Since her children were taken, Hadas Kalderon doesn’t really sleep, but when she does, she screams so loudly she wakes up.
The nightmares rush in, no different from waking. Erez, who turned 12 last week, sensitive and sweet. Sahar, 16, beautiful and clever. Both of them, along with their father, her ex-husband, kidnapped from their home in the Nir Oz kibbutz by Hamas terrorists.
Her community was one of the worst hit in the October 7 massacre. After the attack, 160 survivors picked their way through the burnt ruins of their village and were taken to Eilat, a resort town by the Red Sea, 130 miles away, on buses.
For weeks, they have been living in a luxury hotel, walking half-dazed past the breakfast buffet, sometimes feeling almost normal until someone screams, or they remember. Everywhere, there are children without parents, parents without children.
As for Kalderon, she lives a shadow life further north in a borrowed flat in Tel Aviv. She does dozens of interviews, in different languages, to anyone who will listen. She has to. She cannot lose control. Keeping them in the news, keeping the pressure on, is the only way she can help get them back. It has been three weeks. During the day, she holds herself together.
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“I don’t have time to feel my pain,” she said last week. “I’m just working. This is the work of my life, saving my children and their father. They don’t deserve this nightmare.”
It was 5pm and she had just eaten a few bites of breakfast after finishing another interview, this time with an Israeli channel. She unclipped her microphone, thanked the cameraman and sat down. For a moment, she leant forward, covered her eyes and sobbed. Then she was back, ordering us to listen to what happened.
Her two youngest children were kidnapped on October 7 from their home in a kibbutz near Gaza. Before the attack, about 400 people were living in Nir Oz. Now a quarter of them are dead or missing. “A pogrom”, “a Holocaust” — that is what the survivors from the kibbutz call it. For every person they see alive, another seems to be missing.
As many as 74 people from Nir Oz, many of them children, could be alive in the Hamas tunnels, used as human shields and bargaining chips in the group’s attempts to negotiate a ceasefire.
All together, 230 hostages, most of them Israeli, were taken from the border area with Gaza. Thousands across Israel and the world have missing grandparents, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins and friends.
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Many of these hostages are from small kibbutzim rooted in the socialist peace ideals of the Israeli labour movement. Now they have become one of the few cards left for Hamas to play in its attempt to stop a ground invasion.
So far, four hostages have been released: two older women and a mother and daughter. Each family hopes theirs will be next.
Erez, Kalderon’s youngest son, turned 12 on Thursday. Her friends asked his schoolmates to record video messages for him, to give to him after he is released.
Four days earlier it had been the ninth birthday of Ohad Munder-Zichri, also from the kibbutz. Some of his family held a small party: balloons, cake, no child.
“I don’t want to think about them,” Kalderon said. “It’s too painful. I don’t ... I closed my feelings. I can’t handle it otherwise I get crushed. But of course they are the most amazing in the world, what can I say. Funny. Sweethearts.”
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Her son Erez, she said, was a sweet boy, so nervous. He loved riding horses and playing football but was terrified of the rockets that sometimes flew overhead from Gaza. He was scared the family would be hurt and everyone did their best to calm him, make him feel safe. Then he was dragged from his home. A video published on social media by Hamas appeared to show him being taken away by gunmen.
“Now he is literally living his worst nightmare,” said Kalderon, whose older children were not in the kibbutz at the time of the massacre.
She doesn’t know where her family are being kept, only that one of the other hostages, Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, who was released last week, said they had been kept in a spider’s web of tunnels in Gaza. Lifshitz said she was given food and medical care but her husband is still being held by Hamas, and many fear she may not be telling the whole truth in public in case it endangers him.
Kalderon’s mother, Carmela, and her autistic 12-year-old niece, Noya, who loved Harry Potter, were both murdered on October 7, but she does not have time to grieve for them.
Before the attack, life on the kibbutz was simple and quiet. Everyone knew everyone. They grew crops, ran nursery schools and community events, and did not think too much about what lay beyond the Gaza fence nearby.
