In Sderot, a monument is being built on the ruins of the police station; in Be'eri, victims are being reinterred; on the site of the Nova rave, there's an avenue of portraits of the dead. We revisited the Gaza border communities that were attacked by Hamas - and are turning into a memorial

Shula Dahan passed away a month ago. A year ago, on October 9, we visited her home in Sderot. "Visited" isn't the right word: We invaded her home. A bulldozer was collecting bodies of terrorists on the lawn across from her house, a police officer extracted an Israeli ID card from the rubble that had been the police station, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, wearing his hallmark white shirt, had already arrived for a media-intense solidarity visit. The howl of a siren warning us to enter a safe space sent us scurrying – frightened, we hurtled into the first apartment we came across.

Shula Dahan was sitting on the sofa, terrified, her hands trembling. "She is now a cancer patient, and the horror that grips her is manifested in the incessant shaking of her hands. Pale and terrified, she sits on the sofa next to the safe room… and listens to her husband's descriptions," I wrote at the time . Mika, her dog, never stopped barking; in the stairwell, a young neighbor was seized by a panic attack and could not be calmed down. Meanwhile, Shula's husband, Elisha, began to tell us his story about Sderot – a city he hadn't abandoned since 1956 – and about the atrocities he had seen through the window of his home just two days earlier.

"I thought I was in a movie," he said, adding that he'd witnessed the blood-drenched battle over the police station and terrorists opening the doors of passing cars and shooting the passengers.

A year after the massacre, we've returned to the station that no longer exists. A memorial featuring stone columns is being erected in a new square, at the site: Time is short, the first anniversary is fast approaching, and foreign workers – who most likely have no idea what transpired here a year ago – are laboring day and night ahead of the ceremony that's being planned there. It's shaping up to be an impressive monument.

The western Negev communities near the Gaza Strip are preparing for the first anniversary. On Kibbutz Be'eri they're hurrying to bury the dozens of their dead who were initially interred in other places; funeral follows hard on the heels of funeral. Kibbutz Nir Oz is planning its memorial ceremony in the cemetery next to its botanical garden. The site of the Nova rave near Kibbutz Re'im also looks like a construction site. And here in Sderot the monument is being erected.

For months, buses full of soldiers and Israeli civilians have been driving through the area daily. It's now a compulsory trip. Soon the memorial sites will become Israel's collective Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Perhaps visiting foreign dignitaries will be taken here after or maybe even instead of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

A white tent is perched between the site of the Sderot police station memorial and the housing project the Dahans live in. A bearded man is arranging plastic chairs in the tent. I ask him what he's doing. I didn't recognize him. It's Elisha Dahan. He's preparing the ceremony he's planned to mark 30 days since Shula's death. Eleven months after we saw her in her living room, she died at home. The bullet holes are still visible in the walls. The aging Mika still barks when the doorbell rings, but Shula is gone. The goings-on in the last year aggravated her condition, Elisha says. "The war didn't do good things to her body."

Shortly after we left on October 9, the Dagans packed their bags and moved in with their daughter, in Gedera. The horror of October 7 had devastated the couple, and for the first time in their lives they self-evacuated, after having refused to leave in all the previous wars. Elisha first had to fix their car – it had been parked opposite the police station and was riddled with bullet holes – and then they drove north. They stayed there for about a month and a half.

Afterward the couple moved to a hotel of evacuees on the Dead Sea. Shula traveled once a week to Kaplan Hospital, in Rehovot, for treatment, until the trip became too much for her. They decided to stop the treatments and to return to their home opposite the police station in Sderot. Shula wanted to die at home, and she got her last wish on September 1. "This is the fate decreed for us," the widower says sorrowfully.

A crane of the Y.A. Gueta company is installing the pillars of the monument. From his window, Dahan sees a new landscape: not only the memorial site in place of the police station, but also two huge murals across the length of the adjacent buildings. The police station is depicted in flames, and above it are Torah scrolls that are also on fire and letters ascending from them into the heavens, all in bold colors: "Simhat Torah 5784," by Eliasaf Miara. On the building opposite, a gift of Bank Hapoalim, is a painting of a lion roaring, mouth agape, a lioness cuddling her cub, the figures of a mother and daughter casting their gaze at the horizon, a synagogue or possibly the Temple that shall be built speedily in our time, in the background.

