‘Not one girl could be shown to her parents’: The horrors of Oct 7 – as told by the survivors

In a heartbreaking dispatch to mark the anniversary, witnesses recall the heroism of victims and the true depravity of the attack

Three weeks ago, I travelled to Israel to try and work out what October 7 had meant as the first anniversary approached. The massacres committed by Hamas on that black Sabbath were among the foulest of the modern era and saw the worst loss of life for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Not much time elapsed, though, before the bloodcurdling crimes were sidelined as international attention switched, rather too eagerly, to Israel’s war in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians were tragically killed as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) tried to root out an enemy which used billions of charitable aid to build itself a network of tunnels more extensive than the London Underground. One military expert summed up Hamas’s strategy in two chilling words: Human Sacrifice.
A proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas – like Hezbollah – is dedicated to the annihilation of Israel. It’s quite hard to fight a group which hides behind women and children, burrows under nurseries and hospitals; it’s quite hard to do a deal with terrorists whose charter demands your own extinction. Regardless of the provocation, it is always Israel that is blamed for “escalation” and called upon to exercise “restraint”. 
As Sir Tom Stoppard, our greatest living writer, observed exactly a year ago: “Who can say where Israel’s response to October 7 will sit in the calculus of suffering by the time the region subsides into the next configuration of uneasy neighbours… We are aware that Jews are not the only victims of this tragedy, Hamas knew that there would be consequences to October 7, but the consequences did not weigh with Hamas. Before we take up a position on what’s happening now we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilisation and barbarism.”
I was one of those who thought it was the latter; 7/10 seemed to me to be every bit as pivotal as 9/11, one of those hinges in the history of the world when a profoundly shocking event triggers changes heretofore considered unimaginable. That was not always a popular view, particularly among the young who had been taught to see the only democracy in the Middle East, a haven of women’s equality and gay rights, as a colonialist oppressor. (Even within Jewish families, Israel has the ability to set generations at loggerheads). Fear of “Islamophobia”, seeded in progressive minds with considerable skill by Islamists, may have been part of it. One wit put it well on social media: “Israel is fighting to save Western civilisation before Western civilisation can stop it.”
The legacy of October 7 is complicated, although the evil done that day is not. Some Jews have experienced antisemitism for the first time, and they are living in fear, even here in the UK. In Belsize Park, north London, a man recently waved a placard saying: “I HEART 7 October.” He was not arrested.
On Monday, Israel’s official commemoration of the first anniversary will be pre-recorded. Security may be a factor, but so is the risk of angry protests against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. A warrior hero for a nation still in trauma, the prime minister is also believed by many Israelis to have failed to get the remaining 101 hostages home, or to agree a ceasefire, because the end of the war will mark the end of his own career.
Since I got back from Tel Aviv, events in Lebanon, including the breathtaking and ingenious humiliation of Hezbollah, have moved the dial again. “All part of the rehabilitation of the IDF image – back to what we expect, intel and technological excellence,” one analyst enthused. But that raises an awkward question: how can a country so smart, so Q from James Bond it can set up a factory to manufacture pagers, fit them with mini explosives, have Hezbollah distribute those pagers to all its members and get them to blow up at the same time, have failed to prevent thousands of barbarians breaching its border security and raping, burning and butchering 1,200 of its citizens?
So many questions still unanswered from October 7. I put those queries to scores of Israelis – survivors, soldiers, politicians, bereaved parents, mothers of hostages and just regular people who had to step up for their nation on that dark day. 
Some of what follows is horrifying and hard to bear, I know. I am warning you in case you’d rather not read on. But it is important to write it down. We know how important it is because on the BBC news on Thursday, Hamas’s deputy leader told international editor Jeremy Bowen that Hamas didn’t set out to kill any Israeli women or children on October 7. Hamas “resistance fighters” were ordered only to kill “occupation fighters”, although he did concede that “there were certainly personal mistakes” and the fighters, who just popped into family homes on kibbutzim to have a chat and a bite to eat, “may have felt they were in danger”.
The accounts told to me by the individuals below, and many others who shared their insights, paint a very different picture. As always, the Devil is in the detail. 
6.30am: It was going to be a happy day, one of the happiest days of the year. Simchat Torah, which was scheduled to start at sundown, at the end of Sabbath, is a Jewish holiday that celebrates the conclusion of the annual cycle of Torah readings. There is a lot of food and dancing. The siren woke up Shari Mendes in her family’s apartment in Jerusalem. Shari and David thought it was a mistake. But the architect and her surgeon husband went down to the shelter in the basement of their building with the other residents, just in case. False alarm. 
They came back upstairs and started to get dressed. “We were getting ready to go to the synagogue, and then there was another siren and another,” Shari recalls. “People kept going back downstairs into the shelter with each siren at a different stage of dress –  half dressed, almost dressed – and it was quite funny.” 
The Mendeses didn’t have their phones switched on because they don’t use electricity or any electrical devices on the Sabbath.
After a while, Arab neighbours came up to show them the news on their phones. “We were horrified,” says Shari. She switched on her own phone to find Emergency Order #8 in Hebrew (tzav shmoneh). She was stunned. “This only happens during a war, right?” 
