It's 7:15am on October 7, 2023. In her home on the western edge of Be'eri, Ayelet Hakim hears the community loudspeakers deliver a recorded message.
Just two words in Hebrew, repeated three times: ??? ????. Tseva Adom. Red alert.
Ayelet isn't too worried. In this small community of 1,200 people just four kilometres from Gaza, red alerts are depressingly frequent, and usually signal a rocket has been fired from the strip towards Israel. They mostly overfly the kibbutz.
They scoop up their children, 4-year-old June and 11-year-old Yonatan, and move to the family's safe room – a thick-walled bomb shelter that doubles as a spare bedroom and linen closet.
But this is the third alert this morning, and Ayelet and Yonatan are tiring of the routine.
"We went back in, and we closed the door, and my husband said, 'This time we're going to stay here'," she tells 7.30.
"Then we start seeing these WhatsApp messages from all around the kibbutz. I was on a group that's called Kibbutz Moms, and there were a lot of messages saying there are terrorists on the kibbutz.
"They started to say, 'OK, so what are we going to do now?' And people said, 'Oh, wait, the army will come, probably 20 minutes, 10 minutes. Stay in your safe room and wait until the army comes'."
The nearest army base, Nahal Oz, is just a few kilometres away. A rapid response squad should already be on its way.
'I can't breathe, I'm dying'
At 71, Rami Gold was considered too old for Be'eri's volunteer security team. But when the red alerts sound, he calls his friend Hagi, who is on the squad, and asks what's going on.
"He said, 'We have our first casualty, can you come over and help?'" Rami says.
"They established a place to take care of the wounded members of the squad. They have a nurse there and a paramedic and the doctor is on his way."
Hagi gives his location – the kibbutz dental clinic – and hangs up.
Rami has no idea what's going on, but he's a man of action: He is kept fit by his job building mountain bike trails through rough terrain. He gets on his bike, and cycles through the empty kibbutz. He sees nobody and hears nothing out of the ordinary.
Then he gets to the clinic and comes across the aftermath of a battle.
"I could see a bicycle crushed on the road. I looked to the left, I could see one of the members standing out with a rifle pointing westward."
There's another security team member on the ground, dead. The clinic is full of other members of the squad, wounded from grenade shrapnel. Rami's told his friend, Hagi is wounded nearby. Rami picks up the dead man's rifle, and goes looking for Hagi.
He finds him in a laneway between two buildings, on the ground, wounded. Another Be'eri resident, reserve army general Yossi Bachar is with him.
He can see a wound in Hagi's arm.
"Hagi says, 'I can't breathe. I'm dying. Help me.' I said,' OK, I'm going to take you to the clinic. Give me a minute to see where the shooting is from.' And I went to the bushes ... and a hail of bullets were fired at me."
He takes cover. After a few minutes, with no sign of the shooter, he goes back over to Hagi and pulls him to cover.
Hagi shouts, "I can't breathe, I'm dying". Rami is a bit short with his friend.
"I said, 'If you're shouting, you can breathe. Give me a minute.'"
He looks again in vain for the shooter, then returns to Hagi to take him to the clinic.
Rami has a closer look — as well as the arm injury, Hagi had been shot in the chest. He is dead.
And the shooting starts again.
Another retired general, Israel Ziv, is on a Saturday morning bike ride in the hills outside Tel Aviv when he's called about the attacks in southern Israel.
He immediately turns around and rides for home, where he goes directly to his closet, puts on his old military uniform, grabs his pistol and gets in his car.
Whatever's happening, it's big, and the retired general isn't one to stand by helplessly.
En route, he calls a local commander.
"He told me that he himself is fighting for his life in the command post of the division," Ziv tells 7.30.
"I decided to go in and try to engage, and see what I can do in the field."
On the empty roads, Ziv makes quick time to Highway 232, the main road that serves the communities close to Gaza.
Someone starts shooting at him from about 200 metres away.
"They were shooting at me or my car. So I stopped for 10 minutes under a bridge. I engaged with one of the units of the border police. They took care of shooting back."
With that obstacle cleared, Ziv jumps in a car with two other army officers. They get about two kilometres further when they are caught in an ambush.
"Our car was hit with many bullets and we took cover, and there were two other squads of special units next to us, so I was right in the middle, trying to control that battle and coordinating between those two squads."
'The army isn't coming'
Inside their safe room, Ayelet Hakim and her family are starting to realise just how much trouble they're in.
The WhatsApp groups are now sharing photos of gunmen in the kibbutz, and residents being kidnapped, including Ayelet's brother-in-law, Ohad. Ohad and Ayelet's sister live nearby.
From inside, they can hear gunfire getting closer and closer.
Then someone enters their house.
"I just heard this terrorist like all the time in my house, walking and moving and moving things, and throwing things on the floor," Ayelet says.
