How do you report on a massacre? What Haaretz journalists saw on October 7

Nine Haaretz journalists recount their experiences on October 7, the day their personal and professional lives collided: How reporters, editors and photographers worked under fire and while their own homes, families and friends were under attack, and how the Hamas assault and the Gaza war changed them

Linda Dayan introduces the 7 October accounts of Haaretz journalists on 7 October 2024:

In the first week of October 2023, the top headlines in Israel were the habitual mix of domestic politics and holiday pieces: the commotion at the sex-segregated Yom Kippur prayers in Tel Aviv, the nationwide protest movement against the judicial overhaul enacted by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the prospect of normalizing relations with the Saudis, what to do with the kids over Sukkot.

Then, on Saturday, on what was supposed to be a quiet and joyous day – it was Simchat Torah, the last of the autumn holidays – everyone found themselves in a different Israel, a different Middle East, and a different reality.

Most Israelis woke up to sirens blaring across the country’s south and center, heralding barrages of rockets from Gaza, or from frenzied phone calls from loved ones. Later on, they heard from friends and relatives in communities bordering the Strip about the infiltration of armed terrorists, the murders and kidnappings. Some watched these atrocities broadcast live on social media. It would take days, weeks, months to fully understand what happened that day, but almost immediately each and every person grasped that what was happening around them was a historic event.

Journalists are assumed to be silent observers, not touching the environments they report from and emerging from them untouched themselves. A lot of the time, we are. But what does it mean to be a correspondent from the south, running from the missile fire you’re reporting on? And how do you edit a news site when the biggest story of the day is the massacre at the kibbutz where your parents live? And what do you do when you’re sent to document the devastation of your own neighborhood?

I spoke to nine Haaretz journalists – reporters, editors, photographers – about their experiences on October 7 and its aftermath. Some of them headed south: Eden Solomon to begin her brand-new beat as southern correspondent, Bar Peleg to report first-hand from the epicenter, and Yaniv Kubovich to get as many people out as he could. Yair Brill and Sivan Klingbail spent the day managing Haaretz and TheMarker respectively, all the while getting constant, harrowing updates about the fate of the kibbutzim they grew up in and their loved ones there.

Liza Rozovsky returned from reporting on refugees in Nagorno-Karabakh to a war on the home front. Jack Khoury and Sheren Falah Saab grappled with reporting on Gazans and their suffering from across the border, along with tightening restrictions on freedom of expression at home. Eli Hershkovitz spent the day hiding from terrorists in his safe room in Kibbutz Holit, and returned later to photograph the ruination of his community.

The stories they told were often deeply personal, and at the same time, so familiar. There are the sensory memories of witnessing death and destruction on a massive scale, the feelings of guilt and powerlessness at being unable to rescue everyone who turned to them for help, and the hope that after all they’ve seen, their work will play a part in shaping the way history remembers the event.

•••

Yaniv Kubovich, Haaretz military correspondent – ‘I knew from the first moment that this would be my life’s work, this event’

In the morning, I started getting calls from Gaza border residents from their safe rooms, saying that there were terrorists in their towns and they’ve started breaking into houses. They were whispering so as not to make noise. I live close to the border, in the south, so I got dressed, grabbed my personal handgun, and headed out. I knew that a lot of civilians were trapped. I didn’t do this as a journalist; I wasn’t thinking that I could get a story. I did it because people were calling me and asking me to check on family and friends. So I started a crazy drive to the Gaza border communities.

I drove via Ofakim, where I met the first of the terrorists I’d see. They were battling the police, there were bodies in the street. I decided to go around them through a dirt road, and continued on. I got to the Home Front Command area near Re’im, and I saw another terrorist cell standing there on the side, and got around them as well.

I got to the Re’im parking lot. There were a few people there who’d managed to flee the party, and I understood that there were still partygoers there. A group of a few people with cars got together and started to try to save people. During all this time, I didn’t see the army. It was insane.

We were at the Re’im interchange at around 8 A.M. We went in, a group of cars. The terrorists had stopped advancing relatively quickly, but they were still there, with machine guns. We got in and tried to get people out. To the right, toward the parking lot, you could see burning cars and hear gunshots. When I got there, there were dead people in the shelters. We drove carefully so as not to run over bodies.

The cruelty was insane, and the pictures were insane, and the failure was so serious. The helplessness of the army and the confusion – no one could imagine anything like this, even in the most extreme military drills.

After that, I went back to the Re’im junction, which was the exit point from that area. I started getting messages again, asking me to help rescue other people. I made my way to another kibbutz, where someone asked me to get him out, so I helped him. All this time, there was gunfire from every direction.

