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.
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.
