Journey into the Horrors of October 7th, Part 2

B I N J A M I N  ( B E N )  C A S E Y

Recently, Your Jerusalem’s Binjamin Casey visited the devastated communities of the Gaza Envelope to see the destruction — as well as the hope and rebirth — for himself. In part 2 of this two-part series, Ben tells of his trip to Kibbutz Alumim, to the site of the Supernova festival and to the car graveyard near Netivot, and of the lasting impact that it had on him.

For part 1, click here.

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Kibbutz Sa’ad

After leaving Sderot, we traveled south towards Kibbutz Alumim, first making a stop at the religious kibbutz of Sa’ad. Founded in 1947 by graduates of the Bnei Akiva movement, Sa’ad was overrun by the Egyptian army during the 1948 War of Independence and almost completely destroyed. As a result, after the war, it was relocated to a nearby empty patch of land, from whence it flourished. As soon as we turned off the main road, we began to notice graphic signs of the October 7th incursion. The asphalt approach road to Sa’ad was burned from RPG fire and scarred with bullet marks. The grass and bushes straddling the road were scorched from conflagrations caused by fleeing Israeli vehicles set alight by terrorists’ grenades. The sight etched into my mind a sense of the utter desperation of the people in those vehicles, trying to escape the mayhem at any cost.

We began our visit with the remains of the original Sa’ad at “Ma’oz Mul Aza” (Stronghold Opposite Gaza), an observation tower constructed during the 1948 war to defend the kibbutz. Four stories high, it is said to provide excellent views of Gaza from its rooftop. Sadly, we could not partake in such views, as the tower has been closed since the beginning of the Gaza war. Bullet holes (from as early as 1948 and as late as October 7th) littered the concrete exterior, turning the whitewashed structure into a surrealistic canvas upon which is painted the violent history of southern Israel. Standing there, staring at the bullet holes — some as large as 15 cm in diameter — I could not help but contemplate the grotesque damage that similar bullets must have done to human flesh and bone just a few months ago.

Near the tower were the remnants of a small visitors’ center that had been all but destroyed by a Qassam rocket a few years back. Still, we could make out some faded pictures of the original kibbutz inside the building. Next door was a small, aluminum-sided storage shed. Eliyahu, our guide, entered the shed and emerged with an almost intact fire kite, a crude terrorist weapon constructed from three sticks tied together at their centers and overlaid with a clear sheet of plastic. Attached to the tail of the 1.5 meter kite were strips of dry newspaper, extending from which was a wad of fabric. Before launch, the fabric is soaked in kerosene and lit on fire, and by the time it reaches Israel, the whole thing is ablaze. Such makeshift weapons and their cousins, the incendiary balloon, have been responsible for great damage by arson to fields, parks and nature preserves in southern Israel — at a cost negligible to the terrorists.

By 2018, some 25,000 dunam (6,200 acres) of agricultural and recreational land in the region had been destroyed by kites and helium-filled balloons, causing tens of millions of shekels worth of damage. In concept, both are brilliant weapons of war: cheap and simple to build, difficult to spot until after launch, and equally difficult to down once launched. For eight months out of the year, the enemy can rely on consistent prevailing winds coming out of the west from Gaza at speeds of 8-13 kph (5-8 mph). Since Gaza City is 5 km (3 miles) from the nearest Israeli settlements, these airborne weapons can take under an hour to reach their targets. Many, however, are launched from positions closer to the border, translating into shorter flight times and, consequently, less time to track and destroy them.

Kibbutz Alumim

We left Sa’ad and drove southwest along route 232 to Kibbutz Alumim, one of the communities most severely affected by the October 7th invasion. At the entrance to the kibbutz, we were met by two especially alert guards carrying assault rifles, who inquired about our reason for wanting to visit. After earning their nod of acquiescence, we parked the minibus and walked towards the synagogue for afternoon (Mincha) prayers. On the way, we came across what has become something of a shrine on the kibbutz: the rusted and crumpled remains of Qassam rockets, made of iron, propped up alongside the gleaming aluminum remnants of the Iron Dome missiles that shot them down. The contrast between these two types of weapons caused an irrepressible thought to well up inside me: the dirty, rusted remnants of the Qassam rockets represented the embodiment of evil, while the shiny, relatively intact remains of the Iron Dome missiles represented the embodiment of good. Evil was corroded, twisted and mutilated, while good endured — pure and gleaming. In my mind, this represented the battle of good vs. evil, and good had emerged victorious!

