(November 6, 2023 / JNS)
For as long as I can remember, there has always been a camera in the house. My father was a keen photographer and was always chasing us around so he could capture Kodak moments.
At some point, I got interested too. Since my teenage years, I’ve been stalking everyone with a camera. I can’t remember the last time I was without some kind of camera.
When you live on Kibbutz Nir Oz, there is always something beautiful to photograph. In the summer, everyone is at the pool or on the lawn. Holidays and great events are for everyone, as in the beautiful songs of Shalom Hanoch and Meir Ariel.
In winter, the skies clear and the plains of the northern Negev suddenly gain perspective after months of gray and hot summer skies. It seems like an eternity, summer on the edge of the desert, and finally, the rain comes, leaving the clean and colorful world in its wake.
It doesn’t happen often; It doesn’t rain much in Nir Oz, so every drop has meaning and is a real cause for celebration for the farmers as well as those behind the camera. I have always been both: sometimes a farmer taking pictures and sometimes a photographer working in the fields during a break from school.
I’ve traveled to all kinds of places in the world, but winter sunsets like those at Nir Oz are like nowhere else. The flat fields, not even a small hill to cut the wide expanse; and there is always Gaza in the background, always just under the setting sun.
There is no escaping it, the view of the towns and mosques; the houses that always seem like nobody has finished building or painting. Always in the middle, between the camera and the horizon.
I took so many pictures looking west from the kibbutz. The way the terrorists took when they broke through our fields on Saturday, October 7, was the same way they returned to Gaza, using whatever vehicle they managed to steal from the kibbutz. The vehicles were filled with various items that they had stolen, including many of our friends that we are still looking for.
That Friday night I was on duty at the kibbutz. The shift ends at 06:00, but I stay for a while near the farm equipment shed. The sun rises from the east, just above the tractors, and it was a beautiful frame to capture.
I don’t get the shot when the red alert sirens and relentless rocket blasts force me to run to the small bunker outside the garage: a concrete cube with an open entrance, filled with old things that couldn’t to find. a place in another place. Suddenly, I hear people around me, speaking in Arabic, and then gunshots and explosions.
In WhatsApp groups and the kibbutz network, the messages begin to flow, increasingly serious. You’ve heard the story; minutes turn into hours and the messages don’t stop.
This is what I have to cling to: written messages and what I hear. I dare not look outside the shelter because Hamas terrorists are sitting on the phone right next to it. I hear vehicles approaching, coming and going; I identify the sounds of motorcycles that I don’t recognize from the kibbutz.
Then comes another wave: of looters. They come and try to start the tractors and the earth movers. I recognize the sound of every starter on our farm vehicles and try to understand what’s going on with the sounds and messages on my phone.
Every few minutes, I send updates to the kibbutz WhatsApp group: “They’re taking the big John Deere,” “They broke into the garage and are taking tools,” “They’re closing in, facing the backhoe.” charger.”
I still do not understand the scale of the attack and I think that the information I am providing could help our security team and the military forces that have come to help us. Actually, I later understood that at this stage, our security team was no longer viable and no military force reached Nir Oz at any stage of the attack.
While hiding in the air raid shelter, I start receiving TikTok videos from friends. “Your tractors, according to the Nir Oz stickers, are in Gaza!”
Tractors and more tractors, quite new and shiny, the ones that are now being operated with an extravagant touch by the farmers of Gaza. Dozens of Palestinians sit on our potato planter rejoicing in the streets of their village. Beautiful, expensive German-made red machines that had enabled us to plant thousands of hectares with such precision and timing.
“What will they do with them?” I wonder. We even went to special training in Germany just to learn how to operate them. “They took them just for shit,” I think.
We had been working in the fields for years, always facing the farmers on the other side riding donkeys or old tractors. They greeted us, and we greeted each other. Now they were probably the same people who are storming our kibbutz.
Meanwhile, in the bomb shelter, I try to make sense of the world around me, looking outside by placing my camera phone in one of the holes in the wall. I think about using my knowledge of optics to maybe see something, to somehow turn the bomb shelter into a periscope, a fantasy.
But I can’t move, not even sit. There are terrorists outside, and I have to be quiet. Suddenly a message from my mother: “They shot your father.”
“Okay,” I reply, “I’ll see who can send help.” But there was no one to help him.
Then a message from my wife: “There are people in the house, trying to get into the security room!”
