Roosting birds now coo among the ceiling tiles in the deserted dining room of Kibbutz Nir Oz, once the bustling heart of a close-knit, 400-strong Israeli community which was devastated by the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023. "We used to come and see each other, eat together. There were lots of activities here, also holidays to celebrate," remembers Dalit Ram Aharon, who is showing me around with her husband, Achi.
By the glass entrance doors, dotted with bullet holes, there is a shocking reminder of what happened to the missing residents. The postboxes for each household bear stickers put there after the attacks three years ago: red indicates those killed, and black those taken hostage. "That's one out of four of us: murdered or kidnapped," Dalit says.
"Including children and babies." As Israel marks the third anniversary of its deadliest-ever day, this is another painful time of reflection for residents of the kibbutz, which sits just a mile (1.6km) from the Gaza border and was one of the worst-hit places. Time stands still at the nearby burnt-out house of the Siman Tov family, where a wind chime dangles by the door. A picture shows Tamar and Yonatan with their three children, twin girls Shahar and Arbel, five, and their two-year-old son, Omer.
The parents were shot through the door of their bomb shelter - designed to protect from rockets launched from Gaza, not gunfire. Dalit, who survived with Achi and their three children by hiding in their own shelter for nearly 12 hours that day, recalls the last social media messages sent by Tamar to her neighbours. "On that day in the morning, she wrote in the woman's group, at the beginning, 'Is everyone fine?' Then, at another point, she wrote, 'They are shooting us.' And after that she wrote with a lot of mistakes, 'We are very injured,'" Dalit tells me.
"From what we understand, they torched the house and the children died from suffocation, so all the family was killed." An estimated 500 Palestinians, led by Hamas's elite Nukhba force fighters, but including civilian looters, some of them children, joined the assault on the unsuspecting Nir Oz. Forty-one Nir Oz residents and foreign workers were killed, along with six people who had fled to the kibbutz from a party nearby. Seventy-six people from the kibbutz were kidnapped to Gaza, including nine bodies, with 14 hostages taken alive and killed in captivity.
The last living hostages from Nir Oz were returned to Israel on 13 October 2025 and the remains of the last deceased hostage, Amiram Cooper, were brought back two weeks later. As we walk through the greenery, it is eerily quiet bar bird song and the mewing of hungry, stray cats. Dozens of fire-damaged homes, which were simple, one-storey buildings in Nir Oz, have now been torn down, leaving just rows of the reinforced concrete safe rooms, which failed to keep people safe.
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