This summer, I walked through Kibbutz Nir Oz, a place that should have been filled with life but instead bore the scars of unimaginable horror. Kfir and Ariel Bibas ought to have spent most of their short lives there – playing in the gardens, running through the playgrounds, growing up in the safety of their home. Instead, the newborn and the toddler were ripped away. The image of their mother, Shiri, clinging to her children wrapped in blankets and sucking pacifiers is seared into the collective memory of those who mourn them.
Upon entering the kibbutz, its former beauty was haunting. Where there should have been vibrant homes and laughter, there were burnt-down buildings, bullet holes, and the unmistakable smell of death. The only signs of life were a stray cat and a lonely peacock, blissfully unaware of the devastation surrounding them.
I walked the same paths the Bibas family once did – past the playgrounds where they played, past the homes reduced to rubble. Our guide that day was the father of their classmates – a man whose own children were the same ages as Kfir and Ariel. His family survived the massacre because of a simple lock they had installed on their safe room just weeks earlier.
He described how they huddled together in the darkness, parents lying on top of children to shield them. In their effort to survive, they urinated on blankets placed at the base of the door to keep out the smoke billowing from the flames right outside. Terrorists had set fire to their home, trying to burn them alive. This was not a battlefield. This was a home, a sanctuary, a place where children should have been safe.
A sanctuary violated: The destruction of Kibbutz Nir Oz
Most kids play some version of cops and robbers on the playground, their imaginations painting a picture of good and bad – simple enough. For the children of Kibbutz Nir Oz, the game is different since their young friends were taken hostage. They act out a desperate rescue mission – ”bring Kfir and Ariel back from Gaza.” Their world has been shaped by that day, their play a reflection of an ongoing nightmare. Recess at school is no longer a time for games; it’s a reenactment of loss, an unconscious attempt to rewrite a tragedy too immense for their young minds to comprehend.
Hearing this, I couldn’t help but think back to when I was 18. I lost a friend in a shooting in downtown Toronto – another act of senseless violence that shattered a community I had always felt safe in. I remember the grief, the anger, and the ache of knowing she was gone and nothing would ever bring her back. I remember how the world around me moved on while I was stuck in the weight of it, struggling to process how life could continue as normal when hers would never. But the classmates of Kfir and Ariel are too young to know a “before and after.” This terror will define their entire lives.
I remember standing in Nir Oz, the scent of burnt buildings and death still thick in the air. The ground trembled beneath us as artillery thundered from just beyond the kibbutz, a grim reminder that the horror of that day was not an isolated event but a wound still open, still bleeding. Even then, with destruction surrounding me, I struggled to comprehend the full weight of what had happened. How do you grasp the absence of an entire community, of families wiped out, of children who should have been laughing on those playgrounds but instead became symbols of unimaginable loss?
And yet, even now, the weight settles in again – heavier, sharper. For the children of Nir Oz, the nightmare never ended. It lingers in the silence of empty classrooms, in the echoes of voices that should be there but aren’t, in the games they play that are no longer just pretend. This isn’t just grief – it’s a stolen future, a childhood lost to the kind of terror no child should ever know.
The world will move on, as it always does. Headlines will change, attention will shift. But for the survivors of Nir Oz, there is no moving on – only moving forward, carrying with them the unbearable weight of what was taken. The least we can do is ensure that their names, their stories, and their stolen futures are never forgotten.■
The writer is a recent law school graduate who spends her free time working as an advocate and strategist at the intersection of policy, media, and community engagement.