Traumatised Israeli communities on Gaza border call for return of hostages and defeat of Hamas

It is more than two months since Israeli forces regained control of the towns overrun by Hamas during its devastating October 7th attack. But on Hilla Fenlon’s seed farm in Netiv HaAsara, a tiny community on Israel’s border with Gaza, life has not even begun returning to normal.

Outhouses hit by rockets are still crumpled and charred, while machines used to cultivate pepper and courgette seeds no longer work because they are riddled with shrapnel. The days and nights are punctuated by ear-splitting blasts from an Israeli artillery position nearby.

“We don’t know how [the war] is going to be finished. But if you ask me, I will come back to stay here with my kids only if there are no Palestinians,” said Irit, a local who has been evacuated to Tel Aviv, but still comes back alone to work on the farm with Fenlon.

Before the war, “the army told me it’s safe to be here. And I believed everything,” she added. “And [then Hamas] just came ... and killed all my friends.”

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A similar mixture of fear and anger exists across Israel, a country still consumed by the trauma of an attack in which Hamas militants killed 1,200 people, according to officials, and took 240 hostage. Israeli president Isaac Herzog called October 7th the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

As Israel’s ferocious retaliatory offensive has advanced deep inside Gaza, international pressure for a ceasefire is mounting. The onslaught has killed 20,000 people in the enclave, according to Palestinian officials, displaced more than 1.8 million of its 2.3 million population, and rendered huge parts of the territory uninhabitable.

But fortified and spurred on by overwhelming public backing for the war, Binyamin Netanyahu’s government remains adamant that it will not stop until it has achieved its goals: eradicating Hamas and bringing home the roughly 130 hostages still held in Gaza.

“Lately, I’ve been asked whether we have the legitimacy to continue fighting, and to that I answer: we don’t have the legitimacy to stop,” Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said this month.

One manifestation of the support for the war has been the surge in the number of Israelis who have signed up to fight. “My son wasn’t initially called up as a reservist and he was like a trapped lion, stalking around the house,” said Karo Yehuda, a veteran of Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon.

“He just wanted to fight, alongside his friends. So he called up his former commander and now he’s fighting in Gaza.”

There has also been a huge civil mobilisation. At Gilat Junction, a highway intersection a half-hour drive from the Gaza border, volunteers cook thousands of burgers each day to feed the Israeli army, while private donors have also funded the provision of showers and massages.

Fenlon was donated a car by a stranger who wanted to help people who lost vehicles in the October 7th rampage. “If there’s a bright thing in this darkness, it’s that we have come together in society,” she said.

“Every day I have volunteers coming who [are helping] my farm to do this season because I don’t have workers ... some I know, some are complete strangers.”

Israeli media is giving little airtime to the destruction in Gaza, with the vast majority of the population believing the thunderous air and land assault is fully justified after October 7th.

Instead, television channels and newspapers are filled with accounts from survivors, and the relatives of those killed or taken hostage. Some of those released last month during a temporary truce are now speaking publicly about the abuse they endured inside Gaza. Eulogies for fallen soldiers are aired every night on all the news bulletins. The funeral of the 25-year-old son of Gadi Eisenkot, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, was broadcast on all TV channels.

There is near total consensus that the war cannot end without the safe return of the hostages. Reminders of their plight are everywhere, with posters of their faces plastered across the country, from highway billboards to storefronts to Ben Gurion International Airport. Their relatives organise weekly demonstrations, under the slogan: “Bring Them Home Now”.

In the Israeli towns bordering Gaza, however, many say the war also cannot be allowed to stop until Hamas no longer has the ability to threaten the Jewish state, including through rocket fire.

Over the past two decades, the launches have become a constant threat in southern Israel, where reinforced concrete shelters dot the countryside. But few are willing to countenance a return to that world once the war is over.

“The first question is the hostages ... after that the main goal is that there will be no need for shelters, and that there will be no [Hamas] army against us,” said Tsur Hadar, a dairy farmer on the Nirim kibbutz, where workers have 10 seconds to reach shelter once sirens start to warn of incoming rockets. “How to do that? I hope somebody knows.”

There are also economic considerations. About 250,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes since the start of the war, around Gaza and on the northern border, where Israeli forces and the Lebanese militant group Hizbullah have traded almost daily fire. Businesses in both regions have been hit hard. Officials say a situation in which the populations of these areas cannot return would be untenable.

Among those affected is Tzadok Baruch, a farmer in Mivtahim, a community about 5km from Gaza. Since the war began, the output from his tomato crop has dropped 40 per cent, and he has had to rely on volunteers as most of the Thais who worked for him before the war have left.

In his opinion, the war should not end until Israel’s control of Gaza is comparable to its control of the occupied West Bank. Pressure from other countries, such as the US, for Israel to wind down its offensive before then, he says, is a case of double standards.

“I don’t think [US President Joe] Biden would stop [the war] if they had just had the worst terror attack ever. He wouldn’t approve one truck of humanitarian aid. He wouldn’t let in a drop of water,” he said.

“We will finish the job, because if we don’t, no one will live here.”

– Additional reporting by John Paul Rathbone in Tel Aviv

– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023

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