"Do you have anything to do with this painting? City Hall came and did it without asking us," one resident says.

"Why didn't they ask us first? They could have informed us, at least, said something," complains another resident, who lives in the building adorned with the roaring lion.

Sderot seems to be back to its everyday routine. The supermarket that had been opened after October 7 for a brief time with soldiers in the role of employees, is now bustling ahead of the Rosh Hashanah holiday. The ruins have been rebuilt, the mobile shelters have been decorated, back to normal, at least on the face of it.

For months, buses full of soldiers and Israeli civilians have been driving through the area daily. It's now a compulsory trip. Soon the memorial sites will become Israel's collective Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Dahan: "Life has completely gone back to what it was and almost all the residents have returned. I don't know anyone who hasn't come back. But the situation can't go back to what it was. Life will never be what it was before. You keep coming back to the question: My God in heaven, how did they get this far? It's incomprehensible. It will stay with us for the rest of our lives. Even when there is quiet, there is noise. I was never afraid during any wars, but when it's close to your home, it's noise that never leaves you. The year went by just like that. In a whiz. It went by like wind. Really tough, but it passed."

Last week, at the Sderot Founders House, the people who live opposite the police station met with the tank crew that shelled the three-story building with over two dozen terrorists inside. "The crew thanked us and we thanked them," Dahan relates. A passerby asks us: "In Sderot everyone is a Bibi-ist. How is it you're not afraid to show up here?"

Yellow flags honoring the hostages in Gaza line Highway 232, the road of blood at the border of the Strip, which was used by murderous throngs of Hamasniks. The dozens of burned-out and exploded cars on the shoulders have been supplanted by countless private monuments erected by devastated family members. In some cases there's a sign and a candle, in others a costly, well-designed monument – all of them for young people from the Nova party who tried in vain to flee for their lives along this route from the horrors of the Nukhba. There is a particularly large number of small memorials like this at the Kibbutz Mifalsim bend in the road. Death was omnipresent here.

"Eden Guez, daughter of Aliza and Robert. Your smile is engraved in our heart. Your joie de vivre is our last testament for eternity." There's a Jewish National Fund picnic table and a beer tap, in memory of Eden.

"Stav Gueta, your last will and testament is joy in the heart."

An empty Arak bottle lies next to the shiny pebbled stairs that ascend to the memorial site for Liraz Asulin. She was an accountant at the Neto Group, which does financial planning, and served on the board of the Tamar regional water company. She was 38.

"Kibbutz Nahal Oz. 15 killed. 7 abductees. A commission of inquiry now will avert the next catastrophe," says a protest sign put up by a group called The Families of October 7."

"The Nahal Oz [army] outpost. Here our sons and daughters fell and were abducted. A state commission of inquiry now!"

A battered and bleeding land, thunderstruck and torched, destroyed but still raging, commemorating its sacrifices and protesting. Highway 232 continues south to Kibbutz Kerem Shalom and the Rafah border crossing. Here every road sign reminds us of how we once traveled by bus from Tel Aviv to Cairo, via that crossing. Every memory here is also testimony to the volatile character of this land. From festival to disaster, from disaster to festival.

Every road sign reminds us of how we once traveled by bus from Tel Aviv to Cairo, via Rafah. Every memory is testimony to the volatile character of this land. From festival to disaster, from disaster to festival.

The Gaza Strip, or at least its heavy and oppressive specter, accompanies you as you drive southward. Every so often one spies ruins in the Strip peeping out between the trees, or on the horizon beyond the peanut fields. From a distance, no signs of life are visible in Gaza. It is a dead land. The sights evoke memories – memories of someone who visited Gaza regularly for years and loved it and its inhabitants. The unending sorrow of every visit to the western Negev is also accompanied by sadness and longing for the Strip, which will never again be what it was before this accursed war. The entrance into it at the Erez crossing, with a terminal that wouldn't shame any international border, is deserted and dusty. Where taxis once waited for the handful of Palestinian patients and merchants who were allowed to leave their overcrowded cage for Israel, and lots of vehicles and laborers, doctors and journalists jostled with each other – there are now only tanks and armored personnel carriers. The crossing is closed, perhaps forever.

