GAZA ENVELOPE, ISRAEL — The rockets arrived early on Oct. 7. Danny Garcovich had lived along Israel’s border with Gaza for more than three decades, so the barrage wasn’t unsettling at first. “We’ve been used to it for years,” says Garcovich, a resident of Kibbutz Kissufim. “The moment we hear the alarm for a rocket or a mortar, we go into the safe room for 10 minutes — then we come out.”
But that morning was different, says Garcovich, who is 69. The missiles just wouldn’t stop.
“It wasn’t 10 minutes, it wasn’t half an hour, it wasn’t an hour, it wasn’t two hours, it wasn’t three hours,” he tells me. “Intense rocket and mortar fire from Gaza toward us.”
Garcovich’s daughter, Dafna, 43, lived just a few hundred feet away. When the onslaught began at 6:30 a.m., she and her husband, Ivan Illaramendi, had retreated to their mamad — a reinforced safe room mandated in homes built after the Gulf War. At 7 a.m., Dafna wrote to her father on WhatsApp.
“We hear voices speaking Arabic,” she wrote to Garcovich, who had moved with Dafna’s mother into their own safe room. “Is security coming?”
Garcovich commands a fire-rescue unit covering the Gaza envelope and was in good touch with kitat konenut, the kibbutz security team that would typically respond to an incursion until the army arrived. But when he called that morning, there was no answer. He got on a walkie-talkie to update his team. Their response startled him: It wasn’t only Kissufim, they said. The whole area, it seemed, was under attack.
“I understood then that I was living in an entirely different movie than I thought,” Garcovich says.
More than 5,000 rockets were launched at Israel that day, as cover for some 6,000 Gazans who breached the border with Israel in more than 100 locations. Nearly 4,000 of those who crossed into Israel were members of Hamas’ Nukhba special forces; the rest were a motley mix of marauding civilians and terrorists carrying the flag for other organizations. Together, they tore through — and hang-glided over — the border fence and launched a pogrom throughout the south, the likes of which Israel, no stranger to terrorist attacks, had never seen. The army, caught entirely off guard, was slow to find its footing. For much of the day, residents like Danny and Dafna Garcovich were chiefly left to fend for themselves.
Dafna sent her father another WhatsApp message. “They’re getting closer to the house,” she wrote. “They’re coming.”
Garcovich, meanwhile, was fielding questions from the men he commanded. He told them to get into their safe rooms, put damp rags under their doors and protect their families. They were trained to rescue people from burning cars and homes collapsed in earthquakes. “We were not built to fight terrorists,” he says. One of his men did not receive the order, or disregarded it. He headed outside and was shot dead.
At 10 a.m., Dafna wrote again. “They’ve entered the house.”
Safe rooms are designed to protect people from missiles, shrapnel, chemicals, not armed invaders. The doors to these rooms cannot be locked from the inside because that could prevent rescuers from getting in. Garcovich told his daughter to do whatever she could to keep the door shut.
“I hear voices,” she wrote. “They are breaking everything in the house.”
Garcovich had fitted the exterior of his home with a series of cameras and from his safe room could watch footage in real time. Armed gunmen were now approaching his house, both in front and in back. They came closer and closer and then, for reasons Garcovich can’t explain, passed by without stopping.
Dafna texted again.
10:30: “They’re getting closer to the safe room,” she wrote.
10:45: “Save us! Save us!”
Noon: “They’re trying to get into the safe room. They’re trying to open the door. Save us. Save us. Save us. Save us.”
“And then,” Garcovich recalls, “complete silence.”
AS THE SUN SET ON THAT BLACK SHABBAT, more than 1,200 people lay dead, and 251 had been kidnapped. Women were raped. Mothers and fathers were killed before their children’s eyes. Dead bodies were strapped to motorbikes and hauled off into Gaza. Israelis were shot in their homes. Hamas infiltrators doused houses with accelerants and set them on fire. Some who survived the initial gunfire darted out from choking smoke and flames. They were mowed down as they ran.
