Like many, in the weeks after October 7, I could barely tear myself away from the stories of tragedy and survival shared by those who had been witness to the terror. Amid so many devastating accounts, I remember being gripped by an article by Ha’aretz journalist Amir Tibon in The Atlantic.
It documented how he hid with his wife and two daughters under five in their safe room for hours before finally being rescued by his father, Noam, a retired army general who once commanded forces in Lebanon. As Hamas began their killing spree, Noam sprang into action, saving not just his family but many others, including survivors of the Nova festival.
While others fled, he embarked on a treacherous journey from his Tel Aviv home to his son’s in kibbutz Nahal Oz on the Gaza border.
Now, Tibon has turned this story into a book, offering a minute-by-minute picture of how events unfolded on the kibbutz, as well as others in the region. To say it is gripping is an understatement; it reads like a thriller as his father joins forces with a handful of soldiers and other unexpected heroes, battling Hamas at every turn. Except, of course, it is one to which there is no neat resolution.
“They’re here,” Tibon texts his parents as dawn breaks, his phone battery dying. As the reader, we know what he didn’t at that point, that help was coming, eventually.
But my heart was in my mouth, imagining him and his wife holed up in the dark, no food or outside contact, praying their children would keep silent with terrorists so close. How would my two, of similar ages, have fared?
The horror that he describes is impossible and astonishing, from the way whole families were murdered to the wanton violence and the kidnappings, or the scenes that Tibon’s mother encountered as she and her husband neared the Nova area. Such scenes, of course, featured people whose names many of us will now recognise, such as the now-freed teenage hostages Dafna and Ela Elyakim.
But there were also people Tibon knew personally: his children’s babysitters, friends, kibbutz elders who had welcomed him to Nahal Oz only a few years earlier.
Too soon? Possibly: I learnt that I couldn’t read this book at night as it left me plagued by nightmares. But Tibon is the right person to be writing this at this stage; not a dispassionate historian but someone tracing their own experience to make sense of it all.
In any case, this book is not solely about October 7.
It’s also about the history of the kibbutz, the coexistence dreams of many who lived on it, and the fraught history of the Gaza-Israel border region, from the post-1948 period and the years when Israelis could travel there easily, to the hope of the disengagement period. It’s also an unflinching depiction of the failures of the Israeli government, to some degree over decades, but especially under Netanyahu, who Tibon argues has no desire for peace and has predicated his career on not finding a path to it. It’s also offers a sobering argument why true progress is unlikely until he is finally removed from Israeli public life.
Tibon may be a left-leaning journalist but he states the facts. The lack of preparedness for an attack from Gaza, the government’s strategic abandoning of communities in those regions, allowing Qatar fund Hamas to isolate the Palestinian leadership: all are shattering.
“Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?” asked Moshe Dayan, in a famous eulogy given when he attended a funeral of a leading light of the kibbutz murdered in 1956. Indeed.
This is an important book and I’d press it into the hands of anyone who thinks there are easy answers to this situation. This won’t be the final word on October 7 but it’s a painfully personal reminder of the horrors that led us to where we are today.
The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands, by Amir Tibon
Scribe, £20