Order 8 is sent to IDF reservists during an emergency telling them to report immediately to their base. Shari Mendes had never done military service, as all Israelis must when they leave high school. She missed it because she was born and brought up in the United States, only moving to Israel in 2003 to raise her family. Just a couple of years ago, however, she had been approached to be part of a small, all-female unit which would help take care of the bodies of women soldiers in the event of a mass casualty event. In the Jewish tradition, it is women who prepare female bodies for burial. As more young women were seeing frontline service, the army thought it was a necessary precaution.
On Saturday night, Shari drove to the Shura army base and joined her unit. “My first shift was Sunday morning. It was unimaginable. There were refrigerator trucks lining up as far as you could see. There’s this massive intake area like an airport hangar and it was packed with bodies, body bags stacked one on top of each other right up the walls. Hundreds of bodies. The smell was incomprehensible. I’m very sensitive to smells, and I had never smelled this before. It was like the secret smell of death. I don’t even know how to describe it, you couldn’t breathe the smell was so bad. Literally gasping, struggling to breathe. 
“The floors were wet. Fluids were dripping from the bags. There was blood on the floor, so much blood. It was like walking into horror.”
Around Shari and the team, people were working at record speed, putting up sheetrock walls to create new rooms to stack the bodies in, bringing in more and more shipping containers with refrigeration and shelves. A decision had been taken to bring all the casualties of October 7 to the military morgue instead of sending civilian corpses to a hospital. Many of the bodies were so disfigured or destroyed you couldn’t tell if they were soldiers or kibbutzniks or young people from the Nova festival anyway. Some were just ash.
Shari’s first job was in the identification room. “I can’t overemphasise how shocking this was, even to professionals. Like, there were forensic doctors and army photographers and army dentists and army physicians all in this room gathered around a girl’s body trying to establish who she was. Most of the people in my unit have no medical background. We’re normal people, like secretaries or lawyers or retail workers, whatever. And suddenly there we were dealing with things that no one ever thought you could deal with.”
We are sitting at Shari’s kitchen table. Sixty-three-years old, she is both striking and imposing, somehow radiating moral authority, yet also warm and hugely sympathetic. She has baked brownies for me and they smell delicious, but they sit in the tin untouched. The family’s elderly dog sniffs around at our feet. I think I want to know everything, every thing she went through, but do I really?
There’s an imperative in Judaism that the modesty of the dead woman should be respected. Shari says that was what her team were trying to do. “Even in the rush and in the horror, we said, ‘Please, let’s cover the body when no one’s working on it’ and everybody said, ‘Yes, let’s cover her.’ I was very touched by that. You know, that takes sensitivity in the midst of that unimaginable nightmare, and it was our job to do all the touching of the woman that wasn’t medical. 
“If clothes needed to be taken off, we would take them off and it’s important to give back to the family all the personal effects. We were taking things out of pockets like cigarette lighters. Every single thing, we wiped off the blood, put it in a special bag with a number to go into a certain box, to be returned to her parents.” (Shari has a friend down her street whose son was killed. “She told me what it’s like to open that box and how meaningful it is to them.”)
The team did their best to take off the jewellery. “Sometimes, it was very difficult. These young women had nose rings, and their faces were completely smashed up. And me who’s squeamish is working with a dentist trying to take off a nose ring and there’s nothing left of the face but the nose.”
The women were shot many times in the head. “Why? Why? We saw that these women were shot to be killed, maybe in the heart, in the head, but then they were shot many times in the face, and it looked like systematic mutilation because it seemed like they wanted to ruin these women’s faces. A lot of them were young soldier women, and a lot of them had been very beautiful. The first few we saw weren’t too bad because they might have been caught in their sleep and Hamas just shot them. But, after a while, we got women who had clearly been awake when they were murdered and these women came in and their mouths, their teeth were in grimaces and their hands were clenched, if they had hands.
“We got notified that a woman’s coming in and she has no legs, so the terrorist cut off her legs. There was clearly immense sadistic violence.” A lot of the women had bloody, stained underwear, Shari says, some had no underwear at all. “People were shot in the breast, they were shot in the crotch, and that was not done to kill them.” She is a calm, thoughtful person, but her voice is stiff with anger now.
One body Shari dealt with personally still had a knife stuck through her mouth. “There was so much violence and it was totally sexual.”
Shari Mendes went to the United Nations on December 4 to tell them about the sexual violence, the unbelievable depravity she saw inflicted on women and girls. (As well as Jews, they were Christian, Druze, Hindu, Muslim.) It was an incredible speech, but the UN was notably slow to respond to the mass violation of Israeli women giving rise to the hashtag, #MeTooUnlessYoureAJew. “The UN is supposed to represent all nations,” says Shari, “and they had an exhibit on August 17. It was the International Day of people who were killed in conflict and terror attacks. And they showed a picture of every single terrorist attack that happened that year, but they did not include October 7. What does that say about the UN?” They did eventually send the special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict to Israel from January 29 to February 14. Shari and others testified to Pramila Patten. Her report said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October”. That’s not good enough, Shari snaps. “I haven’t heard most women’s organisations condemn the sexual violence. And what about the fact that there are still 101 hostages, living and dead? Including the young woman we saw taken with bloody jogging pants. What’s being done to them? Why are their names not on everyone’s lips? Every. Single. Day.”)