The synagogue at Alumim was a beautiful and airy structure, dotted with large windows all around. Though the kibbutz was ransacked on October 7th, not one of the windows in the synagogue was broken, a fact considered a miracle by its ever-optimistic residents. As we entered the prayer sanctuary, we were hit in the face with a shocking reminder of just how vicious the terrorists were in the timing of their attack: they struck exactly when the community was in the middle of celebrating Simchat Torah. Mahzorim (holiday prayer books), children’s colored drawings and paper flags were frozen in time in exactly the same positions they had been when the congregants realized they had to flee the celebrations to save their lives. I don’t think I’ve ever prayed such an intense afternoon prayer as I did that day.

After Mincha, we headed across flower-lined paths to the kibbutz’s community center. A pair of peacocks cawed as they strutted away from our rude intrusion into their newly-found privacy in the now practically empty kibbutz. Inside the meeting hall, we spoke with Eyal Rein, one of the kibbutz’s October 7th defenders. He related to us the story of that fateful day, from his first-hand perspective: early in the morning, some 60 terrorists infiltrated through the unprotected rear gate. The automatic weapons were kept in the kibbutz’s armory for “security reasons”, so he and his fellow defenders had to fight their way across the kibbutz to the armory using only handguns. During the firefight, the Slotky brothers, Yishai and Noam (of blessed memory), perished while bravely trying to keep the invaders at bay. Most frighteningly — and perhaps most frustratingly — Eyal told of how the terrorists were waiting in ambush in precisely the right places, as some of them had worked in the kibbutz and were intimately familiar with its security arrangements.

Next, we visited the living quarters of the Thai and Nepalese workers at the kibbutz, many of whom were gunned down in cold blood as they held up their passports screaming that they were not Israeli. Before us was a scene of utter devastation. Everything inside the dormitory was completely burned. The twisted remains of bunk beds showed no signs of ever having had a mattress or a blanket on them. The heat had been so intense that everything combustible was incinerated, and a thick layer of ash covered the floor. Even the roof had buckled and partially collapsed from the intense heat. Here and there lay a personal item that had somehow survived partially intact: a boot, a coffee mug, a beer bottle. And everywhere was the pervasive stench of burned and charred fabric and wood. Next to the living quarters, the remains of an equipment shed stood precariously, its roof collapsed and steel I-beam wall supports bent outwards from the force of an explosion, as if they were made of plastic and not steel. It was extremely difficult to digest what I saw here.

Site of the Nova Music Festival

From Alumim, we drove to the site of the Nova music festival, the focal point of the October 7th attacks. The area was so muddy from recent rains, that on the way, we saw a passenger bus (which had carried another group like ours) being pulled out of a deep mud pit by a large tow truck. As we came closer to the site, the first thing I noticed was the endless carpet of red poppies blooming after the rain storms, eerily reminding me of the World War I battlefields of France and John McCrae’s famous ode, “In Flanders Fields”:

In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Suddenly we came upon a sight that affected all of us very deeply — the main area of the music festival, where some three hundred and fifty youngsters in their 20’s and 30’s were mercilessly gunned down, an untold number raped and mutilated, and some 40 kidnapped and hauled off to Gaza. There, we saw a sea of memorial photos, each one of a young person who had been cut down at the start of his or her adult life. These youths had come to do what almost all young people do at one time or another: party and listen to their music; but their dreams were dashed, their bodies cruelly broken and their lives cut short by merciless savages who screamed the name of their god in their faces as they brutally murdered them. Each photo represents a life. A life destroyed. A life destroyed for no other reason than the perceived injustices against a mythical kingdom of “Palestine”, which never existed. As I stood in this forest of faces of lost youth, what exacerbated my upset was the realization that there are depraved people in this world who claim that it all never happened, or that these young people got what they deserved because they were occupiers and oppressors.

The bodies of the deceased have since been removed and buried, and a garden of flowers planted in their stead — one flower for each of the victims. But their blood screams out from the ground for justice, crying out to the heavens for an account for their murder and for the agony of their families and friends, who suffer endless nightmares that not even the most talented Hollywood director could properly portray. Do we allow the pictures and flowers to merely placate us? Or do we use them to galvanize us to support the fight against the pure evil that is Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the rest of the nefarious radical Muslim groups that seek our death and destruction?

Not one of these youngsters was given any chance. No possibility of escape was permitted. In fact, written orders found on the bodies of some of the terrorists explicitly instructed them to kill, rape, behead, burn and mutilate as many individuals — men and women, children and elderly people, Jews and non-Jews alike — as possible. The thought comes to mind of the now-infamous audio recording of a Hamas terrorist who called his parents from Israel on WhatsApp on October 7th to brag about how many Jews he had just killed, and his parents glorying in his accomplishments. The vision comes to mind of “Palestinian” children running alongside a pickup truck in Gaza that is carrying the semi-nude, beheaded corpse of a young woman, spitting on her and beating her broken body with sticks. It seems that this world has gone mad, and as the insane look on and berate the knights who avenge the horrible acts, I stand here confused and broken.

