Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence that may be disturbing to some readers. Estimation is advised.
One year after the deadly October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel, one survivor says finding an answer to how she dealt with the trauma of that day is difficult.
“The short version is, ‘I’m fine,'” Galia Sofer told Mercedes Stevenson in an interview aired Sunday. Western bloc. “I’m alive, I’m healthy, and I have a beautiful, wonderful family.
“So it’s easy to say we’re good. But on the other hand, we’re not. I’m not.
About 1,200 people were killed in the attack, which sparked an Israeli military offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 41,000 people in the Palestinian territories, according to figures from Hamas-run health officials, which do not differentiate between civilians and militants.
The violence has since escalated into a broader conflict in the Middle East between other Iranian-backed groups including Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Nearly 100 of the 250 hostages taken by Hamas in the October 7 attack are believed to remain held inside Gaza, and ceasefire talks to secure their release have been stalled for several weeks.
Sofer was camping with her two young daughters and other families outside her kibbutz, Mafalsim, located just three kilometers from the Israel-Gaza border, when Hamas began its attack in the early morning hours. Her husband was at home.
I soon realized that what initially sounded like thunder before a rainstorm was the sound of thousands of rockets exploding over Israel.
“It just kept going and going and going,” Sofer said.
Her intuition, born of years of living close to the Gaza Strip, which has long witnessed conflicts between Israel and Hamas, led her to protect her daughters and her body inside their tent as the explosions continued.
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“I grabbed my phone and called my husband and said, ‘Come pick us up.’” It went straight to voicemail. She said: “And I wonder: What should I do?”
“While I’m trying to think and trying to keep (my daughters) calm, I’m like, ‘I can’t hear anyone outside.’ We’re 30 families. There’s a lot of bombing, like a lot of bombs going on. Why aren’t the kids crying? What’s going on here?’ “
Amid the confusion, armed volunteers helped Sofer and her two young daughters into the car, and quickly transported them to their home in Mvalsim, where her husband was still safe.
The security forces were credited with volunteering With Hamas militants fighting as they attacked Mfalsim and preventing any deaths within the community.
Inside their home, there was no electricity, Sofer said. The family took cover with only the lights of their smartphones. They tried to distract the girls by playing while trying to stay as quiet as possible.
“How do you tell a three-year-old: ‘Shut up, because there might be bad people out there,’” Sofer said.
Several hours after the attack began, the family received a message that it was finally safe to flee the area, and IDF personnel helped them into a waiting vehicle.
“You could see they were afraid,” Sofer said.
While driving, Sofer saw the horrific consequences of what had happened over the past few hours.
“It was like the end of the world,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve seen The walking deadBut no less, only in real life. Bodies there, burned cars there.
“You can’t believe it. Like, ‘Am I in a movie? Is this real?’
She said that the smell is what sticks in her memory the most.
“I put the pieces together later,” Oh my God, this is what I was smelling: It wasn’t the fire I had lit the night before. “Houses were burning and people were burning,” she said.
The army took Sofer and her family to the central Israeli city of Netanya, where they stayed for a week with about 1,000 of their neighbors before traveling to Cyprus, where they still live today.
Sofer said that although there were no deaths in Mfalsim itself, her family and others in her community lost friends and loved ones in the attack.
She and her husband are undergoing treatment, and Sofer said her daughters realized what they went through that day and began talking about it openly.
“No three-year-old or six-year-old should know what kidnapping means,” she said.
As she continues to process her trauma, Sofer said she has criticism about Israel’s response. She noted that the Israeli army personnel who helped them flee their home took hours to arrive after Hamas launched its attack.
“This is one of the things that makes me so angry,” she said.
“We have the strongest army, the best army, all the things we’ve been told over the years. Where were they?”
She also questions why Israeli domestic intelligence agencies were unable to stop the attack before it began. To this day, she and the rest of the Israeli population are told little about what the government knows about Hamas’s plans.
“I’m still waiting to find out who knew what and why they didn’t do anything,” she said.
“It’s so sad that we are just little pieces of the big people who rule our lives.”
But Sofer reserves her harshest words for the Hamas fighters who inflicted the trauma she still faces today.
“They are evil,” she said when asked how she would describe terrorists to her daughters. “Bad guys for no reason other than to be bad wanted to do bad things to us, and we succeeded because we are alive and happy and healthy and we have to stay that way.
“Now come and make your bed, for you are not exempt from this.”