After October 7, Shari and her colleagues worked 12-hour shifts, non-stop for two weeks; they often slept at the base. Their own children were being called up. “I had a son, a daughter-in-law and another son who were on active duty. I didn’t know where they were, were they safe?
“You ask me, Allison, how could I bear it? You asked how we got the strength. I mean, I remember thinking that first day I was just in shock, and everybody was just doing, doing, doing. We were using masks, and they were giving us lavender, but all the senses were being assaulted. By the third, fourth day, I was losing it, and I thought, ‘I don’t know that I can do this anymore’.”
After the bodies had been definitively identified, they were taken to a second room, the burial room, where the atmosphere was calmer “and it was just us women with the woman”.   
The team would look after her, showing all the tender care that was the opposite of her final moments alive. One morning, amidst the grey, they saw a flash of pink. “A beautiful manicure with a flower on each fingernail. And that was such a terrible moment for all of us women because a manicure is such a sign of hope for a woman. They’re making themselves beautiful, aren’t they? It was the only colour in the room.” 
They didn’t wash the bodies. Shari explains that someone who dies in war or in terror, according to Jewish law, is not washed because even that dirt is holy, that they died in a sacrifice for God. “They’re already as holy as they could be. We took our time with them, said a prayer. You put dust of Jerusalem above the eyes. And you ask the person for forgiveness.”
She tried not to know their names. “I didn’t want to associate them with the news stories. I’d go home and learn they had a dog and a sister and a mother who was crying. I made that mistake the first day, and it almost destroyed me. I had to keep going.”
She says she knew she would probably be the last person who saw them “and that’s a responsibility. Because they could have been our daughters.”
Of all the young women whose bodies she took care of and prepared for burial, how many were in a fit state to be shown to their parents?
There is total silence in the room, except for the ticking of a clock on the kitchen wall. I pat the dog beside me, pressing my hand deep into his fur to bring me back to this world and away from that place where jihadi psychopaths annihilate the faces of young women for kicks. 
Shari looks at me. I can’t tell if her eyes are full of sorrow or glittering with rage. “None,” she says at last. “Not one girl we could show to her parents.”
6.35am: Around the time Shari Mendes got her Order 8, Nimrod Palmach, who was staying near Tel Aviv, received an order from his company commander to report to army HQ near Jerusalem. Former special forces, Nimrod was now a reservist in the search and rescue team. He disobeyed the order, arguing that his brigade should head south to the Gazan border, although he’s still not quite sure why. He told his commander something didn’t feel right. “A hunch. I felt it was much worse than we were being told. There were two voices; one was telling me to trust my instincts, the second was saying, ‘Be modest, trust the IDF, who do you think you are?’”
Choosing the former, Palmach, who runs an NGO that involves networking and outreach for young Israelis across the Arab world, drove south trying to build a picture of what had happened along the way. The only weapon he had was a pistol which contained nine bullets.
Nimrod, 39, got a call from his ex-wife who was sobbing. Her new husband was from Kibbutz Nir Oz – it was under attack from hundreds of terrorists. “I had already heard about the attack on Sderot [the closest Israeli city to the Gaza border, where more than 50 residents were killed]. So now I understand. Israel has been invaded and the Gaza division has been overwhelmed. Hamas took down intelligence, they took down antennae, even my phone was scrambled. No one [in the hierarchy] knew what was going on. The radio is supposed to give members of the IDF a secret password to tell them go, go! Red alert, it’s a war. But they couldn’t even do that. No radio. Three thousand rockets in the first 20 minutes; we were overwhelmed, the entire system is crippled.”
He says he suddenly had “the most crushing realisation that I’m about to die. There are thousands of them.” He paused briefly by the side of the road to record a video saying goodbye to his two kids so when the army found his body his children would have something to remember. “I said, ‘Daddy loves you and he will be proud of you the rest of your lives.’” Then, he texted army mates telling them to get down there asap. “If you have a gun come here now, you’ll save lives.”
He was stopped at a special forces checkpoint near Netivot around 9am, and they prevented him going any further. So he hopped on a pick-up truck, which was allowed through, and soon found himself fighting alongside a collection of random soldiers and ordinary Israelis outside Kibbutz Alumim. He managed to pick up a dead terrorist’s gun. “I was one of the first responders, the only one who survived the whole day, I think. There wasn’t time to communicate with people. It was the fight of our lives, a handful of us against hundreds and hundreds of terrorists. You’re outgunned, outnumbered. I saw many examples of bravery, even civilians. We gave everything we had to try to stop it.”
Everyone he came across until 7.30pm that night was dead. At the Alumim junction, he counted 23 bodies. “All of them were kids, like young adults. I didn’t know about the Nova festival. I was asking ‘Why are they dressed like that?’” Near the roadside, he found the body of a young woman, “her trousers pulled down, her underwear, blood on her backside.” Instinctively, Nimrod started to dress her.