Someone tries the handle of the safe room. There is no lock – but Ayelet's husband Ariel holds the handle as firmly as possible, and the attackers don't seem to realise that the family is on the other side of the door, and move back into the main part of the house.
The power has been cut. The heat in the safe room is stifling, and Ayelet's four-year-old daughter June is thirsty.
"I told her, 'listen, there are very bad people in our house, and if mum or dad go out, we might not come back. So we have to stay, and we have to stay really, really quiet," Ayelet tells 7.30.
Their only link to the outside world, their phones, are running low on battery.
"We waited for soldiers to come, Israeli soldiers, and we saw the messages until our phones went dead," she says.
"We saw the messages that the army isn't coming, and there's no army, and there's no soldiers, and there's nobody here to save us."
In the middle of the kibbutz, Rami Gold and Yossi Bachar are also wondering how long they must hold out. They've snuck around the corner from Hagi's body, onto the porch of a house where they can see terrorists walking around a row of houses about 50m away.
The 71-year-old and 59-year-old establish a kind of sniper's nest.
"So every time they went back and forth, including on the lawn here, we're able to shoot at them," Rami says.
"Every time we shot one of them down, we went over and hid inside a storage room. The bullets were flying everywhere, hand grenades, and when it stopped, we went back to our posts."
The Hamas militants can't see where the two men are firing from, and the bodies of the attackers start to litter the lawn.
Both men are injured by shrapnel, and they're running out of ammunition.
"I came back here and I said, 'Look, I'm going to stand here because I can't kneel. But here's the last bullet. You shoot better than I do.'"
'I couldn't find anybody alive'
About three kilometres outside of Be'eri, Israel Ziv has fought his way through the ambush, and starts to rescue people hiding near the roadside. He puts them in the car and drives them back down the road. They include escapees from the Nova music festival, which was being held in a forest just outside of Be'eri.
After dropping off another group of survivors, Ziv drives to the festival grounds.
"I drove down to the parking area of the Nova festival. What I've seen there was terrifying, because it was a huge parking lot, but packed of cars, half of them burned, or run over, and so many bodies," Ziv recalls.
"I started to go from body to body … maybe I can find somebody that is still alive. And it was like taken from a horror movie or something like that.
"I think I touched like 40 or maybe 50 dead bodies, but I couldn't find anybody alive. And then I decided to go back to Be'eri."
Small groups of soldiers are in Be'eri. An Israeli military report says that by 11am, about 26 soldiers are moving around the outskirts of the kibbutz.
But they are massively outnumbered by Hamas, who've set up sniping positions and have already killed security forces, including a team of police who'd driven into the kibbutz.
The IDF report says that at 11am, there are 340 attackers in the kibbutz.
That number includes opportunistic groups of civilians who followed the waves of Hamas attackers in, and who participate in looting and killings.
Having handed over his last bullet, Rami Gold looks up to see a rifle barrel pointed at him.
It's an Israeli soldier.
"I said, 'What the hell are you doing here?'"
"They said, 'We came to help. What do you need?'"
Rami tells him: "Ammunition, if possible, and a cell phone so we can call our family."
'Where the f**k' were the IDF?
Israel Ziv gets to the Be'eri gates in the late afternoon. For the first time that day, he sees a large group of soldiers.
"I went to the commander … and ask him, 'OK, what is going on? How can I help?' And he said, 'I'm organising myself. I'm preparing myself to go into the kibbutz'," he says.
"I say, 'OK, I'm here for you.' I didn't want to disturb him, because, you know, respect the command echelon. And after 10 minutes, you know nothing is happening. And I went back to him and said, 'OK, what is going on?' He said, 'I'm still preparing.'
"I said, 'OK, but you know people are getting killed over there. Hamas is there, we need to take over the kibbutz.' And for the third time, I was very nervous, you know, coming back to him and [saying], 'We need to move. We don't have time, and it's going to be dark.'"
When the soldiers do move in, Ziv is astonished to see them go in on single rescue missions, squad by squad, rather than attempt to retake the entire kibbutz.
"You saw the force coming out, carrying a stretcher with one or two of the soldiers, and like a few minutes later on, they brought the family. But the whole point was a misconception of the situation," Ziv tells 7.30.
He says the commanders were treating Be'eri as a hostage incident, rather than the battle it was.
After 17 hours inside their safe room, Ayelet and her family hear shouting in Hebrew as troops finally clear the homes in their district.
Her husband, Ariel, had held the door handle the entire time. The attackers tried the door several more times, but each time went away.
Their survival is miraculous: 101 civilians died in the Kibbutz that day; 30 more were taken hostage, including Ayelet's brother-in-law Ohad, and sister Raz. Hostage Carmel Gat, from Be'eri, was murdered in Gaza at the end of August.
Raz was freed in a hostage deal last year. Ohad remains in Gaza. The family does not know if he's alive.
The events of the day shattered Ayelet's faith in the Israeli army.
