The Aftermath of the Hamas Attack: Portraits of Israeli Survivors

Nikita Soumrov and his son, Avi, were among the thousands of Israelis who were attacked on the morning of Oct. 7, after Hamas gunmen surged into southern Israel from Gaza.

Roughly 1,400 people were killed — in their homes, in bomb shelters, at an outdoor rave.

Avi, 4, escaped by hiding in a closet.

He and many other survivors remain traumatized by the experience.

These are their stories.

Yossef Rozansky and his wife and daughter ran out to rescue a neighbor in Kibbutz Holit whose house was ablaze. Then they retreated to their own safe room. A grenade exploded in their home. They braced the door. Another explosion wounded all eight family members inside. His daughter applied a tourniquet to his leg. “I’m wounded,” he recalled, “sitting there hugging my granddaughter and everyone else sitting inside the safe room, keeping very quiet and all the time looking at their wounded grandmother and the blood spreading all over the room.”

Hila Fakliro, a fitness instructor, was tending bar at the Tribe of Nova music festival when she saw what she thought were fireworks. “I don’t think those are fireworks,” a fellow bartender said. They were Hamas rockets. Soon, men with guns appeared amid the eucalyptus trees where revelers had just been dancing. “There were these crazy maniacs with guns and people falling one by one,” Ms. Fakliro said.

“Mom woke me up and just said ‘run to the safe room,’ and my dad took out his weapon and guarded our front door,”’ recalled Stav Nitzan, the youngest of three brothers. “I needed to sit quietly so that the terrorists didn’t break into our safe room. Every time I wanted to step out, there was another rocket.”

Finally, the family was rescued with the help of their neighbor Benny, “who is the bravest man in the world, because lots of terrorists chased after him and he managed to rescue us, together with other dads,” Stav said.

Sheerel Gabay hid with friends and 30 or 40 others in a roadside bomb shelter near Be’eri. Over seven hours, Hamas lobbed grenades and fired at the people inside. She was shot in the knee and sustained two open fractures and a ruptured eardrum.

The woman who was shot in front of her fell backward, trapping Ms. Gabay under her lifeless body. “I could not move, and could not stop thinking that I’m covered by a dead girl,” she said.

A longtime peace activist, Roni Keidar was receiving cellphone messages from friends in Gaza who were worried about her during the attack as she took shelter in their safe room in Netiv Haasara, near the northern border of Gaza, where they have lived for decades.

“We will return for sure, and if necessary, I will fight with my own hands,” her husband, Ovadia Keidar, said. “We will restore the damage so that our children will have an example of how to protect the country without fear.”

Their safe room in Kfar Aza provided no protection. Shaylee Atary’s husband, Yahav, “pressed as hard as he could against the door to prevent them from breaking in,” she said. She remembers “running outside barefoot, holding my baby as tightly as possible,” hiding in shrubs and bushes until she reached a neighbor’s shed. She pulled sacks of soil and fertilizer over them, she said, trying to “calm Shaya’s cries so that the terrorists don’t hear her and discover us.”

Her husband, who had stayed behind, was missing for four days before she finally received the news that he was dead. She could not pick up herself off the floor until she heard Shaya crying.

As they sheltered in their safe room, the same text kept appearing from mothers in a WhatsApp group at Be’eri: “Help us!” It was not long before a message came from Michal Pinyan’s own mother, who lived close by: “They are throwing grenades. They are trying to blast through the safe room’s door.” Her last message, too, simply read: “Help.”

“They lived three minutes away from me, and I am going crazy because I cannot help them and they were murdered,” Ms. Pinyan said of her parents. “They were both 69.”

“I was somehow under the assumption they had been found dead at home, but a friend who identified them said their bodies had been tossed outside,” she added. “They had both been shot in their heads, and their hands were cuffed with black cable ties.”