“Of course they raped women,” Nimrod almost shouts. On one terrorist’s body, he found a detailed map of the kibbutzim and a list of Hebrew phrases. “Pull your pants down” was one of them. It was hard to preserve evidence, he says, because everyone was picking up the bodies as fast as possible. Hamas was still kidnapping the dead and taking them over the border. 
Palmach believes that Hamas was unaware the Nova festival was taking place. He thinks they could have made serious progress towards Tel Aviv, but conversations the terrorists had on video suggest the lure of raping beautiful young girls at the desert party was too tempting. “Suddenly, after all those years, the monster was released. A lot of them left their tasks. They were supposed to go to Israeli air force bases. Imagine the humiliation of a bunch of jihadists wearing their sandals standing next to an F35!”
He will never forget the carnage he witnessed in places like Kibbutz Be’eri. “I saw it all – women raped, dead kids in cars, families burned, some with body parts, some without. And the damage to the buildings, like a tornado passed. I saw the Holocaust,” he says. “So many dead bodies, many mutilated. The creativity of the deaths was overwhelming. A head speared on a rake. Hamas terrorists took their time. We didn’t have an army that day. I’ve seen what happens to the Jewish people without an army.”
Palmach, who spent five years in the special forces, says he wanted to go into Gaza. “I wanted to go not for revenge, but to see the Israeli army in a strong position. Our army was caught by surprise that day. I want to see the strength and power of the IDF again.” 
Militarily, he thinks Israel has been doing the right thing. “We’ve moved slowly, taken our time. You can’t clean Gaza in a week. We’re not shooting then checking, we’re checking then shooting. That’s what we do. We’re obligated in our moral fabric to bring the hostages back. We can strike Hamas to the point where it’s no longer a threat. I think we are 90 per cent of the way there.”
Like many survivors, Nimrod Palach is haunted by What Ifs. There is a desperately sad video, unbearable actually, of two girls being pursued by a terrorist. He shoots the first one, then the other drops to her knees and begs for her life. There is a brief pause before he shoots her in the head.
Nimrod thought he recognised the place where it happened. It was a few feet away from where he was at the Alumim junction. Why couldn’t he have saved her? Recently, he couldn’t sleep and he got in the car and drove to the spot. When he got there, he knelt down and said a prayer. In the dirt, he spotted the young woman’s credit card. “I saw her name, I called her mother. She answered. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ We both cried.” 
Earlier this week, as Iranian missiles were launched against Israel, I texted Nimrod to check he and the family were OK. It took a second before he texted back, “WE WILL WIN!” With people like him, of course they will.
6.35am: Of all the traumatic starts to October 7, Meirav Gonen had one of the worst. Her daughter, 23-year-old Romi, had arrived at the Nova festival with her best friend Gali at 4.38am. There is a short video of the girls dancing, they look so happy. At 6.35am, Romi called her mother to say she was terrified because there were rockets. “She has PTSD because of the war in Lebanon, because we live in the north of Israel near the border and we always have rockets fired by Hezbollah.”
The girls went to look for their car. Eventually, they found it and managed to go one mile to the east, where they got stuck in a traffic jam that didn’t move. “They were trapped and then they started hearing people shouting, screaming, ‘Get out of the car. They’re coming to murder us.’”
The girls fled into a valley where they tried to hide but there wasn’t really any cover. A male friend of Gali came to rescue them. He had already got 12 people to safety, but, courageously, he came back. They picked up another guy and they were driving very fast on Route 232 and when they reached the Alumim junction (Nimrod would reach there later, but not in time to help Romi) there were terrorists waiting for them, and they sprayed the car with bullets.
Meirav received a phone call at 10.14 saying, “Mommy, I was shot. I’m bleeding, and I think I’m gonna die. Gali is not answering me anymore, the driver is killed, and I’m shot. There is another guy in the car. He was shot in the stomach.” Meirav says she could hear the guy barely breathing and suffering. She was talking to her daughter, trying to help, telling her to try and bandage the wound in her arm. But she was crying and she said she couldn’t.
There was fighting, soldiers on one side and terrorists on the other side of the car, they were in the middle. Meirav knows they were shot at 10.12am because Gali was on the phone with her father, and the driver was on the phone with his girlfriend. “And Gali, my daughter’s best friend, she died on the spot. We heard her last breath, and knew she was murdered.”
Meirav felt helpless hearing the terror in her child’s voice. “Once I understood I couldn’t help Romi, I just started telling her how much I loved her and she [was] strong. And what we would do when she comes back if they take her. Romi started hushing me, telling me to be quiet. Then, I heard the terrorists come into the car. I heard them opening the door. They were shouting in Arabic. And later on, I understood they said, ‘She’s alive, she’s alive! Take her, take her to the car’, something like that. 
“Romi told me they took her by the arm and pulled her by her hair, dragging her on the road. They punched her and she had a big bruise on her eye. Her phone fell and it was lying in a pool of blood, and I knew that she couldn’t pick it up, but I heard part of what was happening and I kept talking to her although I don’t know what she could hear. Then the phone went off.”