And then there were those who had simply disappeared — 300 souls who seemed to have vanished without a trace. Among them were Dafna and her husband. When the army finally began evacuating kibbutzniks, Garcovich says, “My daughter didn’t arrive at the rescue vehicle. And still the next day I didn’t see her name on any of the lists. In the beginning they thought that the terrorists had taken them hostage. Because they didn’t find bodies.”
Over the next two weeks, Israeli security forces worked to understand what had happened to the missing. The final phone calls and text messages of the missing were analyzed. Videos of Israelis being kidnapped and killed surfaced online, many of them posted by Hamas. Graphic as they were, the videos helped authorities begin to assemble the pieces.
In the past, the army searched for missing soldiers, while police looked for civilians. But now, with hundreds of civilians missing in what had become a military zone, the army inaugurated a new search unit to meet the circumstances.
And as they did, one thing was becoming troublingly clear: Some of the missing hadn’t been found because there was nearly nothing left of them to find.
“People were murdered and then their houses were torched,” says Assaf Peretz, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). “The houses continued burning until the fire basically decimated everything and had no more fuel and extinguished itself.”
“This is what gets you into cremation level,” says Peretz, who once excavated a Roman-age cremation site. “When the human body is exposed to a temperature above [1,472 degrees Fahrenheit] for a long period of time … remains are reduced more and more, until at some point you’ll get to an ash, and nothing will remain.”
There were a few archaeologists among the reservists serving in the search unit, and they quickly realized that if Israel hoped to locate the missing — and Israel has historically gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure its dead a proper burial — they would need to marshal skills intrinsic to archaeology: the ability to identify human remains that have been so badly damaged by fire and fighting that, to the untrained eye, it appears as if there is nothing left.
The archaeologists passed their observation up the chain of command. In normal times, the Antiquities Authority regulates archaeological excavation and preservation in Israel. The Dead Sea Scrolls are housed in its Jerusalem headquarters, as is a special unit dedicated to fighting antiquities crime. The military asked this group of archaeologists — more Louis Leakey types than Indiana Jones — to head to the border with Gaza and, with missiles still flying and terrorist ambush a continuing threat, put to work their skills in excavating 3,000-year-old remains to locate missing Israelis who had been alive just weeks earlier.
“They said, ‘Please send archaeologists — it’s like a prehistoric excavation,’” says Ayelet Dayan, who heads the IAA’s research department. “I was shocked, like, ‘Are you serious?’”
On Oct. 22, IAA Director-General Eli Escusido tapped Dayan to recruit and oversee the new team. Volunteers were called up for reserve duty and Col. Yossi Cohen managed the complex mission’s coordination with the army.Early the following morning, 12 IAA archaeologists gathered in a parking lot just outside the closed military zone near the Gaza border, kitted up with helmets and bulletproof vests and, under army escort, made their way to Kibbutz Kfar Aza — one of the worst-hit communities on Oct. 7. By the time they started, 110 people were still unaccounted for. The team was shown three totaled homes and told to look for their missing residents. Dayan dispatched two or three archaeologists to each building.
She and her team divided the house into different sections that archaeologists call “loci.” They cleared out large items, like furniture and iron rebar, then picked up the collapsed ceiling from the floor, piece by piece. Once that was clear, they pulled out their trowels and began combing through the debris on the surface, looking for flecks of bone, teeth or personal items — like glasses, jewelry or dental implants — that might offer clues.
Archaeologists in Israel have often excavated sites decimated in ancient wars and are schooled in identifying where people might have sought shelter. In the kibbutzim, that meant safe rooms and areas where they could tell there had been a closet to hide in, a door to crouch behind, a bed to scramble under.
Once they finished with the debris, the IAA team began collecting ash covering the floor, passing buckets of it out the window to the archaeologists and soldiers working at sifting stations outside.
There, the ash was poured onto screens and shaken back and forth. It passed through, like flour through a sifter, leaving behind tiny bits of bone and teeth and, occasionally, other genetic material. This was collected in a bag and passed off to the military rabbinate, which transported it to a laboratory for DNA testing.
In many ways, the work was similar to what they’d all been doing for years.
“The application of the methods is basically the same,” says Joe Uziel, who has excavated extensively in Jerusalem and now oversees the IAA’s Dead Sea Scrolls unit. “We’re digging through the rubble left behind by a very, very, very violent destruction and trying to put together pieces from within that destruction in order to identify the presence, or the absence, of a specific individual in a specific case.”