People kept calling, and I told them that I would handle it. I would talk to commanders, I told them, the Air Force is there, but I knew I was lying to them. When I talked to the army, they told me that the situation was chaotic and there’s nothing to be done.

You look around amid this chaos, and you tell yourself that this is what a country with no security looks like – with no army, no nothing. The sights at the kibbutzim were horrific, truly awful. The houses with bodies on the lawns, the bodies of terrorists, guns everywhere. It was crazy. At around 10 P.M., I headed back home. I didn’t go to sleep. It was an insane day of so many thoughts – do I go back? Do I not go back? What do I do? There are a lot of people who called me that I didn’t help. I know that they died. I started trying to process all of this, to understand what happened.

I felt awful. I had this terrible sense of guilt. I wrote a post – I had no way to scream it, so I wrote it:

“It was also my responsibility, and I failed. I apologize that I didn’t do more research, that I didn’t present the reality in the field. That sometimes I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of senior officers at your expense. That I didn’t always come with a more critical eye. I apologize for the articles that were intended to boast rather than to criticize, for unimportant briefings I attended. I apologize for this. I had a responsibility, and I failed. I am sorry!”

The cruelty was insane, and the pictures were insane, and the failure was so serious. The helplessness of the army and the confusion – no one could imagine anything like this, even in the most extreme military drills. They did drills like this, that there would be a cell or two, maybe dozens of terrorists who would infiltrate.

The army, in the beginning, took responsibility – they said it was our fault, and we failed. From the beginning, I had a lot of clashes with them, about, for instance, rescuing soldiers before civilians. I tried to get as much information as possible from the beginning, and the reports from the army started being half-truths. They said that they came in at 5, 6 in the morning, when you know that you were there at 10 and you didn’t see anyone, you didn’t see the forces that were supposed to be there.

I want the truth. I never believed that my purpose was to motivate the army or the nation during wartime. When the war started, it was extremely difficult to levy criticism. It brings this invective from people: “You’re a traitor, you’re a fifth column, you’re a terrorist, your mom is this and your dad is that.” I really didn’t care. It doesn’t affect me and it doesn’t have an effect on me. I was a critical writer beforehand as well. The army doesn’t love me – for two or three years, they didn’t give me calls with officers or let me into trips to bases as a punishment. A year before October 7, I did a big investigation about field observers who claimed that no one was listening to them, and that the army was dismissive of their reports.

I tell friends that I’ve been a journalist for 25 years, 19 of them at Haaretz. I did this whole path as preparation for this day. It’s the hardest and most terrible thing I’ve ever covered and will ever cover, but I also feel lucky that it was me who got to do this. I knew from the first moment that this would be my life’s work, this event.

I don’t look at that day as a journalist. It’s your day as an Israeli, a Jew, as someone who was a combat soldier, as a father. I think my role as a journalist was completely secondary. I barely sent any reports. I wanted to keep things under control, to go into peoples’ houses and help.

•••

‘It was as if I were watching it from above, like it wasn’t happening to me. I remained in that mode for months’
Sivan Klingbail, editor-in-chief, TheMarker

I woke up at a quarter to seven – I didn’t hear the sirens, but I got a call from Geffen Gal Tzur. We grew up in Nir Oz, in a cohort of children born in the same year called the Ofarim group. We were brought up in the children’s house and went through school together on the kibbutz.

Geffen called to ask for help – Shai, another member of the group, had seen a video on her mother’s Facebook page. In it, the mother, Bracha Levinson, was surrounded by people pointing rifles at her, and then shooting her. You could see her lying on the floor with blood pouring out of her head. All of this was broadcast live – Shai’s children and her sister’s children were exposed to it, and Geffen wanted my help.

I immediately stepped into my role as a journalist. I said, “I’m sorry, you’re talking to a robot,” and immediately started managing the event. I called the Magen David Adom rescue service, I called people I knew from the army – I tried to get help to Nir Oz. But I couldn’t. People didn’t answer the phone. I called my father and told him that this wasn’t just another day of rocket attacks. It was an infiltration. They had murdered Bracha.

At 8:30 A.M., I decided to ask the VP of Facebook to take down the video from Levinson’s private page. Facebook international got involved, and at a quarter to nine, Bracha Levinson’s page was down, so that no one would be able to see that video again.

Every message, every call I got from the kibbutz asking for help, I sent out in every direction like a madwoman. As I see it, I was moving the troops – but the troops didn’t move, and nobody got to Nir Oz. I tried to rally everyone, and I wasn’t the only one. A lot of people from the kibbutz used their connections, and I know people who went live on television and the radio to get help. Other people tried to get security forces to Nir Oz, too, but they never arrived.