One of the benefits of mobile phones is the way they allow us to keep in touch with our kids, mostly about stupid stuff like missing keys. It was miraculous Meirav could be with her daughter for those moments, but also incredibly painful. I wonder how she feels about it now?
“Relief,” she says. “I have five kids, Romi is my third one, and the kids are glad she was with me and I was with her.”
Romi was supposed to be among the women released by Hamas last November but, agonisingly, she didn’t come out. “Women that came back told us she was with them in the tunnels. We know she’s alive, and that’s enough for all of us to continue fighting for her life.”
Meirav says her daughter is strong, a girl scout kind of person, resilient, with a big smile. “But, you know, after 349 days maybe she does not get enough food to be strong physically. Maybe in her mind she is, but she can lose her life in a minute. We saw that three weeks ago when they shot six of the hostages. We don’t trust, we don’t have the same assumptions any more that Western people have. Hamas are cruel. They will use the hostages to hurt us. Not just those 100 people, not just the Jews, but us as human beings, and we need to fight together.”
Two days after October 7, Meirav and her son went to the Nova festival site to try to retrace Romi’s steps. “We found underwears, bras hanging on bushes. Private stuff spread all around.” She hates the Nova memorial. “It’s too clean, too nice, too beautiful, very tidy. It doesn’t show anything of the hate that happened. It was hell, HELL! This is not a story. There were barbarians, monsters, they killed our children, they took them.”
Like many people I speak to during my days in Israel, Meirav is keen to stress that Hamas and their Iranian paymasters are a threat to the UK and to the entire free world. “What people don’t understand is that it’s not about Israel. It’s not antisemitism. And I would like us to stop talking about antisemitism. They didn’t come to kill us because we are Jews, because they murdered, butchered, raped Bedouin women, Christian women. People said, ‘I’m a Muslim’ and they killed them too. They came to kill whatever represents freedom. Sorry, this is about anti-freedom, anti-human, everything that humanity represents, they are against it. They are also anti-Palestinians, anti-Gaza people. But what they did to those young women, they are outside the human race. They are evil, not just to kill, but to delight in obliterating. Our aim is to live. We cherish life, and they cherish death, that’s the difference.”
Does she feel that enough has been done to bring the hostages home?
“It cannot be enough if they are not here. Everybody wants the hostages home, but I think that our leaders are not using their capabilities. They have a different role now, and that role is to unite us.”
Meirav and I are talking in a conference room in the Hostages HQ. On the walls, there are posters of all those still imprisoned in Gaza. Being here with her I feel the horror of it with sickening clarity. As it’s almost a year, all the hostages have had a birthday in captivity, a terrible thought somehow. Their ages have been updated on the posters:
Occasionally, just one word is written in the corner of a poster: “MURDERED” 
I look up at Romi’s lovely fresh face on her poster, Meirav catches my eye and knows what I’m thinking. What will be Romi’s fate? Israel was built on trauma. The trauma from October 7 goes on and on. The country won’t begin to heal until her people are home and safe, or at least home.
Does Meirav talk to Romi? 
She nods. “Yes, all the time. I tell her I love her, I tell her she’s strong. I tell her all the things we’ll do when she’s back. Sometimes, I feel too ashamed and too guilty.”
Why? 
“Because it’s too long.” 
It’s not your fault. 
“But I’m her mother. Nobody else is her mother.”
On my final day in Israel, I visit Yad Vashem, the nation’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. You have to come here, to this museum of incomprehensible suffering, to begin to comprehend, I think. In one gallery, there is a large glass case containing thousands of pairs of shoes. Eighty-five years old at least now, the shoes are gnarled, grey and brown. But there, amidst the mushroom mulch of sad sameness, are two pairs of women’s shoes. One has the faintest thread of gold, glamour;  the others were pumps, embroidered with flowers. I think of what Shari Mendes said about the young woman in the morgue with the beautiful pink manicure. The victims, those missing millions, were people, with vanity, with hope, with fancy footwear.
After several days at the morgue, when they were doing deep-tissue DNA extraction because some of the women had been so badly burned they could not be identified any other way (a year on, and five bodies still have no name), Shari wrote to her commander saying, “I’m not sure I can keep doing this.” What made her go on was the importance of testimony. Shari’s mother was a hidden child in the Holocaust, she survived, starving, in Slovakian woods. But almost everybody else in the family was murdered in terrible ways. The only way their descendants know what happened is because someone saw and passed the story on.  
Shari had a great-uncle Jacob, aged 20, a gentle soul by all accounts who ended up in Auschwitz in the Sonderkommando, the very worst job, loading the dead bodies into the ovens. “I kept saying, ‘If Jacob can do it, I can do it.’” Shari never dreamt she would have horror stories of her own to pass down.
Israel has been accused of weaponising 7/10, of exaggerating the sexual violence and Hamas’s sickening depravity. Of using it as “an excuse”. I have come to believe that the opposite is true. Nimrod told me he thought that government ministers and the army felt ashamed and humiliated that they had not protected people, the women in particular. That’s why Shari feels obliged to talk for them, however much she is attacked, “otherwise they’ll be forgotten”.