It wasn’t the first time a nation had called on its archaeologists in the aftermath of a crime. But in terms of scope and character, the IAA says its mission is without parallel. They were working under fire. With armed guards. They had been instructed to work fast given the situation’s instability. There was blood everywhere. Flesh. The stench was at once unbearable and valuable — they used their sense of smell to locate remains.
I felt that the entirety of my 30 years in this profession were only for this moment. Only for this event. I truly felt this. Moshe Ajami, archaeologist
“We had to turn off our emotions,” says Moshe Ajami, a Biblical archaeologist and deputy director of the IAA. “You cannot think about it, you cannot think about it. Because if you start to think about it — listen. You go into a house and you see magnets on the refrigerator. You see a picture of a girl. You go into the kid’s room and you see a white board, and on it you see written, Mommy and Daddy love you. And then you look on the floor and there’s a puddle of blood in the shape of a girl. It’s a punch to the face. If you don’t disconnect, you could go crazy.”
Ultimately, the IAA would offer members of its team counseling services to work through what they’d seen. But everything was still new that first day. The work was challenging. Two houses turned up nothing. The team would later learn that the people they were looking for in those homes on Kfar Aza had been kidnapped. One died in Gaza. But in the third house, the team found remains from one of the missing. What had been an interesting idea — enlisting archaeologists to track down the missing — suddenly became a modus operandi.
“They saw that it works,” Ajami says. So the team started moving — from house to house, kibbutz to kibbutz, missing person to missing person.
DANNY AND CECILIA GARCOVICH made aliyah in 1984 when Dafna was a toddler. Chilean by origin, they had been living in Argentina for several years when they decided to live out their dream of moving to the Jewish state.
“We were very active in the Jewish community in Buenos Aires,” Garcovich says. “Dafna was in the Jewish school there. I encouraged my friends to make aliyah. In the end I found that I was the last one. I had to turn out the lights.”
The young family landed first in Beersheva and a short while later moved to Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak near Gaza. A decade later they moved to Kissufim. During Dafna’s mandatory military service, she was stationed for a time in Gaza and managed to get home frequently. “We were lucky,” Garcovich says.
After the army, Dafna found a job working with her father in the multimedia department at Ben-Gurion University. “She was responsible for the biggest auditorium here,” Garcovich says. “It was like a hall at the U.N.!”
In 2000, Dafna decided, like many post-army Israelis, that it was time to see the world. Over the next four years, she traveled extensively — to India, Japan, the United States. Eventually she ended up in Bilbao, Spain, where she worked selling Dead Sea beauty products from a cart. One evening, friends introduced her to a quiet young Spaniard named Ivan. A Basque Jew, Ivan worked at a mobile phone company, but his true love was food — he had studied to be a chef and previously worked in a series of restaurants.
“One day Dafna called and told her mother, ‘I think I found my other half of the orange,’” Garcovich recalls. “‘I’m thinking about getting married. What do you think?’”
Dafna sent photos of Ivan and of the home he grew up in. She told her parents about his family. He seemed like a good match for their daughter. “I said, ‘If this is what you really want, if this will make you happy, we support you,’” Garcovich says.
Having secured the parental blessing, the couple soon married, returning to Kissufim to join Dafna’s parents. Dafna worked in construction while Ivan, an animal lover (the couple had three cats, Marcus, Zeus and Tintin), took a job in the dairy working with cows. He studied Hebrew, settled into his new life — and eventually convinced the kitchen staff at nearby Kibbutz Be’eri to let him work in the dining hall. It was there that he really found his stride — creating the menu, cooking the food and circulating among the kibbutzniks like a celebrity chef, informing them about what they were eating and how it was prepared.
The couple saved up enough money to buy cars and a house on Kissufim — and to pay the deposit to become members of the kibbutz.
On the evening of Oct. 5, Dafna and Ivan joined Danny, Cecilia and other neighbors for a party in the kibbutz sukkah. Ivan, in trucker cap and long shorts, sipped a Goldstar beer while a fiddler performed on a makeshift stage. Dafna, in a black blouse and glasses, snapped photos on her phone. Someone recording the event passed by, and the couple smiled obligingly and waved to the camera.
