Israel falls silent as communities mourn victims from Hamas attacks on one month anniversary

Video report by ITV News Senior International Correspondent John Irvine; and words by Foreign Affairs Producer Natalie Wright

It’s strange to commemorate a one month anniversary when the horrors are still ongoing all around and when so much is left unresolved. But commemorate they did, in Israel today.

Of the 1,400 people killed here one month ago, 50 came from the town of Ofakim. It was the furthest from Gaza that the terrorists got to on their morning rampage.

Ha-Tamar Street is an unremarkable row of family homes on the edge of town, but on the morning of October 7 it became the scene of Ofakim’s massacre.

Outside number 14 on Tuesday we met a lady called Hen. She told us of the atrocities they endured that day.

At home with her three young boys, husband and mother she hid in a bedroom all day long, somehow managing to keep her little ones silent as the terrorists rampaged outside.

Hen’s next door neighbours at number 16 had managed to climb out of a top window onto the roof, but as the father of the family, Ariel, followed his wife, mother and children to what he had hoped would be safety, he was shot dead.

By this stage Ha-Tamar Street had already turned into a grim scene with bodies of Hen’s neighbours, many of them elderly, lying in the road.

She went on to tell us her account of watching the house on the other side of the street endure a 22 hour siege.

A couple in their 60s, Rachel and David, had been held hostage in their own home by five gunmen from before dawn.

After a day of secret communication with her police officer son, Rachel and her husband were rescued by a dramatic SWAT team raid in the early hours of October 8.

Thanks to chance and circumstance Hen and her family survived, but her fellow Ofakim residents who did not were remembered in a vigil.

As the winter sun was setting, people came together to sing and to mourn. Intimate ceremonies like this are being played out in many communities across southern Israel.

And of course while Tuesday is Israel’s one month marker of mourning, just a few miles away on the other side of the fence, there are so many families beginning their own journey of grief.

There will be countless anniversaries in this war as the days turn into weeks and the battles continue. 

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