A group of new IDF recruits were at Yad Vashem that afternoon, maybe they were 18 or 19 years old. All around them was the onerous legacy of what it means to be born Jewish. At least you come out of that museum in no doubt as to why Israel has to exist.
In the final room, a guy with an Old Testament beard addressed the baby soldiers in Hebrew. I asked someone what he was saying, and they said, “He is telling them that the Jews were weak back then. Now we are the strong ones we must never behave as the Nazis behaved to us.”  
Trying to be the good guys and doomed to be seen by the world as the baddies; that is Israel’s burden. After October 7, they could not care less what the world thinks. Let’s finish with one astonishing young man who did his nation proud 12 months ago, and who should never be forgotten.  
If there is a single image of October 7 that will go down in history, it is of a tall, fair-haired young man in a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops standing at the entrance to a shelter, catching grenades with his bare hands. Aner Shapira had travelled to the Supernova festival in the Negev desert with his best friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin. It was “the best party in the world,” according to one excited girl with flowing dark hair, although Hersh did briefly fret about how close they were to the border with Gaza.
Just after dawn, when the sleepy crowd was admiring the fireworks in the sky (they were rockets), Aner, Hersh and their group took one last selfie. They look blissed-out; just your average young people who have stayed up all night at a trance party dedicated to love, peace and psychedelic drugs. They didn’t know that horror was lurking just outside the frame. The milky, early-morning sky was speckled with black dots – a demonic squadron of paragliding terrorists.
Hamas had breached the 40-mile southern border in 30 different places, along with an estimated 3,000 Gazan civilians eager to become shahids (martyrs). At Nova, they found 3,500 defenceless kids to hunt down at their leisure. Over the next six hours of scarcely credible barbarity, that idyllic location became Israel’s killing fields. It was like a Biblical exodus. A new BBC documentary, Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again, uses footage from the festival-goers’ own phones to show the visceral reality. They stumbled across the barren, pitted landscape in their party gear; desperately trying to escape, they were gunned down or burnt alive in their vehicles. Hamas’s own body-cam film shows those who stumbled or were dragged from bushes being put to death with a shrug of the shoulders. “Another dog (Jew) – it is his fate.”
Some, like Noa Argamani, were taken hostage on a motorbike, others hid silently in skips and orchards, playing dead as they listened to the screams of their friends. Shani Louk, a striking, dreadlocked 22-year-old German-Israeli, was abducted from the festival she had adored. Her half-naked body (brutally dislocated, one leg at an obscene right angle) was paraded by her captors on the back of a truck through the cheering streets of Gaza. They spat on her. Sexual violence was common that disgusting day. One police officer came upon a glade where young women, clothing torn, underwear wrenched aside, were tied to trees with their wrists bound above their mutilated heads. (Shari Mendes and her unit would soon be preparing those girls from Nova for burial.) 
Aner and Hersh ran to the highway, Route 232. (Nimrod Palmach, who was desperately fighting terrorists a couple of miles north couldn’t understand why the bodies strewn across the road were dressed in party clothes. Communication was so bad soldiers didn’t even know about the Nova festival.) The boys took refuge in a migunit (a small roadside public bomb shelter with no door) where up to 30 young people were already hiding. During his military service, 22-year-old Staff Sgt Aner Elyakim Shapira had been promoted to an elite army unit when his commanders noticed what an incredible soldier and all-round terrific person he was.
“Hi everyone,” he announced. “I am Aner Shapira, I serve in the Orev unit of the Nahal brigade. My friends from the army are coming soon. I am going to take care of things here, so don’t worry.” A video taken on a phone picked up someone in the shelter responding, “Thank you, Aner, we feel calmer now.”
Realising that the terrorists would throw grenades into that dangerously small, enclosed space, Aner told the group to lie down and cover their heads: “I’ll catch the grenades and throw them back – and if I miss any, you throw them back.”
He was as good as his word. A camera on the dashboard of a car parked outside recorded terrorists walking up and lobbing a grenade through the megunit doorway; and the grenade coming right back out again. Aner caught at least seven of them. Legend has it (for he is already a legend) that the eighth exploded, but his father, Moshe Shapira, believes it was a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) that finally killed his beloved son. 
“A military historian says that, since the grenade was invented, there is nothing like this, somebody thinking they could hold a grenade – hold it not once, not twice, but eight times. And throw it back,” Moshe tells me with fierce paternal pride. That lonely last stand – Aner against 20 terrorists – endured for 34 minutes. Moshe knows almost every second of it by heart. “It’s amazing when you think 20 terrorists came heavily-armed with grenades, with RPGs, everything. And Aner was without anything, just a broken beer bottle. And he succeeded in holding them for 34 minutes till the third RPG hit the migunit. And the RPG, you can’t do anything, the explosion is very, very strong. So – boom! – and, therefore, he saw it coming to him, but he wasn’t able to hold it, and he died.”
