A year later, Israeli survivors reflect on the ongoing toll of October 7th

Several times a day, Lilach Almog walks past the remains of a police station seized by Hamas fighters and bullet-riddled buildings in her southern Israeli town.

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

Almog joined the approximately 120,000 Israelis displaced by the Israel-Hamas war, but returned home constantly thinking about the October 7, 2023 attack.

A year later, survivors think back to that day that changed everything. They hid in bedrooms, bomb shelters, safe rooms and under trees as Hamas fighters poured across the border. In the aftermath, they mourned the loss of their loved ones, struggled with fears, suffered from survivor’s guilt, and wondered if they would ever return home to places that still bear the scars of their ordeal.

Lilach Almog, 37, Sderot

The force of an explosion at the police station opposite her home knocked Almog down on October 7th.

After air raid sirens sounded in Sderot, she ran into the fortified room of her house and watched in disbelief from the window as dozens of gunmen walked down her street with rocket-propelled grenades on their shoulders.

They occupied the police station and a battle raged for days before the Israeli military razed the building while militants were still inside. More than 30 civilians and police officers were killed in the area around the train station.

Almog fled Sderot with her children and mother and lived in a hotel in Tel Aviv for eight months. But in August government support ran out and she had to return to Sderot. Memories of the day when Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 hostages.

The resulting war has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The Health Ministry makes no distinction between fighters and civilians, but says more than half are women and children.

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

“As long as the war continues, there is no way to find peace and return to our lives,” she said. “We still have the hostages there. We still have nightmares. There is no end.”

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

When Ziv Abud discovered the roadside bomb shelter while trying to escape the attack on the Nova music festival, she breathed a sigh of relief and thought it was a safe place to wait out the rocket attacks.

“We now know that the shelter we went to was essentially a death trap,” she said.

Almost 30 people were crammed into the concrete bunker, which was supposed to accommodate about ten people. When Hamas fighters arrived, they began throwing grenades inside.

A former soldier managed to throw eight grenades, but the ninth exploded in the bunker, killing about half the people instantly, Abud said. In the smoke and chaos, militants took people hostage 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 sign of her boyfriend, Eliya Cohen. Four people, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, were kidnapped, but six others survived.

Over the past year, Abud has campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the hostages, flying around the world to press for Cohen’s return.

“I’m thinking less about my own trauma and just about 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 understand how they survived.

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

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

The Margalits have been married for 64 years and have lived in Nir Oz for most of that time, working to transform the barren desert into a village of towering trees and green lawns. The kibbutz was destroyed by the attack and will take years to rebuild. However, questions remain as to how – or whether – this should happen.

Like most residents of Nir Oz, the couple lives in temporary housing, a development of new homes about an hour northeast.

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

Shlomo Margalit returns to the kibbutz about once a week to take care of the cemetery, a job he held before October 7. But now many graves have been added. Every time he is there, he chooses one person and goes to their destroyed house to say a proper goodbye.

“There are too many to do everything at once,” he said. “It’s too sad and too difficult. It’s impossible.”

Eilat Shalev, 47, Nova Festival survivor

Eilat Shalev remembers that the pomelos – large citrus fruits – were to be harvested in southern Israel a few days after October 7th.

She knows this because farmers had already set up large collection containers that she hid behind as Hamas fighters overran the road leading to the Nova music festival, where she had danced with her husband, Shai.

The two became separated when militants began firing at their car. Shalev ran to nearby fields, jumping in and out of vehicles until she found herself near a grapefruit orchard.

“I grabbed the first tree I saw on the left. I hid in the ground with my hands on my head and my face and just prayed to God that God would save me so I could live and return to my children,” she said.

Minutes later, a bullet landed inches from her head. She played dead for hours before setting off again. Israeli security forces eventually took her to a police station. As the hours passed and her husband made no contact, she became increasingly worried. He was pronounced dead five days later.

Shalev said she and her four children, ages 12 to 23, turned to Judaism for solace. But she doesn’t sleep well at night and finds it difficult to manage the household on her own.

“As the days go by, one day and another day and another day, it actually gets worse. It’s not getting better,” Shalev said. “Missing him becomes stronger because you understand more and more that he is 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 job as a high school history and civics teacher to regain control of her identity.

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

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

The day after her release under a November ceasefire agreement, 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 expected, a milestone in how much she has lost in the past year. On October 7th, she plans to stay in bed and watch “Dirty Dancing” for at least part of the day.

Next month, Atzili hopes to return to one of her passions, giving tours of 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.

“Israeli Jews want the Palestinians to disappear, and the Palestinians want the Jews to disappear, but that is not going to happen,” she said. “Nobody goes anywhere. We don’t have to love each other, but we have to get along and we have to find a way for everyone to live here safely.”