“Praying that he lives”

A year has passed since the dawn attack by Hamas in which over 1,000 Israelis were killed and hundreds taken hostage.

Rita Lifshitz’s father-in-law is one of the kidnapped who has not yet returned.

– I wake up every morning and wish that everything was just a terrible nightmare, she says.

At dawn on October 7, 2023, armed men breached the fence around Gaza.

Then a bloody attack was launched against Israeli cities and villages. At the same time, rockets hit Tel Aviv and several other places in the country.

Hamas announced that the operation “Al-Aqsa tidal wave” had begun.

In southern Israel, not far from Gaza, the music festival Nova took place out in the desert. Thousands of people had been dancing to the music just a couple of hours earlier. Suddenly they needed to flee for their lives.

A few hours later, 364 of them were dead.

The Hamas terrorists opened fire, threw hand grenades and killed as many as they could.

In film clips, the attackers can be heard celebrating and yelling at each other: “here’s another dog, kill it”.

During the attack, Hamas killed a total of more than 1,100 people, most of them civilians. It is the deadliest attack on Israel in the country’s history. Thousands were injured and nearly 250 people, including several children, were taken hostage and taken to Gaza.

After that bloody day, a year of war has followed. The Israeli government formally declared war on Hamas, which it has vowed to destroy.

Since then, Israeli bombardments have left large parts of the Gaza Strip in ruins and more than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The majority of those killed are said to be civilians.

– We are devastated. Everything that is happening is terrible, says Rita Lifshitzs, 60.

She moved from Sweden to Israel 40 years ago – and on October 7, most of her home village, Nir Oz, was burned to the ground.

Rita remembers the panic that erupted that morning. She herself had gone to Tel Aviv ten hours earlier, but had contact with the neighbors in Nir Oz.

On Facebook, she saw part of the massacre while it was going on.

– An acquaintance from the kibbutz was the first to be murdered. Hamas took her phone, filmed and posted it on her Facebook when they murdered her. That’s how her children and grandchildren saw her killed, says Rita.

Many others were kidnapped and taken hostage.

Of the hostages who were taken away by Hamas, today, according to Israel, there are still around 100 who have neither been freed nor found dead.

One of them is Rita’s 84-year-old father-in-law Oded Lifshitz. Rita’s mother-in-law was also taken hostage, but she was later released.

– My mother-in-law is strong, but her heart is broken. Just like the rest of us in the family. We don’t know anything about what happened to father-in-law, we don’t know if he is still alive. But we hope he is with a Palestinian family who will take care of him.

She says that Oded supported the Palestinian people throughout his life.

– He has worked for human rights and for peace with the Palestinians all these years. Every week he brought Palestinian children and their parents from Gaza to Jerusalem for cancer treatment.

A year has now passed and Rita has not yet been able to return to live in her home village. But every now and then she goes to what’s left of the family house. There she says a prayer for Oded to come back alive.

On the anniversary, many will gather at the cemetery to honor those who were killed and kidnapped. She mourns them and she mourns the innocents killed in Gaza.

– The other day, tears fell down my cheeks from morning to night. It hurts my heart for all the children who die in the Gaza Strip. The future doesn’t look bright either. Israel’s future does not look bright.

But she wants to find and feel hope. She believes that it is necessary to achieve change.

– First of all, our kidnapped family members must come home and it must happen now. Then the whole world must help rebuild Gaza – and it must be a two-state solution. But it doesn’t work if Hamas terror rules inside the Gaza Strip.