We are talking in the penthouse kitchen-living room of the Shapiras’ apartment which has a panoramic view over East Jerusalem. Propped up in one corner is an enlarged photograph of Aner, which was taken over the crouched forms of people packed like sardines inside the shelter. He is standing just inside the threshold, his body tilted forward, tensed, ready for a catch, like a cricketer in the slips.
Both Aner’s parents are architects. Mum Shira is a British Israeli who was born in Oxford when her father was studying for a PhD. Preoccupied today, Shira is on the phone arguing for a thousand burnt-out cars that lined the route away from Nova to be preserved as evidence (insurance people want to sell the vehicles, still full of unquiet ghosts, because for each car you can get $2,000 for the iron). Eventually, the Shapiras hope they will be historic artefacts featured in a 7/10 exhibition or permanent monument.
Moshe, strong-featured and handsome, gets up and comes back with a shallow, glass-topped wooden case which he sets down on the table between us. It’s full of bullets, cartridges, shards of glass and other bits that the Shapiras gathered from the shelter a month after their boy’s murder. Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s left arm was blown off, possibly by the same blast that killed his boyhood friend. Hersh was taken hostage along with three others from the shelter and held in Gaza for 330 days, becoming the poster boy for all of those brutally abducted, thanks to the tireless efforts of his mother Rachel. (On September 1, a fortnight before I arrive in Israel, Hersh and five other young hostages are executed in a tunnel under Rafah, in southern Gaza, with bullets to the back of the head. The appalling conditions in which they were held and the failure to broker a deal or a ceasefire to rescue them weighed heavily on all of Israeli society, I was told. It reopened agonising wounds barely scabbed over since October 7, and it brought further heavy criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. Failure to bring the remaining 101 hostages home is widely seen as breaking the social contract between state and citizen, a serious matter in a country where so many are expected to put their lives on the line.)
Moshe gets me a coffee before talking me through his mementoes. “This is what we found in the liquid on the floor, the blood, all these bullets. This is a hand grenade which exploded and this is the RPG.” Moshe holds up the weapon’s steel tail which is like the bristling insides of a hefty umbrella. As he tells me more about the eldest of his seven children, he clutches the RPG that ended Aner’s life, like a Catholic would use a rosary to pray.
Aner Shapira most certainly did not fit the stereotype of the “genocide-committing IDF” which is drawn by pro-Palestine “River to the Sea” marchers and moronic American college kids sporting recreational keffiyehs to match their anti-semitism. An artist and musician (he played classical piano from the age of six and latterly wrote and recorded rap songs), Aner, as his father recalls with fond bemusement, was “an anarchist. He didn’t believe in nationality. He was against flags. He believed in the good in people, and that society should be free of police systems. He was also against the army, so he lived in a conflict with himself about that, but he saw the need for the army to defend the country, and he gave his all to serve.”
As a small boy, Aner already had a fierce sense of social justice. He would loudly berate police on the street if he saw them treating illegal immigrants roughly and called out racism in particular and unkindness in general. “We kept telling him the police may open a file against you,” Moshe laughs, shaking his head, “but he didn’t care. Aner was always against what he saw as evil being done to anybody.” Two months before the massacre, Aner took a vacation in Greece where he saw some Free Palestine posters in a café window. “He went in to talk to them,” Moshe recalls. “He thought he could help them understand the conflict, that it’s not always black and white. He believed in people.”
Moshe takes a more cynical view than his son. He points out that Hamas took control in Gaza after free elections, “and they got a big support so that’s really sad. Where is the resistance to terrorism among Palestinians?” He gestures outside to the roof terrace and to an Arab village beyond. “After the slaughter of October 7, they started letting off fireworks to celebrate. These are our neighbours. I mean, the village it’s like 100 metres from my house.” 
The Muslim villagers, Moshe points out, enjoy a good life in Israel, they own the local bus company, nice houses, full civil rights, “but the hatred is so deep”. He blames UNWRA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) and schools in Gaza for feeding children anti-semitic poison. “Even the Right-wing extremists in Israel would never teach their kids to slaughter and regard people as not human.”Out of respect for his son’s tender nature, Moshe is at pains to point out that Aner’s “act of bravery” was for “the surviving of people, not the killing of the terrorists”. In fact, Aner Shapira perfectly encapsulates GK Chesterton’s maxim: “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
Moshe tells me one story which reveals a bigger truth about Israel, I think. Not long before the war, Moshe took part in the widespread demonstrations against plans by Netanyahu’s government to overhaul the judicial system – cancelling the Supreme Court’s ability to block government actions and appointments, it was felt by many to be a threat to democracy. He asked Aner to join him. Aner refused. He said he had heard people at a protest saying that soldiers should disobey commands, and he couldn’t stay because he was disgusted. “But why, you’re an anarchist?” his father pointed out. Aner rebuked his dad, saying his unit was fighting terrorists who were trying to kill civilians. “When you have a cruel enemy that wants to kill us, we need discipline,” Aner said. “I can’t disobey the commands because they are for rescuing people, it’s not a game, we have to save lives. I will never let somebody else risk his life in order to save me. I prefer to be the one that rescues.” And so he was.