Being a journalist helped me stay very focused, and I managed the event like a journalist, rather than a person whose loved ones were in mortal peril. I was in touch with my parents over WhatsApp, and I was very worried, but I kept a certain distance. It was as if I were watching the scene from above and it wasn’t happening to me. I remained in that mode for months. It really helped; it was an armor that guarded my wellbeing. I couldn’t get out of it, and I didn’t want to, either.

On October 8, knowing that dozens of people I know personally, who grew up with me, my friends, were either kidnapped or murdered, I held a Zoom meeting with my employees. All the writers and editors at TheMarker were there, and I explained that Israel was at war. I had a calm smile, talking about how anyone who was in crisis or called up for reserve duty could come to us for support. When the meeting ended, after I’d put on that giant, calming smile, I broke down and cried for the first time. I just collapsed. But it was just five minutes, and then I got up and got back to full function.

In the beginning, we put out instructions that were sent out to every Haaretz employee – not just TheMarker – about how to interview people who had been through hardship, or whose loved ones had been through hardship. This is something I couldn’t have written if I hadn’t been one of those people. The text starts by saying, “Don’t ask people how they’re doing. They feel like shit, thanks for asking.” Another sentence that stuck with me was “Don’t tell people to ‘be strong’ – they’re already strong. They have no choice but to be.”

I think that the most difficult lesson I learned on October 7 was the limits of my strength – as an editor of a newspaper, as a journalist. We do our work out of this motivation to have an effect on the environment around us. For a full day I sent out messages to everyone I could think of and talked to people from the kibbutz. I kept telling people that “help was on the way, I’m doing everything I can.” Even when I didn’t say it, I felt it. People died while on the phone with me. For a long time, Yona Wallach’s poem was stuck in my head: “I couldn’t do anything about it/ It was here in my hands/ And I couldn’t do anything about it.”

•••

‘People in Israel didn’t want to hear about what was happening in Gaza’  – Jack Khoury, Haaretz Arab affairs correspondent

When I heard Muhammad Deif’s message on a live broadcast at around 7 or 8 in the morning, I understood that we were on our way to a very big, dramatic event. It dawned on me that it wasn’t just another incident, another round of fighting, but something much bigger, much more significant, with extremely far-reaching consequences. I realized that we were getting into an exceedingly difficult mission, coverage-wise. Since then, I’ve been in that loop, nonstop, every single day.

Covering a war is extremely difficult, but as a writer who’s been covering the Palestinian arena for more than a few years, I know that you simply need to get a sense of the event even when you can’t get to the area at all. The Gaza Strip is closed off, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to go in with the army. I could only cover it from afar. It’s a lot easier than it was years ago, with all the social media posts, with all the reports. Despite the war and the destruction, there’s still infrastructure. You can still get information online about what’s going on in Gaza. But at the same time, it’s covering it remotely.

So you’re talking to people who are in the know, people who can talk to this or that source and get information, and of course staying glued to social media and media outlets with particular agendas – ones that (align) with Hamas or with groups on the other side, which is the PA.

And from all this chaos, you have to distill and refine and get the information that’s more correct and authentic. It’s not easy, because the Palestinian media also has its own agenda. Every channel has its access to sources here but less access to sources there. It’s really hard, and, of course, I still try to bring in primary sources, especially when it comes to the hostages, and civilian issues. The perspective of the civilian population in Gaza and what they’re experiencing.

Sometimes, maybe you can talk to lower-ranking members of Hamas and other Palestinian factions and get some information, but there’s no possibility of talking to senior members or policy makers, not in Gaza and not abroad. You’re first and foremost a journalist who’s covering the war for an Israeli paper, and I was also afraid of how talking to Hamas members would be perceived in Israel.

At a certain point, I started sharing my work on social media. I was subjected to terrible attacks and wild incitement from all sorts of people. Some of them were on the right, and some of them weren’t – and some of them also call themselves journalists. I interpreted it as a sort of silencing, and I’d say that they did succeed to a certain degree. The phenomenon of incitement and hateful comments isn’t new, but now it’s much more vicious than what I’ve experienced in the past.

People (in Israel) didn’t want to hear about what was happening in Gaza at all. Maybe now they do, just in the last few months. But for a long time, even when I would come in with the number of dead in Gaza, people would attack me. They said, who would believe the numbers, everything that’s happening in Gaza is because of Hamas, everyone in the Strip is a Hamas member. It was a painful experience. I’d see it in the comments on the occasions I read them – I would usually try not to. There’s no doubt that there was a profound deterioration – I’d even say brutalization – in Israeli society regarding what’s written about the civilian population in Gaza.