“They thought, ‘Now we have everything in order, it’s all ready,’” Garcovich says. “‘We can now start to think about expanding our family.’ That was the next stage. They wanted to have kids this year.”
A WEEK AFTER ARRIVING IN THE SOUTH, the IAA’s work had expanded to a number of the kibbutzim that had been attacked. Eventually they excavated hundreds of cars — many scattered along Route 232, which came to be known as the “road of death” — and open fields where Israelis fleeing the onslaught were killed.
The team grew to more than 30 archaeologists, but that number wasn’t sufficient for the work, so they partnered with the army, teaching young soldiers how to sift rubble in search of human remains. Some of the archaeologists who have excavated sites that are 2,000, 3,000 or even 10,000 years old say the Oct. 7 remains were in worse shape.
By the time the IAA arrived at a location where evidence suggested someone went missing, the military had already been there. A canine search unit might have been through. Zaka, whose personnel retrieve bodies and body parts, had done its gruesome work. “They collect everything that’s possible,” says archaeologist Yoav Arbel. “Our job is to find those that they can’t find. We are the last stop.”
In archaeology, context is everything. Where something is found can explain as much about it as the thing itself. If excavators dig up a coin from the Second Temple period in the same destruction layer as the remains of a house, they can safely assume the house was occupied in the same era that the coin was in circulation. This was true of the IAA’s work near Gaza as well. Sometimes remains are so small or so badly damaged that DNA extraction proves impossible. But if archaeologists find a pair of glasses, a bracelet or a cellphone mixed up among ashes with a bone fragment, this information can help confirm the person’s identity.
On Oct. 29, Ajami, Dayan and several other members of the team were called to Dafna and Ivan’s house on Kissufim. When they arrived, the safe room door was so badly damaged they couldn’t open it. They had to climb in through the window. The ceiling had collapsed, not unlike ancient homes destroyed in the Roman sack of Jerusalem.
“In 70 CE, you see a violent destruction,” says Uziel, who excavated the eastern slopes of Jerusalem. “Everything is basically destroyed and covered over with massive destruction debris, layers of burnt materials, buildings that collapse.”
And just as they did with those 2,000-year-old homes, the archaeologists got to work separating the collapsed ceiling from the “destruction layer” beneath it. Dayan didn’t know it was Dafna and Ivan’s house. Like a number of the IAA archaeologists on the team, Dayan preferred not to know who she was looking for. For some it was just too painful and made separating the work and their emotions impossible. For her part, Dayan preferred to approach the work as a tabula rasa, worried that any prior information might color the way she searches. “If I hear the witness and see pictures or videos, then I will not see the whole scene,” she says. “I can miss something.”
Almost immediately, someone — no one I spoke to remembers who — announced that they had found a tooth.
“It was very exciting,” Dayan says. “Because you can get DNA from a tooth.”
Gradually they discovered more remains and personal items linking them to Dafna and Ivan. The remains were collected in a bag and delivered to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv, which confirmed what Garcovich says he already knew: They had found Dafna and Ivan.
“In the end, I’m happy that they weren’t captured,” Garcovich tells me. “A little consolation. If they had kidnapped them, the uncertainty of not knowing what happened seems unbearable. And we know that they fell very fast. They didn’t abuse them. They held the door of the safe room and the terrorists shot them with so much fire — you can see the spray on the wall in the safe room. And all that fire went through their bodies. And they fell there.”
Without the IAA, Garcovich may not have learned their fate. “The work they did is holy work,” he tells me. “They could see things that regular people can’t see.”
MOSHE AJAMI, WHOSE WORK focuses on the First Temple period, has a clean-shaven head and a spit-clean office in Jerusalem. He has a military bearing but is quick to smile. Ajami was still working at Dafna and Ivan’s house when he received a call from the IDF summoning him to the site of the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im. Days earlier, he’d attended the funeral for the daughter of a family friend who had died there.