While Sderot is now erecting its monument, at the Re'im park it was virtually built by itself almost from day one following the disaster. When we got there, two days later, wrecked cars were strewn along the roadside with personal possessions spilling out: tents, picnic equipment and children's games in a place that had been buzzing with life before being turned in an instant into a killing field. A Toyota pickup with Gaza plates stood in the wadi that emerges from the park, when we visited last year. At the entrance to the adjacent Kibbutz Re'im, two Toyotas were parked next to each other, packages of dates and bottles of water from Gaza were in the back; rolled-up prayer rugs, like the yoga mats we saw at the Nova festival, were in the passenger cabin. The machine guns in the front had already been removed.

Now the Nova site is the central memorial locus, even though it's still improvised and temporary. Maybe that's its strength. An avenue of portraits of the 364 people killed there, with thousands of visitors every day. There isn't a soldier who hasn't been brought here. When we visited last week, too, the site was teeming. Where the bar stood during the party, where I saw bottles of alcohol still on the counters last time, a tent now stands in which a Torah scroll is being written "for the ascent of the soul of those murdered at Nova, from the people of Israel." It's difficult to think of a greater contrast then that between the cans of Red Bull I saw at the bar, and the bearded men who are now scurrying about in the air-conditioned "Torah tent" that has been erected on the carnage.

Another group is busy creating the Re'im Flag – a huge installation in memory of those who were murdered. Arab workers are paving an access road leading to the place, lending it the air of a Tel Aviv construction site. "You are in the Nova compound. Please be aware that this area is under rocket threat," warns a poster, a reminder that the war has achieved nothing to date. A group of soldiers, men and women, kneel next to one of the pictures of the murdered, lighting memorial candles, their eyes tearing up.

But you will see no tears in the eyes of Avi Klingbail, who's waiting for us on Kibbutz Nir Oz. At 80, he's youthful and vigorous, dividing his time over the past year between his ravaged kibbutz and his temporary dwellings – first in an Eilat hotel and now in an apartment in Carmei Gat, a neighborhood in the Negev city of Kiryat Gat. When we visited here last year, he was showing a group of engineers around the wreckage. He had refused to leave the kibbutz and remained there almost alone. The murderous invaders from Gaza stole his old wheelbarrow and bicycle. He and his wife, Haya, were trapped in their safe room for 10 hours on a kibbutz that no soldier or police officer reached for half a day of blood-chilling terror. Imagine it.

Nir Oz lies in ruins. A year has passed and nothing has been removed, not one house has been rebuilt. Other than plywood covering the windows to prevent looting, nothing has changed. The Tekuma Authority, the government agency responsible for rebuilding the Gaza-border communities, has decided that 71 homes will be completely demolished and rebuilt; the kibbutzniks think that 100 need to be razed. In the meantime, planning is underway for the new kibbutz that will arise here in place of the one that was hit hardest of all, relative to its size, and was abandoned to its fate more than all the other kibbutzim in the area.

Haya suggests that we go to see the squills, heralds of autumn, that are in bloom on the way to the cemetery. She also recommends stopping at the cactus garden tended by Oded Lifshitz, 84, who is among those being held hostage in the Strip. "We don't want to be forgotten," Avi says as we walk along the paths. Next to the Lifshitz home, which was torched, is a house of death slated for demolition soon. In this neighborhood more people were taken captive than murdered.

What will become of this kibbutz is still unclear. Meanwhile, life in Carmei Gat bodes well. Veteran member Klingbail bemoans the fact that his kibbutz was conservative in its approach over the years, the second-to-last kibbutz to drop the system of children's houses, which led to a situation in which most of its membership was quite old. "Because of that policy, we lost a few years in which we could have gotten young, new members," he says. "We are an old kibbutz, average age about 70." If they had been less stringent about their ascetic, rigid way of communal life, young people would have come. "The kind of kibbutz we were in the past will never exist again," he adds. "We'll have to knock down the walls, we'll be more of a cooperative community."

"For every house that's standing on Nir Oz, two were destroyed," Klingbail tells us. He estimates that about 20 percent of his former neighbors won't return. He himself clings to the place and has even tried to organize a system whereby each member spends one night a week on the kibbutz – in a display of what the Palestinians call sumud, steadfastness. But this kibbutz-style sumud has failed.

"The center of our life isn't here now. There are also members who were hit brutally and aren't capable of coming back," he says. His vision: Two and a half years from now, there will be a more beautiful kibbutz here than before. We ask if his political views have changed.

