A year later, Kibbutz Nir Oz still fighting to tell the real story of Oct. 7

In the year since she survived the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre in her kibbutz, Nir Oz, Lahav has struggled to explain to international media what happened that day.

By Andrew Tobin, The Washington Free Beacon

Irit Lahav, a 58-year-old professional tour guide, knows how to walk clueless foreigners through unfamiliar terrain.

But in the year since she survived the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre in her kibbutz, Nir Oz, Lahav has struggled to explain to international media what happened that day.

No matter how many interviews she arranges with her traumatized neighbors or tours she gives of their burned-out homes, many journalists have continued to tell the story of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust as another chapter in Israel’s supposed persecution of the Palestinians.

“People are saying Israel is bad,” Lahav, a former peace activist, told the Washington Free Beacon last week during a visit to Nir Oz, about a mile and a half from Israel’s border with southern Gaza.

“What? The Palestinians are holding our hostages … How would one feel if it was their daughter, their grandfather, their father, their 2 -year-old children, baby Kfir [Bibas in Hamas captivity in Gaza]?”

“The Palestinians are very good at PR, they’ve done a very good job, and Israeli people say, ‘We don’t need to explain ourselves because we know that we are moral people,'” she added. “But at the end of the day, people only see what the media shows.”

Once a leafy paradise, Nir Oz was one of the first Israeli communities to be overrun on Oct. 7, and it was among the hardest hit.

About 120 Hamas and Hamas-affiliated terrorists followed by a mob of some 800 Gazans, including women and children, poured into the kibbutz over the course of the daylong pogrom, which overwhelmed unprepared Israeli security forces.

The terrorists killed 41 people and abducted 76 others, according to the Nir Oz community. Most of the modest one-story houses and other buildings were destroyed by arson, gunfire, grenades, and looting.

Israel responded with an ongoing war to destroy Hamas, the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group that governed Gaza, and return the hostages.

Iran and its other terrorist affiliates, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen, have joined the multifront battle, which has threaten to expand into all-out regional war.

A number of leading English-language news outlets have faced scrutiny for apparent anti-Israel bias in their coverage of the Gaza war and among staffers.

The Washington Post has stood out from the crowd with repeated factual errors at Israel’s expense and a foreign desk packed with former employees of Al Jazeera, a Qatari network that the Jewish state recently banned from operating in the country, citing alleged ties to Hamas.

Lahav recalled with anger how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported on the August funeral of Avraham Munder, 79, who was abducted from his home in Nir Oz on Oct. 7 along with his wife, daughter, and only grandson.

The terrorists killed Munder’s son during the attack. Munder “suffered bodily and mental torture for months” in Hamas captivity before he was killed, according to the Nir Oz community.

The CBC report, which aired on the state broadcaster’s flagship nightly news program, made no mention of the Oct. 7 attack or what happened to Munder or his family other than to question “whether it was Hamas or Israel’s attacks [on Hamas] that killed” him.

Interviews with mourners focused solely on their complaints that the Israeli government had failed to secure the return of the abductees who remained in Gaza. The second half of the two-minute segment was dedicated to displaced and injured Palestinians in Gaza, especially children.

“Some of their gruesome injuries, including small headless bodies, are just too horrendous to show,” a voiceover intoned.

Lahav accused the CBC of having “completely erased” Hamas’s atrocities in Nir On on Oct. 7.

CBC did not respond to a request for comment.

Most of the former residents of Nir Oz, including Lahav, have temporarily relocated to government-provided apartment towers in Kiryat Gat, a city in southern Israel.

Locals fully furnished and equipped the apartments, even providing clothing, toothbrushes, and artwork. Every Friday, members of a different Israel community have brought the evacuees sweets.

“It’s a very nice gesture,” Lahav said as people gathered to collect the sweets last week.

“Some of the people here who are receiving cakes and fruits are people who lost their loved ones or [whose loved ones] are still hostages in the hands of the Palestinians. You look at them, you would not even imagine that they’re going through this emotional stress right now. But these are the people.”

Forty women and children who were abducted from Nir Oz on Oct. 7 were returned in a November ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, and another 16 have been confirmed dead, according to the Nir Oz community.

Twenty have remained in Gaza, potentially alive. Negotiations for another hostage-ceasefire deal have gone nowhere.

The former Nir Oz residents have begun planning to rebuild the kibbutz, but the process is expected to take at least three years, and they disagree about how to do so in a way that honors their dead and missing, Lahav said.

Some of the former residents, especially those with young children, are not sure they will ever feel safe enough to go home.

Meanwhile, Lahav has continued to drive an hour each way to Niz Oz once a week to give journalists tours of the kibbutz. She said she keeps fighting to tell the real story of Oct. 7 in hopes that the world will step up pressure on Hamas.

“My friends who are there [in Gaza, like] Oded Lifshitz, who was like my second father, how would he feel if I would just be sitting around doing nothing?” she said.

“I think they expect us, they expect the whole world to turn every stone and say, ‘No.’ They wait for us. They wait for us to rescue them, and ‘us’ is the whole world, the whole [of] humanity.”

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