On Oct. 7, Hamas attacked the trance party marking Simchat Torah, attended largely by young people who camped in tents and danced throughout the night. Nearly 370 of them were murdered and about 40 taken hostage. When Hamas unleashed its rampage at Re’im, about 20 partygoers, among them the daughter of Ajami’s friend, took shelter inside an ambulance parked in a stand of eucalyptus trees. Most died, though it is impossible to say exactly how. One thing, however, is certain: The killers didn’t want anyone to find out. They torched the ambulance.
Now the army was getting ready to clear the site, but a number of people were still missing. “So I gathered my staff and we went to the site of the ambulance,” Ajami tells me.
In the intervening months, the festival site has been turned into a memorial. Families and friends of those killed and kidnapped at the Nova festival, including Bay Area-born Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin, have put up memorials to their loved ones with photos, flowers, scarves touting their favorite soccer teams. But when Ajami arrived late in October, the scene, he says, looked much as it had on the day of the attack.
“The tents that the partygoers used, the ambulance, all the Coke refrigerators, blood,” Ajami recalls. “They hadn’t cleaned yet — at all. When I got there, it was a shock. I looked around. I’d seen videos on TV and TikTok … horrors. But you know that you have a mission and you have to complete it.”
“The ambulance was lying on its side,” he says. “I said, ‘In such a chaotic situation, what would a person do? They could go underneath the vehicle.’ So I started searching. There is a slight difference between dirt and human remains. It took me about a minute to see that there were remains of five bodies there that no one who’d looked before could see. Pieces of bone, primarily teeth, and jewelry that we could connect to a missing person. I have worked in the Antiquities Authority for 30 years. I have excavated many archaeological sites and many, many graves. You just develop an eye. We don’t have special technological tools for it. It’s experience.”
When he found the remains under the ambulance, “I felt that the entirety of my 30 years in this profession were only for this moment. Only for this event. I truly felt this. Everything I had done was pointing here — where I can solve this dilemma for people about what happened to their child,” he says.
“We saw things that a person shouldn’t see, particularly at the beginning. The blood. The smells. Body parts. Flesh. Horror. We didn’t stop for a moment. From the morning until dark, we didn’t stop.”
Next he went inside the ambulance itself. There, among other items left behind by those who had died there, he found a burnt watch.
“I said, ‘Put that in a box and save it,’” Ajami says. He handed it over to the military authorities before heading home that evening. Several weeks later he returned to the Nova site where his friend’s family was putting up a memorial to their daughter. Her mother approached Ajami and held out her hand.
“She said, ‘Look what they found,’” Ajami says. “And she opened her hand — and there was the watch.”
The watch he had found belonged to her daughter.
EARLY IN SEPTEMBER, I LAND in Israel and drive south to the Gaza envelope. As I approach Kibbutz Be’eri, Oren Shmueli, a member of the IAA team, briefs me on what to do if I hear a siren: drop to the ground, make myself as flat as possible and cover my head. I must have looked skeptical, because the next thing he said was, “It’s actually quite effective.”
Shmueli has excavated extensively in the south and has made many friends in the area. At one point during the war, he, his daughter and his son were called up to the army reserves at the same time. Now we pass a parking lot outside the kibbutz gate where several dozen IDF soldiers pile onto trucks headed into Gaza. A guard waves us through the yellow gate and into the kibbutz. The first thing I notice is its beauty. The roads are well kept and lined by mature trees, green and healthy despite the extraordinary heat of this early fall.
By the time I arrive in Israel, only one person remains missing, and the IAA’s work in the south is largely complete. But pulling through Be’eri’s gate — a gate Hamas broke through on Oct. 7 — we return to the beginning. We park and head on foot toward one of the 150 houses here that were destroyed. That’s when I notice just how quiet it is. Before visiting, I’d read the field notes that archaeologist Yoav Arbel had compiled about his experience. He said the quiet here “is not a gentle, rural silence that merges with the twits and flutter of birds and patiently absorbs the sounds of a barking dog, a humming trolley, a tractor shuffling by; nor is it the severe quiet of libraries or the hollow, final stillness of cemeteries. This place was hit by a storm, and the aftermath silence was heavy, battered, and stunned.”
