'We felt like we had been betrayed': An October 7 survivor remembers

Gadi Stahl's daughter-in-law was one of the first people killed in the October 7 attacks.

The night before the unimaginable happened, Stahl, 82, spent a carefree evening with family and friends at a cabin in the woods near his kibbutz Kfar Aza, located some three kilometres from the Gaza Strip.

They celebrated late into the night, he says. "I went to sleep feeling happy and content."

The son of German-born Jews, Stahl has four children and nine grandchildren. His parents emigrated from Germany after the Nazis took power in 1933, hoping for a better future for their children in what was then Palestine.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, he woke up at 6 am, Stahl says. Shortly afterwards, he noticed strange sounds.

"Later it became clear that it was the rockets whistling." He then rushed to the shelter of his house, where he lives alone.

The attacks on southern Israeli communities on October 7 led by Palestinian extremist group Hamas "came out of the blue," Stahl says.

"There hadn't been any rocket attacks for a while; there hadn't been any escalation before that."

The worst massacre of Jews since World War II, the carnage coincided with Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday. The day has since also been referred to as Black Sabbath in Israel.

Israeli channel N12 recently reported new findings suggesting that about twice as many militants advanced into Israel from Gaza that day than initially estimated.

A total of 6,000 fighters from Gaza, including some 3,800 members of Hamas's Nukhba special forces unit, attacked kibbutzim and the Nova music festival held near the border that day, according to military sources.

At the same time, some 5,000 missiles were fired at Israel from the Palestinian coastal territory on October 7, N12 reported.

Unconceivable cruelty

Some 1,200 people, more than half of them civilians, were killed on October 7 - men, women and children alike - and more than 250 abducted to Gaza.

A year on, around 100 hostages are still held there, though as Israel's war on the Palestinians rages on, it seems increasingly unlikely that many of them are still alive.

Eyewitness reports describing how Palestinian militants ripped through Israeli communities detail scenes of inconceivable cruelty.

Many of the terrorists wore GoPro cameras and livestreamed the atrocities they were committing, including mutilations and rape, on social media.

In Kfar Aza, the kibbutz founded in 1957 that Stahl calls home, some 300 terrorists breached a protective fence and attacked the community on October 7. Sixty-four people were murdered and 19 taken to Gaza.

Many residents of the Israeli border communities attacked that day were activists working towards a future that entails a peaceful coexistence of Palestinians and Israelis.

One of them is Stahl's daughter Ziv, who runs the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din that fights "to protect the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli armed forces' occupation."

'We weren't prepared'

The residents of Kfar Aza were not warned by the Israeli army, says her father, who works as a chemist in a local factory that he co-founded.

"We weren't prepared," Stahl says. He stayed on the phone with his four children throughout the attacks, including one of his daughters who lives in the United States.

He heard gunshots outside, but says he only later realized that "it was terrorists shooting and that there was no army there."

One of his grandchildren hid in a shelter with a friend whose hands were seriously injured in the attack.

"They waited 10 hours for help," the 82-year-old says, still visibly agitated by the thought.

The first Israeli soldiers only reached his house at 2 am the next day, to evacuate him from the embattled settlement, Stahl says.

"We felt like we had been betrayed."

It was a neighbour who discovered the body of Stahl's daughter-in-law in her house. Attackers had shot her alongside her dogs. Stahl's son only survived because he had slept in a cabin outside the kibbutz that night.

Failure to take responsibility

One year on from the massacre, Stahl remains furious with the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. No official investigation into the government's failure to protect its citizens has been launched so far.

"The government told us, you are protected, we have built you a wall that cannot be crossed," Stahl says bitterly, referring to the barrier that encloses the Gaza Strip.

"And then you see pictures on TV of how a primitive tractor can simply mow down the 'insurmountable' fence. And how SUVs dash across the border and no one stops them."

No one stopped the attackers, even though "one or two tanks on the way would have been enough," Stahl believes.

The Israeli army could have "prevented the hostages from being taken to the Gaza Strip," but the military was not available because troops had previously been moved to the West Bank to protect far-right Israeli settlers there, he says.

Israel underestimated the capabilities of Hamas, according to Stahl.

The Islamists, which have been ruling in Gaza since 2007, are designated as a terrorist organization by the EU, the US and Israel.

"They knew exactly where they had to go," Stahl says about the way the attacks were conducted. "They operated like a real army, they had very detailed information on the kibbutz."

The fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu has never personally taken responsibility for the October 7 attacks is a "disgrace," the 82-year-old says.

Meanwhile, he is seeing an unprecedented wave of support from the civilian population, Stahl says.

An act of revenge

Despite having lived through one of the worst massacres imaginable, Stahl continues to believe that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only be achieved by dialogue.

Israel's retaliatory campaign in Gaza, which has claimed more than 41,000 Palestinian lives, most also believed to be civilians, one year after the war began, appears to be an act of revenge, instead of a war on Hamas, Stahl says.

Before the war, the residents of the kibbutz often traded with Gazans, he says.

"When we build the factory in Kfar Azar, one of our first customers was a sandal manufacturer from Gaza City," Stahl recalls.

In the 1970s, he drove all the way through the city to a Gazan factory on the coast to make sure the product they were selling was working properly. "I was welcomed with open arms."

Ever since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas took power two years later, such a trip became unthinkable. Recapturing the Gaza Strip would be "a disaster," Stahl says.

A return

Despite the horrors he lived through, the 82-year-old is determined to move back to his kibbutz.

Some residents already returned when the new school year began in September, even though Hamas continues to launch missiles at Israel.

Stahl also believes it is important to go back "to show our enemies that we will recover and get back up again."

New housing is being constructed some distance away, though Stahl would have preferred for it to be incorporated into the existing kibbutz, despite the visible traces of the attack.

Kfar Aza has been "turned into a kind of museum to show how bad it was." His grandchildren are unsure whether they want to stay, he says.

"It will take a long time until we recover from this trauma."