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The terrorists broke through at 6.30am, after a barrage of rockets, and went methodically through the houses, seeming to know exactly where to go. Moshe Adar, 64, a farmer, was in his safe room with his partner.
He could hear people coming into his house, shouting in Arabic, as gunfire and explosions sounded outside. They tried to force open the safe-room door as he held it closed. He knew they would come back.
“I decided not to wait for them and instead to surprise them,” he said. He left the door, stood back, and when they opened it again, he shot them with his pistol: two men, dressed in civilian clothes, armed with AK-47s. He shut the door.
By the time the Israeli army came, eight hours later, his mother, Yafa, 85, was gone. Hamas fighters published pictures and videos showing her sitting, perfectly serene, in a golf cart, being driven away from the kibbutz where she had spent her life and into Gaza.
His son, Tamir, 38, who was deeply involved in the communal life of the kibbutz, was gone too. When the attack began, he left his wife, Hadas, and two children, Asaf, seven, and Neta, three, in the safe room while he went out to fight the attackers. Tamir has not been seen since. His family survived because he had insisted on installing an extra security measure that meant they could lock the safe-room door from the inside.
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“Everybody loves him,” Adar, said, his voice catching in his throat. “Really, everybody.”
On his left forearm, still red raw, was a new tattoo: 7.10.23. “We never expected a Holocaust like this,” he said.
Down in Eilat, a beautiful resort town, the survivors do things to calm themselves, to pass the time. A few of them have started free-diving, going as far down into the ocean as possible, slowing their breathing, feeling their heart beat. Others try to numb it all by smoking or drinking, or just sleeping, all the time.
Adar is trying to keep it together for his grandchildren. As we spoke, Neta, 4, came up to hug him. She and her brother ask all the time: “Where is Dad? When is he coming back?”
“They understand he’s not with us now, and he’s coming back soon,” he said. “What can I say? We’re waiting together.”
Like many of the other survivors, he is angry at the Israeli government for its failure to communicate with the families of the hostages. Some of those we spoke to said they had not once been contacted by the state throughout three weeks of waiting.
Everyone wandering through the hotel lobby had a story of horror: the mother of a three-month-old, whose husband was taken; a teenager whose parents are gone. On a board outside the restaurant, where usually the lunch specials might be listed, are black-and-white notices showing the funerals of the people from Nir Oz. One service is for Daniel Darlington, from Manchester, whose mother came from the kibbutz. He was visiting with his German girlfriend, Carolin Bohl. Both were killed.
Arie Itzik, 70, the paramedic in Nir Oz, sat on a sofa in the hotel lobby, listening to the shouts of laughter from the children playing in the pool. He went back to collect the bodies and doesn’t want to talk much about what he saw.
Some of them were burnt beyond recognition, others mutilated. It was a terrible thing, he said, but he was happy that his mother, who survived the Holocaust in Romania, had died on the kibbutz just a few months before. It is the captives, his neighbours and friends, the children in his community he is terrified for.
“Old people. Kids. We have some girls there, they are 15, 16, 17. And I am scared more about them, OK? You understand what I mean,” he said.
The dead are being buried. For the families of the missing, there is no closure, their days spent swinging between hope and despair. Bar Goren, 23, and his three siblings — Assif, 25, Gal, 21, and Dekel, 19, the only girl — are trying to keep close, staying together, as they campaign for their mother’s release. Maya, 56, a nursery school teacher, was taken during the attack. They have heard nothing.
“We’re trying to be together as much as we can,” he said. “We know how important it is to keep up the pressure.”
Their father, Avner, who loved music and used to write shows that they would perform in the holidays, was killed. The army found his body between Nir Oz and Gaza.
He was buried last week, in the earth of the kibbutz he loved, beside the ruins of the burnt homes.
Additional reporting: Eitan Amrami and Oliver Marsden