Battered and stunned is a good way to describe the homes that now come into view. Ceilings caved in on rubble-strewn floors. Gaping holes blown into walls. Hellish halos of bullet-pocked doors. Exposed, charred frames, twisted wires and steel protruding irregularly. Tiles and iron rebar littering what once were kitchens, mixed in with the remains of plates and cups and other decimated kitchenware. Scorched doors lying flame-curled on battered floors — floors on which, I now realize, someone had likely died.
In other homes, refrigerators are still full of food: yogurt, wine, a storage container labeled “For Cooking.” Arabic graffiti, spray-painted in green on white facades. Shabbat candlesticks, bowed by extreme heat. In front of many homes, signs straddle verandas: “X & Y were cruelly murdered in this house.” “Z was kidnapped from this house and held captive in Gaza.” (The IAA has asked that, out of respect to their families, I do not use most victims’ names.) During the invasion, 101 Be’eri residents were murdered. Thirty were taken hostage. Together, that’s 10 percent of the kibbutz population. Gone.
In front of one house, mounds of debris huddle against a wall, detritus cleared out during the IAA search. Pointing to the window, Shmueli says, “This is the safe room.”
“People hid in their safe rooms, and what did the terrorists do?” he says. “You see that attached to the safe room was a pergola — a roof over the porch. Like this.” He points out a pergola in a neighboring house that survived the onslaught.
“The terrorists set the pergola on fire and then, because of the intense heat, either the people ran out, or they died inside. So, our working method was that we would approach a house and first of all clean the outside, to make sure there were no remains outside. Then in the second stage, we worked inside the house.”
Shmueli steps up onto a small landing and heads into the house. As I follow behind, I notice a half-burned spiral notebook lying by the door. I crouch to see what it is: a bat-mitzvah preparation book.
Shmueli heads into a small room. “This is the safe room?” I ask.
“Yes. You can see they had an exercise machine there.”
The skeleton of a treadmill sits at the small room’s center.
“If you found remains, they were on the floor,” he says. “And the issue was to first remove the upper layers. Here in the security room there wasn’t a lot [to remove] because the ceiling didn’t collapse. In older houses they collapsed more frequently. … The material that was here you have to take it outside. And you see the small piles over there? Those are the piles from the sifting stations.”
He leaves the safe room and heads to what once was the back wall. Nothing remained but an open vista looking out on the neighbor’s toppled home.
“And all this destruction was from the fire?” I asked.
“From the fire, grenades, gunfire. Yeah. House after house. Like this.”
“And did you find human remains in this house?”
“Yes.”
We head up a set of steps that don’t feel at all secure and land on the second floor, which is now the roof. That’s because the actual roof is entirely gone. Shmueli points out the commanding view Hamas held from positions like this one. The kibbutz is flat. From the second floor the view is largely unobstructed. As he’s talking, a coyote appears out of nowhere, spots us and scampers, startled, across the floor and onto a nearby roof.
Shmueli looks around and sighs, as he will many times throughout the day. “The amount of destruction,” he says, shaking his head. “I didn’t think this would be so hard.”
We spend two more hours walking house to house — each one holding a unique horror story. Before we head home, Shmueli takes me to Kibbutz Urim, where his wife grew up and his mother-in-law still lives. Ilana Ben Dov is warm and gregarious and plies us all with cake. Shmueli’s daughter is there with her boyfriend. Urim is located near a military intelligence base that was attacked on Oct. 7. The kibbutz was untouched. That, Shmueli tells me, was “really a miracle.” A former teacher who has taken up painting, Ben Dov tells me that she was up all night on Oct. 6 working on a canvas. She stopped early the next morning when she heard the cacophony of sirens and rockets.
She couldn’t bring herself to finish the painting for months. Now, she says, it’s part of an exhibition of her work hanging in a rec room not far from the kibbutz dining hall. Ben Dov leads us there now. Under fluorescent lights is a regal painting of her granddaughter’s dog. The one she began Oct. 6 hangs here, too — a tranquil beach at sunset. And there’s another piece, red and yellow and black. Two small homes, engulfed in flames. Smoke darkening the sky above them. Beneath the image, a quote from the Book of Joel: “Blood and fire and pillars of smoke.” The line is best known from the Passover haggadah, where it is intoned just after the Ten Plagues. It could have been a headline on the morning of Oct. 8.
