Israel

Nancy Rommelmann | 2.17.2024 7:00 AM

"I can't believe we are going to the place where the most horrible thing happened, and it's an hour from here," says Yael.

"When it started, we were like, 'Holy shit!'" says Avi. "Then we got used to it."

Avi continues driving south, Tel Aviv to Sderot, a place most people became aware of on October 7. The videos of white pickup trucks arriving on a Saturday morning were unremarkable but for the men in the back with assault rifles. We would learn some also carried cameras, in order to memorialize what they had come to do. As one headline later read, "Everyone died."

"This is where the police station was," says Avi of a dirt lot punctuated by an air conditioner–size shaft. Otherwise, there is no sign of recent habitation, no commemoration of the hours-long firefight up stairwells and on the roof. Seven officers from the station and an untold number of Hamas militants were dead by the time the Israeli military gave the order: Hit the station with tank fire.

"There was one terrorist left in the building," Avi says. "Israeli forces demolished it, with him inside."

"We tend to raze things," says Yael, as she and Avi move up what was once a busy commercial strip. Every wall here is pocked with bullet holes, broken window glass has not been replaced, and what appears to have been a residence is missing its face, exposing a toppled-over sink and a pile of clothes. The only two other people on the street make assurances that the blood from the 50 civilians killed here on October 7 has all been washed away. Still, the town feels ghosty, abandoned. Life and death are frozen here, if not a mile away in Gaza.

"They're from Israeli cannons,"........

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