Aner died on Saturday the 7th, but the Shapiras had no idea what had happened to him until they got a call on the Monday. The entire family sat on the sofa and heard the voice of a girl on speakerphone saying: “I can’t speak, but I want to tell you how Aner handled the situation and, thanks to him, I’m alive.”
“What situation? We didn’t know. She couldn’t speak, she was in shock.” Later, the father of the guy that took the picture of Aner in the shelter called Moshe and said: “I don’t know if he’s dead or heavily injured”, but his own boy had seen Aner in action, catching multiple grenades. “He said, ‘Thanks to your son, my son and his girlfriend are alive.’” Although the family found it hard to believe the grenades story, a video from the dashcam which soon went viral proved it.
⚠️WARNING: DISTURBING⚠️Aner Shapira was an Israeli hero. On October 7, Shapira was at Nova. When Hamas attacked civilians in a bomb shelter, he defended them with a knife, a broken bottle, and his bare hands—throwing grenades back out. He died trying to save lives. pic.twitter.com/tn63EM5ViN
Aner was buried at Mount Herzl on October 10. Rachel Goldberg-Polin posted a remarkable tribute to him on Facebook. “How can I talk about beautiful Aner? I remember him as a boy, in Hersh’s room, sitting on his bed laughing and speaking to me in his heavily accented English… always in English, to make me feel comfortable. And I remember listening to his music; he composed the music and created the lyrics in such a beautiful and sometimes hilarious way. I think of the treks and adventures the boys went on together, starting at a young age and continuing through as they became young men. And I think of the 11 people who walked out of that bomb shelter on October 7. Eight of them sleeping at home tonight and three sleeping in Gaza, and I know the ONLY reason any of those people are alive is because of sweet, brave, clever, fearless beloved Aner. Why isn’t there a word bigger than hero? Aner, you are our bigger-than-hero. May your beautiful memory be for a blessing.”
I tell Moshe I can’t believe how mature Aner was for a 22-year-old, instinctively taking command and assuming responsibility for so many others, and Shira corrects me; “he was 22 and a half, he’d be 23 now.”
The Shapiras clearly get huge consolation from the strangers that Aner saved. “They said that they didn’t see any fear in his eyes,” Moshe says. “He was focusing on the mission.” He takes out his phone to show me the video of Hamas attacking the megunit. You can see the grenades that Aner is throwing back at the terrorists. 
“We are lucky,” his father says. “We have recordings from inside the shelter and we have the movie from the outside. They were not exaggerating what Aner did. It’s a gift from God to have this documentation, otherwise nobody would have believed it.”
I get that, but I still wonder how I’d feel watching the video if that was my son, who is close in age to Aner. “You’ve collected all these things, Moshe,” I say. “Is it helpful to you and Shira to know exactly what happened to him in those terrible minutes?”
Moshe nods: “There is a phrase in Judaism that’s called ‘the mercy of truth’. It deals with all the things that you’re doing for somebody that died. It’s a charity because you won’t get anything from it. But I think that we got a charity of truth. To get the truth as it was for Aner is a charity, yes, because so many people don’t know what happened to their kids on that day.”
Some 364 young people who attended the Nova festival were murdered, and 44 were taken hostage (Meirav Gonen’s darling Romi is still in Gaza 12 months on. “We love you, stay strong.”). Noa Argamani was rescued by ground forces, but the boyfriend she cried out for from the motorbike – Avinatan Or – has not come home. The only way Shani Louk’s death could be confirmed was when a piece of her skull was found in Gaza.
“Aner didn’t succeed in saving his life,” Moshe says. “But he succeeded in showing that you can’t go to slaughter like a sheep. You have to stand, and it’s amazing, you know, he did succeed. He succeeded because you show the world that if you have a spirit, even if you’re unarmed, you can face evil and you can fight.”
I visited the Nova festival site on a perfect sunny afternoon. It is an eerily beautiful place; no screams now, no remorseless gunfire, no jubilant monsters hellbent on martyrdom, just the tinkle of wind chimes attached to memorials with their photos of each young victim (so many faces so full of promise, my God, so many), and the sound of visitors softly weeping.
On the drive home, we stop at the megunit, the site of Aner’s last stand. Rust-coloured blood everywhere, on the floors, on the walls pitted by gunfire. It is shockingly small, the size of a garden shed; so small that the living managed to stay alive under the bodies.
As long as they live, today’s young Israelis will always be the Nova generation. Their attitudes have hardened, or so people say, because they saw what your enemy does to you if you don’t pay attention. That’s a cruel lesson students in the West, who idly lend their support to Islamist rapists and murderers, should pray they never have to learn. 
What a leader of his country Aner Shapira could have been. A sensitive soldier who inhabited the contradictions of being a Jew surrounded by hatred, a peace-lover who had to take up arms to save people. Who knows? Aner might have persuaded the world that Israel was on the side of good. On the first anniversary of October 7, we may glimpse the tall, fair-haired young man standing there in the doorway still, alert, ready to protect. “I’ll catch the grenades and throw them back.”