"Sivan [his daughter, editor of Haaretz's business paper TheMarker] brought me people on a tour from Eli [a West Bank settlement], the source of all the evil. They asked me if my viewpoint had changed. Why should it change? I am not driven by [a desire for] revenge. America dropped an atom bomb on Japan and two months later started to rehabilitate Japan. They didn't want to oppress the Japanese. They wanted to cooperate with them. My approach hasn't changed. I would organize a global fund and rehabilitate Gaza."

I was asked if my viewpoint had changed [after October 7]. Why should it change? I am not driven by [a desire for] revenge. America dropped an atom bomb on Japan and two months later started to rehabilitate Japan ... I would organize a global fund and rehabilitate Gaza.

Avi Klingbail

We try to get a glimpse of Gaza and climb onto the roof of a burned-out hulk of a house, the one closest to the border, and spy the wreckage of homes in Khirbat Ikhza'a across the way. The house under us was built for a kibbutznik with special needs. Only the safe room in this structure, whose patio faces west, still stands. "On this patio Amitay would sit to watch the sunset," a memorial plaque states. This was the home of Amitay Ben Zvi and his caregiver, Jimmy Pacheco. First the terrorists began to destroy the building, then they murdered Amitay in his wheelchair, snatched Jimmy and burned the structure down. Jimmy returned from captivity after 49 days.

What did Amitay think when he sat here and watched the sun set beyond Khirbat Ikhza'a? We will never know. In the peanut fields of Nir Oz, Thai workers who have returned are gathering the harvest. A small vineyard can be seen across from Amitay's torched house. In the sculptures and cactus garden tended by Oded and Yocheved Lifshitz – she too was abducted but was released in November – there's a road sign that was brought here from a different place, directing people to the former Katif bloc of settlements in the Strip. Dozens of the dead are now at rest in the small cemetery. Whole families, parents and children, freshly dug graves.

In neighboring Kibbutz Be'eri, there's a funeral now almost every day. Most of the 102 people who were murdered there were initially buried far away. Ahead of their first yahrzeit they are now being laid to eternal rest, one after another. About 200 of the 1,000 residents have returned, the rest are moving into a new neighborhood built for Be'eri refugees on Kibbutz Hatzerim where they will be housed for a few years, outside Be'er Sheva. Seventy families have already moved there. Be'eri has a spokesperson and every visit has to be coordinated with her and includes a guide from the kibbutz. There's also a form to be filled out in advance. Our guide is Lior Alon, who spent no fewer than 16 hours in the safe room of his torched house on October 7, together with his wife, two of their daughters and one of their boyfriends. A sojourn in hell whose traces are clearly etched on him.

"I used to be a quiet person," says Alon, who's in charge of sports activities on the kibbutz, recounting the horrors of that day in an almost unstoppable stream of words. Over the past year he has guided hundreds of groups, thousands of people, and the job is like a balm to him: to tell and retell the torment of that day. He also forced himself to spend one night in the safe room of his gutted house, as a corrective experience. It helped him, he says.

In Be'eri almost every house is a disaster area. Alon recounts the calamities in harrowing detail. The rubble has been cleared from only two or three multi-story buildings and from the kibbutz's decimated art gallery. All the rest remains dust and ashes. The last time we were here, a pickup truck from Gaza was still parked not far away and soldiers slept in the dining room.

A copy of Haaretz from October 6, 2023, lay on the kitchen table in one of the homes we visited last year, opened to political commentator Yossi Verter's weekly column, as though waiting for someone to come back and finish reading it. It's very unlikely that the person who read it is among the living today.

"On Saturday morning, maybe he only got up from the table for an instant," I wrote about the possible reader, at the time, "leaving behind the column and the coffee – but apparently he will never return." A trail of blood led from the safe room to the garden then, where terrorists apparently dragged someone dead or wounded. The corpse of a dog with lovely, light-colored fur lay in the garden; another canine corpse lay a few meters away. Sights I will never forget.

One day I got a call from Merav Svirsky, an impressive woman, who told me that the house I had described a year ago with the newspaper was that of her parents. Rafi Svirsky was a year ahead of me at the Ironi Aleph High School in Tel Aviv. I didn't know him. He was murdered in this house. Now Alon leads me inside. A cat that was sprawled on a scorched chair in the garden skitters away as we approach.