I don’t think my coverage has changed, but it’s been more difficult, more massive. I covered the Second Lebanon War and everything that’s been happening since 2007, including Guardian of the Walls, but there’s no doubt that this is different on every level – in terms of the scope of the destruction, in terms of the intensity of the events and also in terms of the number of dead and the difficult pictures you’re exposed to. It’s much more dramatic and difficult and painful on a physical level.

Everything I’ve written about the civilian experience in Gaza – my conversations with medical patients, with the wounded, with social activists, with human rights activists, with people in the diaspora – telling me what they’re going through, how difficult it is, has stuck with me. People I know, their sons were wounded. Some of them left Gaza and moved abroad, that sticks with me. Every article that has a human element sticks with me.

•••

‘I could see on the community WhatsApp group how the terrorists were moving through the kibbutz’
Yair Brill, deputy editor, Haaretz.co.il

I’m originally from Be’eri – I left about 10 years ago, but my parents and other relatives still live there. My siblings and I live in Tel Aviv but, of course, many of my friends live on the kibbutz, and I know everyone.

On October 7, I was on call for the news desk for the weekend. I woke up at around 6:30 A.M., from the sirens, like everyone else in Tel Aviv. I got up, saw those first messages, and was at the computer in minutes. I was getting updates from a few places: the work groups, writers, editors who were updating us via WhatsApp on everything that was going on and the information they’re getting.

There was a lot of talk about what was happening regarding missile fire across the country – in the beginning, many rockets were fired at central Israel. There was less information about the situation on the kibbutzim.

The third group I was getting information from, which was the most significant, was the kibbutz’s message board app. It’s used for announcements about happenings in Be’eri – cultural events, menu options at the dining hall, shuttles to different places. From this, you could see what was really happening in Be’eri in terms of geography.

The infiltrations happened at a very early stage, but it took a long time to understand what was going on. Everyone was stuck in their homes, and couldn’t always tell what was happening outside. Besides, even when you understood that terrorists have gotten in, no one had any way of knowing how many of them there were.

When my parents were in the shelter, they didn’t know what was happening 100 or 200 meters from their home or on the other side of the kibbutz. At this point, on the other side, they were already burning down homes, killing, kidnapping people.I could see through the WhatsApp group how the terrorists were moving through the kibbutz. The messages were very vague: ‘we hear voices in Arabic,’ ‘we hear gunshots,’ ‘we can see burning houses’. It took time for me to figure out how these messages were moving toward my parents’ neighborhood.

It was a very complicated experience to be on shift at the time. The messages from the news desk were pretty technical – I simply worked, updating things here and there, fixing issues, putting pictures up on the site. You understand that it’s a significant event, and you need to work. This is why we’re here. But from the kibbutz, you’d get messages where you’d suddenly recognize people’s names.

You have no control over what’s happening, and it’s very hard to function that way. I had no power over it, but at least I could make decisions – ‘let’s put up something about blood drives because there are hospitals that need type O donors to come,’ or ‘let’s use this picture instead of that one, because it might be insensitive.’ These were the professional decisions that kept me feeling like I had some control.

In Be’eri, the battle continued into Monday afternoon. My parents were rescued overnight Saturday, and then taken to a hotel at the Dead Sea on Sunday morning. My cousin, who we’d later learn was killed that day, was still missing. So many people were missing. The ZAKA disaster response group and the army hadn’t arrived in Be’eri to check how many bodies there really were, how many were kidnapped; everything was incredibly chaotic.

It was important to me to be as accurate as possible so that people from Be’eri wouldn’t feel their memory or reputation was being tarnished. There were many nuances that were crucial to get right, both because I care about the people of Be’eri, and because I didn’t want people from the kibbutz to think that out of all the papers, Haaretz got the details wrong.

I understand the anger that a lot of people have, but I’m not ready to give up on my humanity. I don’t believe in this sense of revenge that some people have, either. I don’t think that everyone in Gaza is a terrorist or that everyone in Gaza supports Hamas, for the same reason that I know that not all Israelis support the occupation and not all Israelis support taking over Gaza.

From the beginning, on a personal level, I believed that Israel didn’t need to enter Gaza, it needed to say ‘what happened has happened, and if we’re speaking in terms of victory and loss, then we lost, and now we’re trying to fix it.’ The most important way to do so, I think, is to bring back the hostages. I don’t believe we’ll reoccupy Gaza, and I don’t believe Israel will fully wipe out Hamas or any other terror group. I still believe in a diplomatic solution.