It’s late in the day, and Shmueli is tired — more emotionally, it seems to me, than physically. Ben Dov’s kibbutz is not on the route home, and I wonder why he’s suggested we come. I consider the question as I return to my hotel in Jerusalem that evening. I think he wanted to show me the “before” image — to ensure that I understood exactly what was lost on Oct. 7. I’d seen what a kibbutz in the Gaza envelope looked like after the rampage. Stopping at Urim allowed me to see what it might have been like full of people, full of art, full of life. Ben Dov showed me the area in her yard where she hosts a sukkah party each year and delivers a lecture on some aspect of Jewish culture or history. In a barn not far from her house, the kibbutz cows eat from a trough. Soldiers on leave swim in the kibbutz pool.
Urim was lucky. Making my way through its picturesque streets makes it achingly clear what had been lost elsewhere.
Earlier in the day we’d stopped for coffee at a gas station, and I presented Shmueli with a question I’d asked each member of the IAA team I spoke with: Why did you volunteer for this work? They’d seen terrible things. There were no truly good outcomes — success, after all, meant confirming that someone had been murdered.
Each person gave me a version of the same answer: After Oct. 7, everyone in Israel was looking for a way to contribute. Professors headed south to pick avocados on farms that had lost their laborers. Well-known actors sent phone messages to displaced children, speaking in the voices of their favorite cartoon characters. And these archaeologists had jumped at the chance to put their special skill-set to work. What they accomplished — searching more than 200 houses and 400 cars, uncovering the remains of human beings who otherwise would have been lost to eternity — not only allowed closure for families and some kind of burial for the dead, it robbed Hamas of a potentially potent weapon, making it impossible to claim they were holding those missing people captive and demanding their ransom.
Most members of the team I spoke with say that this project was the most important thing they had ever done. “Not in my career,” one tells me. “In my life.”
When I ask Shmueli the question, he answers with a story.
“My grandfather, my mother’s father, David Miller, was an officer in the Royal Air Force,” he says. Behind us at the gas station, a large truck fills up with petrol while a Muslim man completes afternoon prayers on a small rug. “In 1943, he was flying in a Lancaster Bomber and was killed over Nazi Germany, one of five or six crewmen. He parachuted from the plane, not wearing a Magen David — a Star of David — so that if he was captured, they couldn’t identify him as a Jew. They never found a body. And that was that. In Hanover there’s a grave, but it’s only a headstone. Here in Israel, there’s a totally different concept. The level of obligation for the state to bring the dead to burial is really at the level of kedusha — holiness.”
He takes a sip of his latte before completing the thought.
“My mother grew up an orphan,” he says. “There was no body. Here at least I can close a circle.”
Then he shrugs. What else is there to say?
DANNY GARCOVICH BURIES HIS DAUGHTER in a war zone. IDF soldiers escort him to the Kissufim burial ground and, alongside the kibbutz security team, he digs the grave.
“As it is written,” Garcovich announces. “We came from ash and to ash we return.”
Dressed in his navy blue fire department uniform, he removes a plastic bag of ashes from a blue and white urn. He hands it to a man standing inside the grave who places the bag gently onto an Israeli flag lining the bottom. The bag is not full. Earlier, Garcovich had passed some of the ashes to Ivan’s brother, who took them back to Spain and interred them beside his parents.
“We buried the ashes of two bodies together,” Garcovich tells me. “That’s what we buried. They lived together in happiness. They were married. They died together. So we buried them together, and they move forward together.”
Armed men shovel dirt back into the hole. It’s a small grave and there’s little to bury. They finish quickly and in silence. Dafna’s mother lays a garland of flowers on the grave. Others follow with large bouquets.
“From here we’ll move forward,” Garcovich tells the small group gathered at the graveside. “We have no other choice. We can’t stop the world and get off. And I hope that everyone who fell — not only my daughter and her husband; all the people who fell — that they won’t have fallen in vain. I hope that in the near future we will be able to rebuild everything anew, and to return security to the residents and to the region.”
Then Garcovich places his hand on his heart.
“Baruch Dayan Ha’emet,” he says. “Blessed is the True Judge.”