A year later, Israeli survivors reflect on the lingering toll of Oct. 7

Associated Press

Lilach Almog walks past the remains of a police station seized by Hamas militants and buildings pockmarked by bullets in her southern Israeli town multiple times a day.

“Every corner has become a memorial,” she said. “Even if you want to forget for a bit, you can’t. You look outside at the wall and it reminds you of everything all over again.”

Almog joined the roughly 120,000 Israelis displaced by the Israel-Hamas war but has returned home to constant reminders of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

A year later, survivors reflect on that day that changed everything. They hid in bedrooms, bomb shelters, safe rooms and beneath trees as Hamas militants poured across the border. In the aftermath, they’ve mourned loved ones, struggled with anxiety, suffered survivor’s guilt and questioned whether they will ever return home to places that still bear the scars of their ordeal.

Lilach Almog, 37, Sderot

The force of a blast at the police station across from her apartment building knocked Almog off her feet on Oct. 7.

She had scrambled to her home’s fortified room after air raid sirens sounded in Sderot and watched from the window in disbelief as dozens of gunmen walked down her street with rocket-propelled grenades on their shoulders.

They seized the police station, and a dayslong battle raged before the Israeli military bulldozed the building with militants still inside. More than 30 civilians and police officers were killed in the area around the station.

Almog fled Sderot with her children and mother, living in a hotel in Tel Aviv for eight months, but government assistance ran out in August, forcing her to return to Sderot and memories of that day, when Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 hostage.

The resulting war has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between fighters and civilians but says more than half were women and children.

The anxiety of the past year has overwhelmed her, forcing her to leave her work as an architect and interior designer and go on disability leave. Her 9-year-old son began wetting the bed. Her 11-year-old daughter refuses to go anywhere without her.

“As long as the war is still continuing, there’s no way to feel calm, to return to our lives,” she said. “We still have the hostages there. We still have nightmares. There’s no end.”

Ziv Abud, 27, Nova music festival survivor and girlfriend of hostage Eliya Cohen

When Ziv Abud spotted the bomb shelter on the side of the road as she was trying to escape the attack on the Nova music festival, she breathed a sigh of relief, thinking it would be a safe place to wait out the rockets.

“We know now that the shelter we went into was basically going into a death trap,” she said.

Nearly 30 people had crammed into the concrete shelter meant to hold about 10. When Hamas militants arrived, they started tossing grenades inside.

A former soldier was able to toss out eight grenades, but the ninth exploded inside the shelter, instantly killing about half the people, Abud said. In the smoke and chaos, militants grabbed people to take as hostages and sprayed the shelter with bullets.

Abud survived, protected by the crush of bodies above her. When she opened her eyes, she saw the bodies of her nephew and his girlfriend but no trace of her boyfriend, Eliya Cohen. Four people, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, were kidnapped, and six others survived.

Over the past year, Abud has campaigned tirelessly for the hostages and flown around the world to press for Cohen’s return.

“I think less about my own trauma, just how to bring Eliyah home,” she said.

Shlomo Margalit, 86, and Hanna’le Margalit, 79, Kibbutz Nir Oz

Shlomo and Hanna’le Margalit still struggle to comprehend how they survived.

All of the residents on both sides of their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz were killed or kidnapped on Oct. 7. Hamas militants entered their home three times but did not go into the safe room where they were hiding.

Of Nir Oz’s nearly 400 residents, 42 were killed and 75 were kidnapped that day. But the couple, part of the founding generation on the kibbutz, was spared.

The Margalits have been married for 64 years and lived in Nir Oz nearly all that time, working to transform the barren desert into a village filled with towering trees and green lawns. The kibbutz was devastated by the attack and will take years to rebuild, though questions remain about how — or even if — it should be.

Like most of the residents of Nir Oz, the couple is living in temporary housing, a development of new apartment buildings about an hour northeast.

“I still can’t think about what was lost. I think for me that will happen much later,” Hanna’le Margalit said. “Right now, all the energy and our work is for survival, to get used to a new place, to hope the hostages will come home.”

Shlomo Margalit returns to the kibbutz about once a week to care for the cemetery, a job he held before Oct. 7. But now many graves have been added. Each time he is there, he chooses one person and goes to their ruined house to properly bid them farewell.

“It’s too many to do all at once,” he said. “It’s too sad and too hard. It’s impossible.”

Eilat Shalev, 47, Nova festival survivor

Eilat Shalev remembers that the pomelos — large citrus fruits — were about to be harvested a few days after Oct. 7 in southern Israel.

She knows that because farmers had already set out large collection bins, which she hid behind as Hamas militants overran the road leading to the Nova music festival, where she had been dancing with her husband, Shai.

The two got separated as militants began shooting at their car. Shalev ran toward nearby fields, jumping in and out of vehicles, until she found herself near a pomelo orchard.

“I grabbed the first tree I saw on the left side. I hid with my hands on my head and my face in the earth, just praying to God that God will rescue me so I will live and return to my kids,” she said.

Minutes later, a bullet hit just centimeters from her head. She played dead for hours before making her way back to the road. Eventually, Israeli security forces brought her to a police station. As the hours passed and her husband didn’t make contact, she grew increasingly worried. He was pronounced dead five days later.

Shalev said she and her four children, ages 12 to 23, have turned to Judaism for comfort. But she has trouble sleeping at night and struggles to run her household alone.

“As the days go by, one day and another day and another day, it’s actually getting worse. It doesn’t get better,” Shalev said. “Missing him gets stronger because you understand more and more that he’s not coming back. He’s really not coming back.”

Liat Atzili, 50, hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz

After 54 days in captivity in Gaza, Liat Atzili was determined to return to her work as a high school history and civics teacher to wrest back control of her identity.

“I feel most comfortable and most at ease, and it’s the thing that comes the most naturally for me to be in a classroom,” she said. “It’s a real connection to what I used to be like and what my life was before.”

She counts herself lucky to have been held in an apartment in conditions much better than the hostages kept in underground tunnels. Still, during her captivity, Atzili had no idea whether her family had survived.

The day after her release as part of a November cease-fire deal, the Israeli military announced that her husband, Aviv, had been killed and his body was being held in Gaza. Two of her three children were on the kibbutz, and both survived.

The upcoming anniversary is more difficult than Atzili anticipated, a milestone for how much she has lost over the past year. On Oct. 7, she plans for at least part of the day to stay in bed and watch “Dirty Dancing.”

Next month, Atzili hopes to return to one of her passions, giving tours at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum. She understands the parallels people want to draw between the Holocaust and what happened to her, but the reality in the Middle East is different, she said.

“The Israeli Jews sort of wish that the Palestinians disappeared, and the Palestinians sort of wish that the Jews disappeared, but that’s not going to happen,” she said. “Nobody’s going anywhere. We don’t have to love each other, but we have to get along, and we have to find a way that everybody can live here in safety.”