Inspiration from Zion: This is a Love Story

What happened here on October 7th?

We came to help farmer Rami harvest his cherry tomatoes — red, yellow, orange, and chocolate-colored.

Though he has foreign workers, there was so much work to be done that he welcomed the extra help.

We had never been to Mavki’im before — a small moshav north of Gaza and south of Ashkelon. It wasn’t on the front lines of the invasion, but I knew that here too, there would be a story to tell.

Rami, big and gruff, initially seemed reluctant to talk. Then, suddenly, the turmoil of his memories burst from his mouth:

“I knew those people weren’t people long ago. I was in Gush Katif. I was one of the first to arrive at the scene when Tali Hatuel and her daughters were murdered.
Someone who can stick his head into a car, see a baby in a car seat, and riddle her body with bullets… that’s not a person.”

20 years have passed since the 2005 “Disengagement” from Gaza — when the State of Israel uprooted every last Jew, even the dead were removed from their graves, hoping that surrendering the Gaza Strip would bring peace. What happened then, and what has happened since, weighs heavily on many minds.

Rami’s face twisted with disgust and grief. Then he told us what he experienced on October 7th.

The Red Alert siren going off. Thinking it was a “normal” round of rocket fire from Gaza. Stepping outside, seeing the sky filled with missile trails and explosions like nonstop fireworks..

Instinct kicked in. He yelled for his wife to get up and get in the car. With his children serving in the army, he had only his wife and himself to protect.

The guards of the moshav were already in position, guns ready.

His wife wanted to go to Netivot. He chose to go directly north. If he done as his wife suggested they would have driven straight into the Nukhba ambush that was already at the junction, slaughtering everyone that came their way.

A split-second decision saved their lives.

Later, he managed to speak to his son on the phone. His son said, “Dad, don’t come back. Everyone here is being slaughtered.”

He returned two days later.

“I went to the site of the Nova festival. I wish I hadn’t. I can’t unsee what I saw. I needed medication for months just to function again.
There were bodies everywhere. Young people missing arms. Missing legs.
There was a burnt car full of heads — just heads. So charred, you couldn’t tell who was who.”

Then, quietly, he said:

“It’s terrible to say this, but the massacre at Nova saved Be’er Sheva.
If the terrorists hadn’t spent so much time doing what they did there, they would have kept going north — captured more communities, killed many more people.”

He went on to tell us about friends who had been at the beach in Zikim when terrorists arrived by sea.

One friend ran with other to a bomb shelter, thinking it would protect them from rockets [It’s utter insanity that we live with bomb shelters on our beaches]. But the terrorists weren’t just coming from the roads — they came from the sea. One threw a grenade into the shelter, killing everyone inside.

Another friend had managed to find a shallow ditch and buried himself in the sand. Only his eyes were visible. He saw everything and had to lie there, unmoving. He told Rami:

“The terrorists ran up and down the beach, right next to me.
Somehow, they didn’t see me. I don’t know how I’m still alive.”

We asked Rami: “How is your friend now? Is he okay?”

“He’s okay. He’s messed up, but he’s okay.”

That, somehow, seemed like an appropriate description for all of us. For the entire country.

Then, with a grin, Rami told us how he fed soldiers in the first days of the war, before the government evacuated his community to Eilat.

Soldiers with tanks were deployed on roads and fields. Soldiers, waiting for the instruction to move into Gaza, hunt down the enemy and rescue the hostages. “You haven’t seen anything like that even in a WWII movie,” he said.

Soldiers need to be fed and when everything was broken, people with big hearts and buckets of ingenuity filled the gap. Rami’s eyes lit up when he described how he rigged up a mobile BBQ with a grill and a generator, bought hundreds of pitas, made fresh salad, and drove between the soldiers, handing out hot meat straight off the grill.

That must have been a sight to see!

Words fail to describe the depth of the horrors, so unspeakable, so incomprehensible that we cannot wrap our minds around what happened. Perhaps because it is still happening.

It’s August 2025, and yet it’s still October 7^th, 2023.

And yet, there is no place on earth I would rather be.

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