Three Years After October 7, I Moved Back to Nahal Oz

O n the morning of August 18 , shortly after 10 a.m., a moving truck stopped in front of our home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, the closest Israeli community to the Gaza border.

The driver and two assistants began unloading dozens of boxes containing our belongings—books, clothing, electronics, kitchen appliances.

Fifty minutes later, everything was off the truck, the boxes piled in the center of our living room.

I gave the movers some cold water—it was ridiculously hot, as summer days in Israel tend to be—and they hurried out the door.

My wife and I stood in front of the boxes, and we both took a deep breath.

Almost three years after surviving the October 7 attack, we were back home.

Nahal Oz is a small community located less than a mile from the Israel-Gaza border.

It’s a kibbutz—a collective village where even today, in the capitalist Israel of 2026, many elements of daily life are managed by the community.

It has a successful dairy farm, eight chicken coops, and fields that stretch several miles to the north, south, and east of the kibbutz, where potatoes, cabbages, carrots, and corn are grown throughout the year.

To the west of the kibbutz is the border with Gaza, and beyond it are large mounds of rubble standing where the Shuja’iyya neighborhood of Gaza City used to be.

Many of the Hamas terrorists who infiltrated Nahal Oz on October 7 came from there; Israel’s response was to completely empty and destroy the neighborhood, leaving scorched earth where thousands of families once had their homes.

Today it is part of the approximately 60 percent of the Gaza Strip held by the Israeli military.

Nobody lives there now.

Like most of the kibbutzim along the Israel-Gaza border, Nahal Oz has traditionally been a stronghold of the Israeli left; the Labor party and its allies won more than 90 percent of the local vote in past elections.