Terrorists hunted down Roi Rutberg, a 21-year-old farmer in Nahal Oz, an Israeli kibbutz on the Gaza frontier. They carefully planned their
by Michael M. Rosen
Long before any Israeli “occupation” of Gaza, Arab terrorists called fedayeen used it as a launching pad to infiltrate Israel and slaughter Jews. “The newly created Israel-Gaza border,” Tibon writes, of the period following the Jewish state’s establishment in 1948, “knew very few days of peace.”
Following Rutberg’s murder, the Israeli general Moshe Dayan visited the kibbutz, where he delivered a dark but realistic pronouncement. “Beyond the furrow of the border,” he intoned, “a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path.” Decades of low-grade violence emanated from the enclave.
Even so, vibrant communities developed in the so-called Gaza Envelope, and the vast majority of them harbored hopes for peace with their Arab neighbors, even ferrying them to Israeli hospitals. Dani Rachamim arrived at Nahal Oz in 1975, eight years after Israel had taken the strip from Egypt, and developed close enough friendships with Palestinians across the border to invite them to his wedding on the kibbutz. “It felt totally natural for them to be there and dance with us,” he tells Tibon. “We were neighbors.” The community even hosted a Festival of Peace in 1994, amid the early euphoria of the Oslo Accords, welcoming dozens of Palestinian families. “Peace with the people of Gaza was now within reach,” Rachamim and his fellow kibbutzniks thought.
But that euphoria quickly gave way to despair, as Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization rejected further peace proposals and went on to arm Palestinian groups—including a newly formed Islamist faction called Hamas, whose establishment Israel tacitly blessed as a counterweight to the PLO—that launched a campaign of violent attacks, most prominently including suicide bombings that claimed the lives of hundreds of Israeli innocents. By the early 2000s, Gazan terrorists had begun developing the mortars and rockets that would figure prominently in the 10/7 onslaught.
Shortly after Israel withdrew unilaterally from the enclave in 2005, Hamas seized power. Several rounds of fighting failed to dislodge the Islamists, who amassed and fired yet more rockets, dug a hardened military subterranean network longer than the London Underground, and began plotting October 7.
That savage attack has, by now, been widely documented, but Tibon adds important and meticulous detail, providing the definitive account of the ordeal in Nahal Oz, where the terrorists would murder 3 percent of the community and take another 2 percent as hostages.