Itai Svirski, who was taken hostage, is one of my best friends. He was killed in captivity because the Israeli government pressured Hamas. A person he was with was killed by IDF bombings. It’s very clear, as I see it, that the only way to bring these people back to a normal life is some sort of deal.

•••

‘We were under our cars, and I told myself that it was only a matter of time before I got shot’
Bar Peleg, Haaretz reporter

At around 8 in the morning, I started to understand what was happening in the south. We’d already received the now well-known video of terrorists in pickup trucks in the city of Sderot, and that dispelled any doubts. I started heading south and arrived in Ashkelon at about 9 A.M. The power station there was on fire; most people don’t remember the fact that it was hit by a rocket. I was caught by a siren at a gas station nearby, and after I’d gotten down on the ground, I lifted my head up and saw some photographer friends from other outlets. We decided to keep heading southward together.

A local helped us find our way to Sderot. We were driving through open fields, through the places where terrorists were hiding. We didn’t know – no one knew yet – that Sderot also was in utter chaos. By that point in the morning, we thought the worst was behind us.

When we arrived, it was through the city’s back entrance. We witnessed the trail of destruction the terrorists had left behind in Sderot – they came in at seven o’clock and massacred people for about ten minutes, broke into the police station, and stayed there into the night.

The first thing I saw was a motorcyclist dressed in red, lying on the road, dead. It was the first corpse I have ever seen. We advanced a few meters and saw a destroyed car; we know now that it had been hit with an RPG, and the driver was dead. Another few meters ahead, we saw a small shelter that had since become famous. Elderly people were hiding there. We’d seen the picture of their bodies at about 7:30 A.M. I wrote to the news desk that, as far as I could tell, there were about ten people murdered around the shelter.

That’s when it hit me that I’d sent a viral picture of that shelter to the news desk at 7:30 A.M. and it was already about 1 P.M. That meant that more than five hours have gone by and no one had come to cover the bodies. I saw them, their eyes open, in the sun. At that moment, I grasped that this was a very different situation. Rescue services haven’t even had time to cover the victims, the bare minimum as a show of respect for the dead. It’s what they always do.

With me were much more experienced and veteran journalists and photographers – some had worked in real warzones, people who had been in Ukraine or in Lebanon in the past. I kept looking at them, at their eyes, for validation for what I was feeling. I could tell that they were revolted, and I understood that the situation really was dire.

We left Sderot and started to see what had happened on the roads. We saw all the cars in Sha’ar Hanegev – there were 10, 15 cars, burnt out or riddled with gunshots, bodies. We saw Highway 232, called the Highway of Death. If we had driven any further down, we would definitely have been killed; I know for a fact that there were terrorists in the area at that time.

We saw a dog wandering around by itself. It was cute and it didn’t seem traumatized, but it was alone there. I whistled to the dog and he approached me. I pet him and he started to lead us somewhere. He brought us to another area, with five or six cars, and murdered people all around us. That was the first time we saw people who were murdered after escaping the Nova party. I saw Adam and Shani, a couple, just kids. It looked as if their bodies were holding hands, from the position they were in.

We were in that area for about 40 minutes, an hour. I was feeling jumpy, I told the other journalists, “Come on, let’s go to Re’im. It’ll be dark soon, and it’ll be a lot less forgiving to go in the dark.”

And that’s when the terrorists opened fire on us. We got down on the ground, and we heard the bullets whistling over our heads. The first five minutes seemed like an eternity. We were under our cars, and I told myself that it was only a matter of time before I got shot, and really hoped I would be shot in the leg and survive.

We saw a police car go by – I lifted up my head, but they didn’t see me. A few moments later, five jeeps full of soldiers arrived to the area and noticed us – a special-forces unit. They closed ranks around us. They were right above us, shooting, and the terrorists were firing back – onto my car.

The bullets were getting closer, I could feel pebbles hitting my helmet because bullets were hitting the ground. I knew I had to get out of there. I could hear the bullets hitting the car, could hear one puncturing the tire, I knew it was very, very close. I jumped behind a barrier there and hid – all the photographers did the same in the end. Eventually, the soldiers killed the terrorists.

After it was over, I got a phone call telling me to show up for reserve duty. I needed to go back to Tel Aviv, put on my uniform, and leave. We drove for another hour, changed the tire, checked to make sure that everyone was alive. We left behind two of our cars; they had been shot at so much that they couldn’t move. I headed back to Tel Aviv, with a spare tire and a car riddled with bullet holes.

