do it at the site of the Nova rave, where there is a new access road through land that two years ago was scattered with cars and belongings abandoned in terror, and a parking lot for a steady stream of visitors.
Holit’s residents don’t need a memorial to fix their memories. Walking around with Nir is to see a litany of atrocities. Here is the house where a seven-year-old girl, hiding in a cupboard after her parents were shot, rang neighbours begging to be saved. They risked their own lives to go out and collect her.
Here is the house where Nir’s parents-in-law lived and were killed. Ronit was a 55-year-old who brought the colours and glamour of Buenos Aires to Israel, and never stopped studying. She was awarded her doctorate posthumously.
Roland, 68, was gentle and playful, a talented cook and actor who loved clowning around with his grandchildren. A memorial poster shows him smiling under a crown of flowers.
Some of the most badly damaged houses have been pulled down, including Shir Matias’s family home, and she has not yet been able to spend the night in Holit. She feels calm when she visits during the day but as night falls it pulls her back towards the horrors of 7 October.
So she understands why some residents will never return. “It’s very reasonable to not want to go back to the place where your friends and family and neighbours were slaughtered.”
But she misses the greenness, the “amazing sunsets” and the tranquility of a place so quiet that the only sound was often children running around as they played, “like the soundtrack of a movie”, and is not ready to say goodbye to the family’s home.
“I really feel my parents’ presence there, and I won’t go down without a fight. I will give my everything to getting back to Holit and trying to be able to live there.”
