Terrorists hunted down Roi Rutberg, a 21-year-old farmer in Nahal Oz, an Israeli kibbutz on the Gaza frontier. They carefully planned their assault, crossed the border into Israel, advanced through an agricultural field, brutally murder-ed Roi, and dragged his corpse to Gaza, where frenetic crowds mutilated it.
October 7, 2023? No. The Rutberg slaying took place in April 1956. But as Amir Tibon observes in his new book, The Gates of Gaza, it presaged Hamas’s barbarous attack and reflects how profoundly and persistently intractable the enclave has been. Gaza is truly a problem from hell.
A diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, Tibon provides a propulsive and poignant recounting of his own ordeal in Nahal Oz, where he, his wife, and their two young daughters sheltered for 10 hours in their safe room as Islamist terrorists rampaged across their community.
Seamlessly blending a history of Gaza with the harrowing events of October 7, Tibon highlights how, for more than 100 years, the Strip has destabilized the region and warped both Israeli and Palestinian society.
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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.
Most memorably, he recounts how he called his own father—retired Major General Noam Tibon, a decorated 62-year-old counterterrorism veteran—from his safe room. Noam Tibon raced south from his home in Tel Aviv to rescue his grandchildren, but not before heroically rescuing two shell-shocked escapees from the Nova Music Festival. There he fended off Hamas fighters in a vicious firefight and evacuated wounded Israeli soldiers.
Amir Tibon’s promise that “if we all stay quiet, then Saba will come and get us out of here,” helped keep his terrified daughters calm. Once their grandfather arrived, he joined forces with IDF commandos to hunt down the remaining terrorists, liberate the kibbutz, and knock on his son’s safe-room door. It is one of the great stories of our age.
Tibon shares other untold tales of heroism, like that of the Bedouin Arab Israeli soldier on the beleaguered army base outside Nahal Oz who stripped off his uniform, donned civilian clothes, blended into the Hamas attackers, and led them into an IDF ambush. Or the story of Nissan Dekalo and Beri Meirovitch, members of the kibbutz’s rapid-response team, who kept more than 100 terrorists pinned down for hours while taking cover in a disabled Range Rover. Or the ordeal of Dafna Elyakim, a 15-year-old Nahal Oz resident who witnessed her parents’ murder, was hauled off to Gaza, and yet managed to care for her eight-year-old sister Ela until they were returned home. Or that of Ilan Fiorentino, who, like Rutberg 67 years earlier, served as Nahal Oz’s security chief and sacrificed his life defending the kibbutz.
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Along the way, Tibon demonstrates how Israel’s protective edge had cracked, in ways both large and small. “Our worst nightmare was playing out,” he recalls. “The network of fences, cameras, and other security apparatuses that we had always believed would protect us from the army of terror on the other side of the border had been breached.”
For nearly a decade, the Israeli government turned a blind eye to Hamas’s buildup and the hundreds of millions of dollars Qatar funneled to the group, relying on the flawed assumption that it was deterred.
And he notes how, a few years before Hamas’s invasion, the Ministry of Defense had ordered all Envelope residents to secure their rifles under lock and key in central armories out of fear that they might be stolen by Arab workers. The kibbutzim that ignored this directive ended up faring far better on October 7 than those who heeded it, unable as they were to access their weapons once the terrorists had swept in.
At times, Tibon’s ideological predilections—he does work for his country’s far-left newspaper, whose owner, Amos Schocken, recently referred to Palestinians as freedom fighters and called the Israeli action in Gaza a new nakba—become annoying, especially since they are unnecessary for the furtherance of his otherwise remarkable storytelling.
Dayan’s 1956 speech concluded with a bleak but inspiring statement. “This is the fate of our generation,” Dayan insisted. “This is our life’s choice: to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.” Gaza’s gates continue to weigh heavily, and only a smart, powerful, and resolute Israel can bear their burden.
Photo: AP Photo/Sam McNeil
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