•••

‘At any moment, we may lose our freedom of expression. Sadly, I put up stories and then I’m afraid of them coming and questioning me’
Sheren Falah Saab, Arab culture correspondent at Haaretz

October 7 didn’t end with that day. Every day is October 7. We’re stuck in this event that has gone on for a full year, it’s something that stays with us all the time. I think it’s the worst place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could devolve into. I never expected anything like that to happen, and it frightened me. It frightened me because I knew that this was a point of no return – that this war would change the entire region.

I’m in touch with people in the Gaza Strip, and Gazans, at least the ones I’m in contact with, understood that there had been an attack, but didn’t know the details. The civilians didn’t grasp the scale of the event. When Israel started to attack, they didn’t understand. Hamas didn’t officially declare that they were going to war. Some people didn’t understand, or tried not to understand, that Hamas actually entered Israel, carried out a massacre and kidnapped people. It’s an unfathomable situation.

I report on the Gazan side, and I get very harsh responses. I’m an Arab citizen – I’ve seen what happens to Arab citizens who’ve written about the Gaza Strip. Some have been arrested, some have been investigated, some have been charged. I’m a journalist, and I always say that I have the privilege of working at a paper that allows me to give a voice to the other side – the Gazan side.

Since the war, I’ve come to understand that this shouldn’t be taken for granted in Israel in 2024. At any moment, we may lose our freedom of expression. Sadly, I’ll put up stories and be afraid of them coming and questioning me. It’s scary what’s going on here in terms of freedom of expression. It’s really changed me, and made me appreciate what I have at the moment.

But if we don’t report about it, who will? If I have a story, and I insist that I need to write it and publish it, I feel that at least I’m getting that voice out and allowing it to be heard by the world. It sounds a bit philosophical, but it’s a matter of conversing with the future. Historians will write about this war, and each one will have their own story to tell.  In extreme situations, it’s hard to see the value of your work, but in another 50 years, people will make use of the articles in the archives and read about what happened here. It’s the future generation that keeps me going. I want other people, in another 20, 30 years to see what war can do to both sides.

Sometimes, and we see this a lot in mainstream Israel, media doesn’t just shape public opinion, it shapes our morality during wartime. The media ignores Gazans, it doesn’t talk about them, doesn’t mention them. We’ve removed Gazans from the Israeli consciousness, so we lose the ability to judge and analyze this war from a moral perspective.

News reporting doesn’t value human suffering. You see this suffering expressed in the cries of the families of the hostages, in the cries of the families of the murdered in Gaza, people who lost their families and can’t bury them. It just doesn’t exist in the news.  I try, in my articles, to focus on that suffering and humanity, because even when this war ends, you don’t know when the next war is coming. I’m afraid it might happen in Lebanon. But we need a very clear message to stop the war.

I think, one day, I’ll break down. People ask me how I’m doing, and I start to cry. This is a very cruel war. I hear the testimonies and I’m processing it by myself. Of course, I have the news desk, without whom and their support I wouldn’t be able to keep going, and I also have psychological support. But it’s an inconceivable reality. The human brain and human consciousness and human soul have a limit to how much they can take. I cry every day, even when I’m alone.

This is an uncompromising war and neither side wants to surrender. You don’t see people, not even in the Israeli and Palestinian public discourses, saying anything pragmatic. One side claims that the state of Israel has no right to exist, and the other side claims that the state of Palestine or the Palestinian nation has no right to exist. I’m holding up, but I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m surrounded by both sides of this war.

I try to bring in stories of Gazans. Whether it’s artists or writers or a story about a TikToker – I try to lead it in this direction. If we, as journalists, ignore the other side, we’re also having an impact on the abilities of our readers or the public who consume that media to understand them. We have a part in this. We have a part in shaping this awareness, we have this power, and we need to use this power ethically.

•••

‘My articles about sexual assault were exploited by rape deniers. What could I do? I report facts, and what other people do with that is another matter’
Liza Rozovsky, society and culture writer at Haaretz

October 7 found me in Armenia. About two weeks earlier, there was the massive expulsion of residents of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenians who had lived there for generations were expelled by the Azeris, who took control over the region that had been part of Soviet Azerbaijan. They reclaimed the area in September 2023, and all the people who had lived there, about 100,000 Armenians, were simply kicked out.

This was, of course, a gigantic story, but just as my fixer and I were on the way to the border region, where all the refugees who had just been expelled were, the notifications about what was going on in Israel started to come in. My fixer was in all sorts of Russian Telegram channels that immediately started posting the awful videos (of Hamas atrocities). I saw a few, and they were very, very difficult. I realized that I needed to get back to Israel fast. On October 9, I’d already returned.