“Okay,” I reply, “Stay inside with the door closed.” Keeping a facade of composure keeps me sane. Fortunately, two years ago, my wife insisted on installing an internal iron lock in the security chamber, a reinforced steel bar that goes into the wall. I thank him every day, that’s why my family is still alive.
And I’m standing. Standing and waiting. At any moment, the terrorists could enter the bomb shelter; they are a few meters away. I turn on my phone’s camera and start recording. I don’t know why; maybe for the sake of documenting all this. Someone will see if something happens to me. If there are red alerts or confrontations with the military, they are sure to go into the air raid shelter, that’s what I would do in their place.
But I maintain a false aura of calm, especially thinking about my son. Not about what might happen to him, I prefer to push that thought away, but about what had already happened to him. That’s what breaks my heart at the time. He has already lost his innocence and he is not even seven years old.
We failed a lot if our son has to go through wars. In fact, it has been happening to them since the day he was born. Every few months, about twice a year, there is a mini climb; a little war, as if this is just another mundane part of life after which everything goes back to normal.
But things will never go back to normal. Not after what happened on October 7th. People say it could be up to two years before things are rebuilt and restored. My blood boils to think that several hours caused the destruction of entire lives.
We are regulatory people, farmers, artists and everything in between. We want to create and grow, not destroy.
In addition to having our friends imprisoned and our kibbutz reduced to ashes, there is also the crisis caused by the fact that our sleep was stolen right from under our feet. That little piece of paradise that was only ours, the one we built over decades, with our efforts.
It was our safe place. I’ve never locked the front door, and now my son watches Home Alone movies and plans how to set up fun traps for terrorists. He doesn’t even go to bed without all the doors and windows closed.
I am writing all this from Paris, while my father Yossi is being buried in Israel. I see it live. My wife is French, not even Jewish. Why does he have to endure all these wars? So immediately after the event, we fly to France. We feel far from our family and friends, but we also feel safe. All I have left are the images.
I photographed everything around Nir Oz during my 30 years there. They took my cameras and my dad’s but left the computer. Good friends managed to recover my home backup. My whole life is in pictures that are more important to me than all the possessions in the house.
I leave the bomb shelter only in the evening, with the arrival of darkness. The army comes to rescue me after 13 hours, in the middle of a red alert. I go with them all over the kibbutz in the dark because they haven’t finished searching the place and making sure there are no more terrorists.
On the way I tell them what’s in the buildings, where it’s worth checking out, what’s behind the chicken coops.
Only then do I understand the extent of the destruction of the kibbutz, which looks as if someone has played a violent computer game inside it, with unlimited power.
We meet some of the security team members, the ones who survived, and I start asking them who is alive. They don’t answer with words, just a slight nod of the head. A slight nod, but it felt so heavy. The numbers start piling up in my head; so many that it’s hard to remember.
In the end, we reach a safe place. Everyone left from the kibbutz is in a safe daycare, and I’m surprised that everyone is in the same place.
Knowing the family, but still wandering around everyone like a zombie, looking for who’s there and who’s not. It will be a few days before I know exactly who is missing. There is also some food, some tinned halva taken from military rations. It was great comfort food as I hadn’t eaten in two days.
We sleep on the floor with everyone, amidst the hopeless looks of the people of the kibbutz who still do not know what has happened to their loved ones.
The next day, we have a few minutes to collect our belongings from the house before evacuating to Eilat. Everyone goes with suitcases and improvised bags to the burnt kibbutz.
A walk of shame, I think to myself. We flee like refugees from our home. On the way out of the kibbutz, the extent of the destruction becomes even greater, on the roads and in the fields. The last photo I take in Nir Oz is of a cloud of smoke over a distant farm. I don’t want to show you this picture; I don’t want you to remember Nir Oz like this.
My father’s funeral just ended. Friends praise him remembering the camera that was always with him, documenting everything, and I am finishing this text. Thank you, father, for the love of photography, which was and remains a part of me all my life.
All the friends who were kidnapped or killed, the kibbutz that burned down, the fields where nothing will grow this year except weeds, it all remains in the photos and burns in me to show the whole world.
Here is Kibbutz Nir Oz as it was; these were our lives. Lives of construction and creation, not destruction. We’ll be coming back; I promise to photograph for you.
Originally Posted by Israel Hayom.
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