"I lived here for 55 years," says Ayelet. "My whole life, there was army here all the time. It was a devastating notion to know that there's no army and there's no one to come and get me, and there's no one to come and save us."
What would she say to the army's top commanders – those responsible for the chaotic and slow response on October 7?
"Where the f**k were you? What the f**k were you thinking?"
Failings outlined in report
There is no publicly available inquiry into Israel's failings on and before October 7 – just a brief report summarising what happened in Be'eri.
Some of its findings are damning.
"The IDF did not fulfil its mission to defend the residents in the most grave manner and failed in its mission," the report says.
"In some cases, security forces fought to defend a position and evacuate and treat wounded soldiers before doing so for civilians."
And it confirms what Israel Ziv saw that afternoon at the kibbutz gates.
"From the afternoon hours onwards, forces were waiting outside the kibbutz while the massacres continued inside," the report says.
The report acknowledges the extraordinarily difficult situation the military faced in southern Israel that morning, with attacks on at least 24 different communities.
"The critical question in all the battle inquiries is the reason for the delayed arrival of security forces at the beginning of the fighting in the communities … the principal answer that the simultaneous attacks on many communities and military outposts, as well as the blocked access roads, made it difficult to fulfil our mission."
Israel Ziv says the army's reputation was tarnished on October 7.
"The biggest problem is the issue of loss of trust," he says.
"If you would ask on October 6th, every child or citizen in Israel, they would all say that we absolutely rely on the army to defend us ... once we have a problem. And the military failed, completely failed."
In many instances, the army even failed to protect its own soldiers. At the Nahal Oz base, just a few kilometres from Be'eri, 54 soldiers died.
Nineteen-year-old Roni Eshel saw the beginning of the pre-dawn attack at 6:28am and radioed updates as the first wave of Hamas fighters approached the fence, blew it up, and crossed into Israel.
She and other soldiers in the control room were alive until at least midday, when Hamas set fire to the base.
Her father Eyel Eshel can't fathom why the military did not get to the base for the five-and-a-half hours she was alive.
"Where were the IDF soldiers? Where were the command people? I don't have the answer yet," Eyel says.
He's the driving force behind a private inquiry that's investigating failures on and before October 7, in the absence of a formal Israeli inquiry.
"I felt that I'm alone, so I took the mission and made it by myself, because I want the truth," he says
"I want the truth of the story, what happened here on October 7, especially what happened to my daughter."
Rami Gold still lives in Be'eri, patrolling the kibbutz on his mountain bike, his Israeli-made automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.
He says he doesn't have the emotional energy to blame the army for its failure to protect the community.
"I'm trying to do the best I can with what I have to make sure that the people around us will feel better, safer," he tells 7.30.
"Hopefully in the future, I'll have enough strength to ask these questions."
Despite all he did that day, Rami suffers from guilt that he couldn't save more lives, including that of his friend Hagi.
"Why?" I ask him.
"Because I wasn't able to save him!" says Rami. "
Because by the time we came back to the dental clinic, the paramedic, the doctor and all the other members of the [security] squad were killed already.
"I say to myself, I could have sat by him, hold his hand while he was…"
His voice trails off.
"I didn't. It kills me."
Ayelet Hakim and her family have moved to another settlement in the Negev desert, about 40 minutes' drive from Be'eri.
Some of the worst damaged homes in Be'eri have been demolished, and there are plans to knock down the houses in Ayelet Hakim's district. People were killed or abducted from most of the homes in her neighbourhood, the closest district to Gaza.
"The truth is all I want to do is come back and live on kibbutz Be'eri, and now I can't," she says.
"We had a really good life here. The 7th of October just destroyed it for us.
"As a grown-up maybe I can walk around here and see everything ruined and the houses burning, and know that that person who lived in that house was murdered, and I will never see him again.
"But for kids, I don't think it's a good idea to live here."
Reminders of October 7 are everywhere in Be'eri.
Ruined buildings are marked with paint to indicate that they've been cleared of booby-traps and bodies.
At the Highway 232 bus stop, at the entrance to Be'eri, a shelter is covered with stickers and posters commemorating the 16 people murdered inside.
In the thin forest of the nearby Nova festival site, a field of makeshift memorials tells of the 364 people who were killed there.
And every few minutes, the quiet is interrupted by the thump of outgoing artillery fired into Gaza, where the year-long war continues.
At his home in the hills outside Tel Aviv, Israel Ziv says he can't quite believe the things he saw and did on October 7.
"You know, all my life my wife is laughing at me because I still keep in the closet my uniform and my pistol, and she says, 'You're very old, who wants you if something happens?' I said, 'You never know'.
"My uniform and my pistol is still there … you never know. We live in a hostile neighbourhood."
Credits:
Reporter:
Photos: Shaun Kingma, Reuters, South First Responders via Telegram
Digital production: Jenny Ky
Editor: Paul Johnson
