October 7, 2023, the black day of ravers, soldiers, families: “From that day I am also an animal”

“Look Hila, there are fireworks too!”.
“What did you say? I can’t hear you, the music is too loud!
“I said there are fireworks, look at the sky!”.
“These are not fireworks, Lion. They are rockets”
(Two boys dancing to the raven).

“At half past six, in my house in Tel Aviv, the alarm wakes us up. Long, scary. This is not the first one we have heard. But it is a blow from the blue, because nothing special happens. Or so I think”
(Manuela Dviri, writer).

“We hear the siren and lock ourselves in the security room. From the window I can see about fifteen terrorists at the entrance to the kibbutz. I calm my children, I say that everything is fine. But inside I’m frozen. If I open the window, I know it’s the end.”
(Daniel Lanternari, survivor).

“Dad, father! I killed ten Jews with my own hands!’ “May God protect you, my son, as I would like to be there with you!”
(phone call from Mahmoud, a young man from Gaza).

It is a sabbath without shalom. black october. Israel’s worst revival. They catch them dancing and having fun. Who milks the cows and prepares breakfast. Who sleeps and does not understand. In the kibbutzim and in the barracks, on the beaches and in the streets. In the vaults that will protect you if you get shot, or if they set you on fire. In the huts of Sukkot, which sheltered the people of the desert but the Ak-47s cannot do anything. Old men on crutches and newborns, pregnant women and flower children, little girls and farmers. Two fairies, a former Hapoel football player, a famous photographer.

They grab them by the hair, beat them, tie them up, burn them alive, carry them, behead them, make them kneel for mercy and then separate them with hand grenades. The person who kills everything with GoPros. Who will die, still in cell phone memories.

Noah Argamani, that she will come out alive: she screams loudly at her boyfriend as they drag her away on a motorbike. Shani Louk, never to return: she is thrown on her stomach in a crop, naked, her legs twisted.

There is a 45-minute video, shown by the Israeli government to journalists, that the faint of heart cannot see. «This morning», an Israeli officer will say among the bodies gathered in a kibbutz, «I feel like Eisenhower entering the Nazi concentration camps». To recover the bone fragments, you have to search kilometers of fields. For analysis DNA of burnt children, it takes a month. To convince women who have been raped to tell one year was not enough: «That day», Sapir admits, «I became an animal too».

6.29am: Hamas begins the “Al Aqsa Flood”
They say they didn’t expect it. That even the leaders of Hamas did not know everything. That Bibi Netanyahu’s government had focused on the West Bank and weakened controls on Gaza. Something that the Egyptian services warned and no one paid much attention to. And at the same time a historic peace agreement was signed with the Saudis. That strange Iranian and Russian advisers were seen in the Strip a few days earlier. That there were nine workers at the UN supporting the murder. There is ongoing research, much to understand.
At 6.29am, when the “Al Aqsa Flood” operation began and four thousand rockets were launched into Israel, not even Hamas thought it was able to kill 1,139 people and kidnap 252 . They chose the fifty years of the Yom Kippur War, to surprise the Israelites as the Egyptians surprised them, but the discovery is that the lamb is already ready for slaughter: through 119 gaps opened in the barrier, six thousand Gazans leave the Strath and spread themselves armed in twenty one moshavs, camps, barracks, cities, police stations. They use everything, trucks and motorcycles, fire engines and motorboats, even motorized hang gliders they bought on the internet.
The militias with the mephisto, the Gazans in slippers, have taken drugs Captain to charge themselves, but eventually find themselves facing only girls in uniforms who block themselves, while screaming into their cell phones for help. Or a few police who defend themselves like heroes, a few shock troops who also kill the Israelis by mistake.
When we reach the media, and forty-eight hours have not passed, there is still shooting in the camps. On the 234 highway that runs across Strath, the naked bodies of terrorists rot.
The large open area of ​​Fèis Nova, where we danced while waiting for dawn and unaware that terror was rising, is a landfill of overturned tents, crushed cars, bodies that cannot be recovered.

Fifteen Thai workers, for four days, were hiding in fear in the stables of Ein Ha Shlosha and no one bothers to save them. A few hours and the tanks are already stationed around Gaza for the big revenge, Operation “Iron Sword”. Bibi says: “We are at war”. In Damascus, the leader of Hamas responds: “We know very well what awaits us. ” It is not true: the law of vengeance has difficult figures after a year, thirty-seven Palestinian deaths for every Israeli killed. The beast of war has consumed everything, including sorrow and truth. “After all”, Hanan Ashrawi, a passionate Palestinian Authority historian, will one day say, “Hamas was an act of resistance”.
There is also a movement of denial: the murder never happened, they are sure, it is an invention. Be’eri and Kfar Aza and Nir Oz are there, places of death cannot be forgotten.

The most sincere question: where were you that day?
Over the past year, the most heard question in Israel is: where were you that day? A bit like old Americans when they talk about the Kennedy assassination. Or the smaller ones, since September 11.
“My daughter was supposed to be in Be’eri for her civil service,” said Mara, a mother from Jerusalem, “and luckily she wasn’t there that Saturday.” Nadav, a friend who works in finance: «My son had left Nir Oz shortly before the terrorists came. Now he has been called back to the army, they sent him to Gaza.”
In history books, October 7 was the anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, or the Jewish uprising at Auschwitz.. Now, it is written in full letters and he visited every detail: October 7 was the biggest attack in the land of Israel, the worst massacre of Jews since the Shoah, the worst terrorist attack since the Twin Towers. And today is the longest of the wars between Arabs and Israelis, a massacre of Palestinians like we have never seen, the biggest export since the Nakba of 1949. Where were we on October 7? Everyone will remember him forever. But what matters is where we are now.