I’d had a bit of experience in interviewing women who’d been sexually assaulted, so I ended up with the project of writing about sexual assaults on October 7. I realized very quickly that the chances of interviewing Israeli rape victims were very low, and that the story is a matter of collecting the crumbs of information available.

It turned out that it was a sort of minefield of rumors. Not necessarily false information, but information characterized by a lack of understanding, and throwing around words and then retracting them. There are small bits of information that need to be pieced together like a puzzle.

There are a lot of conflicting interests. On the one hand there are a lot of people going around and releasing all this nonsense into the world, and on the other hand there are survivors and witnesses. People who can tell the story, but it’s almost impossible to get to them. They’re the least interested in talking.

It was a very complicated experience to deal with this story – both because you understand that you’re doing something important, and also because you feel like you’re disgracing the dead, digging for these pornographic details. It puts you in a very unpleasant place, both with your sources and with yourself.

I saw the way articles that I published about sexual assault were exploited by rape deniers. What could I do? In the end, I report the facts that I can confirm, and what other people do with that is another matter. Of course, I’m revolted by the rape deniers; I know with a very high level of certainly that there were numerous sexual assaults (on October 7). But I’m also disgusted with the political exploitation of this story by politicians in Israel – such as Foreign Minister Katz.  Katz goes around making statements and raging in the name of Israeli rape victims, without research or fact checking, and uses the subject to attack the United Nations and other international groups.

When I covered the war in Ukraine, I came to understand that no statement made about a war by either side can simply be accepted as truth. In many, many cases, it includes elements of lies, and even if it doesn’t, it needs to be checked rigorously.  When you’re covering a war from afar, you don’t know who to believe and, at a certain point everything becomes white noise. Regarding the sexual assaults on October 7 and the conditions in Gaza, as well as the war in general, separating fact from fiction is the most difficult part, and, I think, the most important part – and our most important role.

•••

‘I never imagined I’d see things like that in my life, let alone during my first month as a journalist’
Eden Solomon, Haaretz southern Israel correspondent

I officially started my position as the south correspondent on October 1. This was my first time working at a news desk – beforehand, I’d been at a quarterly magazine. I hadn’t had time to get in touch with sources and have the introductory meetings you usually have with spokespeople of local governments and other contacts. I reached out to them and met them over the course of the war, and learned the work on the fly.

I lived in Ashkelon at the time; rockets were falling continuously there. When the volleys began, I ran to all the apartment buildings that got hit by missiles in the city and started reporting what was happening. I was taking cover in a house that had been hit – there were nonstop sirens and rocket fire.

It was then that I first saw the videos of the terrorists entering the kibbutzim. I got in touch with people who were trapped in their homes in Be’eri and other kibbutzim, and people who knew from social media that their family members had been kidnapped and transported to Gaza by the terrorists. I was working while trying to process what was happening, how consequential this event was.

A few days later, I travelled with Nir Hasson and photographer Olivier Fitoussi to Be’eri. We entered the kibbutz with members of ZAKA, who had come to collect the remaining bodies that were left there. At the entrance, I smelled it – the revolting stench of death. That was the moment I realized the scope of this disaster.

As we moved through the kibbutz, I saw dozens of bodies on the ground. At that point, they were thought to be the bodies of terrorists, but we now know that some of those bodies were of kibbutz residents. It was terrible. I saw feet soaked in blood, as if they had tried to escape from one house to another, sights you wouldn’t see in the most awful of horror movies. I never imagined I’d see things like that in my life, let alone during my first month as a journalist.

We also travelled to the Nova site, which was also insane. All of the partygoers’ belongings were still there, costumes strewn all over, musical artist’s equipment scattered around the place. Parents were coming to search for their loved ones, those who hadn’t gotten the news yet that their children had been killed.

It was my first time writing news stories. I didn’t really know how to start, but Nir gave me the push and helped me write it. In the first months, I didn’t even have time to think about whether or not this is what I want to be doing. I didn’t see another option. I knew something historical was happening that needs to be written about.

•••

‘I took slow steps toward the window. I saw three members of Hamas’ Nukhba forces, in their green headbands, with Kalashnikovs. They were smoking cigarettes’
Eli Hershkovitz, Haaretz photographer and resident of Holit

I live on Kibbutz Holit, on the Gaza border, because I’m in the process of building my own home in Yevul. I have a work routine: When rocket fire starts, I load up all my equipment – computer, lenses, tripod – in my car and head north. I go to Netivot and Sderot, the areas that are hit the hardest. To get the bulk of the pictures and the chaos, you need to go to the more crowded cities.