The Car Graveyard

The final stop on our tour was the “car graveyard”, a field outside the city of Netivot where some 3,000 vehicles belonging to both Israeli victims and Hamas terrorists lay, side-by-side, in various states of destruction and decay. The sun was setting now, marking a surreal ending to a heart-wrenching day. As I stood looking through the makeshift razor-wire fence (placed around the graveyard to keep out souvenir hunters), the sun finally dipped below the Gaza horizon, and in the quiet and eerie stillness of the twilight, I was reminded of an actual cemetery, the vehicles arranged neatly in rows just like the tidily aligned gravestones of a graveyard, giving no hint to the confusion, noise and terror that marked the final moments of their passengers, just as the inanimate gravestones give no hint to the tumult in the lives of the deceased.

I realized that many of these vehicles still contained blood, ashes and body parts that the unwaveringly dedicated ZAKA search-and-rescue volunteers could not clean out of the burnt and bullet-riddled hulks, each of which might have been, at one time, someone’s prized possession. It’s hard to contemplate the sickening task delegated to these first responders of removing and identifying the almost unrecognizable human remains. Due to the impossibility of extracting all of them, the vehicles will be crushed or shredded, and buried in special plots around Israel.

As we stood there, many of us offered silent prayers for the murdered victims and for those who were kidnapped into the subterranean rat holes of Gaza.

Here was mine:

May Hashem bless the memories of the victims who perished on the horrible day, October 7th.

May He bless the memories, in particular, of all the young people whose lives were suddenly cut short, who died in stark terror and unimaginable suffering, as they were gunned down, blown up by RPGs and burnt to death inside their own vehicles.

May Hashem bless and protect the people who were stolen from their families, friends and the only world they knew, and who now live among those who hate them, their lives hanging precariously in the balance, not knowing what the next day will bring.

May Hashem bless and soothe the suffering of the families of the murdered and kidnapped, whose lives will never, ever be the same again.

May Hashem be with the survivors of that ignominious day, many of whom are left with life-changing physical and psychological injuries, and who relive the horror in their nightmares even as they sleep at night.

May Hashem bless our brave Israeli soldiers, who, every day, fight the enemy and look for hostages in every nook and cranny of Gaza, at great risk to themselves.

May Hashem bless the memory of all the brave fighters who have perished since this awful war began, who have given their lives selflessly to protect all of the people of Israel.

May Hashem bring peace back to Israel, speedily and in our day.

And let us, please, say, “Amen”.

Epilogue: The Monetary Toll

On every stop on our tour in the Gaza Envelope, we saw rocket parts scattered all around us. My curiosity led me to consider the monetary costs of these rockets and of Israel’s defenses against them. On October 7th alone, some 8,500 rockets were fired at Israel. At a cost of around $600 (USD) apiece, this tallies to $5,100,000. Around 10% of these rockets either failed, landed in the sea or fell inside Gaza. Thus, roughly 7,650 rockets made it to Israel. Since it’s known that the Iron Dome fires, on average, at 90% of all incoming projectiles, this translates into approximately 6,885 attempted interceptions. Since each attempted interception costs around $60,000, the combined cost of all interceptions would be $413,000,000. Adding this together with the cost of the Hamas rockets, we arrive at a grand total of $418,100,000. (The difference between the cost of the interceptions and of the rockets is 413 million dollars!)

According to the accounting software company FreshBooks, the cost of building a 50-bed hospital ranges anywhere from 25 to 75 million USD. Conservatively, using the high-end estimate, Israel could have built five-and-a-half hospitals for the price of having to defend the homeland on that one tragic day.

This made me angry. For the same price, we could have made the world a better place instead of just fighting for our survival. Such is the price of war, not just physically and emotionally, but on a nuts-and-bolts level — economically — as well. It brings to mind just how much, more than ever, we need the words of the prophet Isaiah to come true, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Binjamin (Ben) Casey lives in the Golan Heights with his wife Ariella, their shepherd dog, Simcha, and their beloved black cat, Buzz. Ben worked as a flight engineer for many years, traveling around the world as part of material transport and aid distribution missions until he was shot during a break-in at his home in Entebbe, Uganda. He and Ariella made aliya to Israel in 2019.

Ben Casey may be contacted at caseyscab@gmail.com.