At 6:30 A.M. when the sirens started, I jumped out of bed, got dressed in thirty seconds – didn’t even take a sip of water – threw my gear in the car and started to get the first photos of the rocket fire from Rafah.

My home on Kibbutz Holit is about a kilometer from the border. The kibbutz’s security coordinator, who was my neighbor and the leader of the kibbutz’s security squad, came out of the bushes and shouted at me, “Eli, there are terrorists, get into your safe room. Don’t open the door and don’t leave until you get the all-clear.”

I went back holding my two cameras, and shut myself in the safe room. I took some electric cables that I had in the safe room and tied them to the door handle and to the window, to make sure no one could get in. And all this time, there was non-stop rocket fire, as well as gunfire outside. Bullets were hitting the safe room’s window, and I could hear the mortars falling within the kibbutz. The smell of burning was in the air.

At around 7:30 A.M., someone from the Associated Press called to ask if I could send them some pictures from what happened that morning in Holit. I told them that unfortunately, I don’t have much reception, and walking around outside is a death sentence, so they shouldn’t call me again.

I was told at 11:30 A.M. that the Eshkol Regional Council announced that the army was entering the kibbutz. Afterward, we understood that this was a massive lie. About four hours later, I heard the chirp of walkie-talkies from my safe room, but I couldn’t hear which language they were talking in. I assumed it was the army, finally. They had said at 11:30 A.M. that they were on their way; how long could it take to get to my side of the kibbutz?

I opened the door, got out of the safe room, and took slow steps toward the window. I saw three members of Hamas’ Nukhba forces, in their green headbands, wearing t-shirts and camouflage pants, with Kalashnikovs resting on their chests. They were smoking cigarettes.  They saw me immediately, and shouted to me in Arabic to come to them. I went back to the safe room and tied everything up again, thinking that it was clearly a matter of time before they came into the house, because the army didn’t seem to be here. Hamas had conquered Holit. All I had left was to think about how I would like to die or how I would want to be killed – I didn’t think about the possibility of being taken hostage.

One of the terrorists entered my neighbor’s home, the one responsible for the security squad, and the other entered mine. When the terrorist broke into my home, he shot about four bullets into the wall of the living room, and I heard more gunshots from a different direction. I later learned that when the second terrorist opened my neighbor’s door, he shot the Nukhba member four times. As a result, the guy who came into my apartment thought the army had arrived, and ran away.

Just half an hour or 40 minutes later, the first soldiers got to my side of the kibbutz to rescue the residents. I left at around 5:00 P.M. with my cameras and my phone. My world had been turned upside down. I started photographing the entrance to the kibbutz – some of my photos of soldiers arriving at Holit were published that day in Haaretz. I also photographed the first group of residents that were evacuated to Kibbutz Gvulot nearby. I kept taking pictures until about 8 P.M., when a brigade commander asked me to evacuate to Gvulot as well.

Out of all my gear, all that was left were two cameras and two lenses – the looters had stolen everything, all my gear, out of my car, leaving only a spare pair of pants in my trunk. With that, I left the kibbutz, and saw a small part of the terrible tragedy that was all around me – a body next to a bicycle, three or four cars with their doors open at the Mivtachim Junction, the bodies of the occupants strewn on the road. A burning tank near Gvulot.

The terrorists entered Holit at 6:35 A.M., and slaughtered people right away. There were 15 dead in a kibbutz of 110 people, of whom 25 were away that weekend.

I went back to work on Tuesday. I joined a veterinarian, and got cages for cats as well as dog food from her. I travelled back to Holit to save the animals whose owners were no longer there. It was a difficult experience, because some of the owners were murdered, and I’d need to search for the animals. I visited the homes before the ZAKA disaster response group, before anyone else, and it was a gut-wrenching experience. Blood smeared on the ground where they had dragged people’s bodies. The terrorists’ bodies still lying there.

People said that the security coordinator was kidnapped. I was the last person to see him that day, and I knew what he was wearing. I saw from under one of the sheets a man dressed in black, and I said, “Guys, that isn’t a terrorist, that’s a member of the security squad. The terrorists were dressed in camouflage and blue t-shirts.” It turned out to be the security coordinator, who was killed in the morning while battling the terrorists.

For articles, I photograph families from the region. I establish a connection with them; when they hear that I’m also from the Gaza border, they try to console me, and I try to console them. It creates a dialogue of bereavement, of mourning. People suddenly break down, ones you’ve never met before in your life, and suddenly you have something in common because, emotionally speaking, you are all dead.

This article is reproduced in its entirety