Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
On Oct. 7 last year, along with millions of Israelis and Jews around the world, Lee Yaron felt helpless and overwhelmed by the devastating images that began flooding into news feeds — and didn’t stop. As a journalist for Haaretz, she knew she needed to do something.
She was focused on climate journalism at the time, splitting her time between New York and Israel, but Yaron pivoted almost immediately and began the work that resulted in her new book, “10/7: 100 Human Stories.” She recounted those initial days and what followed in a Sept. 30 Q&A session with J. Editor-in-Chief Chanan Tigay at the JCC of San Francisco.
“The moment Oct. 7 happened, I was like every other Israeli and every other Jew. I couldn’t do anything,” Yaron told Tigay. “I couldn’t do anything but read these stories and cry… I couldn’t think about the future anymore, I could only think about what we lost, and about the present… I felt like it was this horrible injustice that happened to [the victims], and that I need to do what I can to try to help these families.”
Published last month, “10/7” grew out of Yaron’s desire to offer more intimate, personal portraits of the people directly affected by the terrorist attacks and what followed.
“The victims and the victimized communities are allowed, as much as possible, to relate their own experiences, from their own tragedies,” Yaron writes in the book’s introduction. “Sometimes in their own words, at all times from their own perspectives.”
Some chapters contain firsthand accounts of victims, survivors or their families according to where they were located on the day of the attacks. These include the targeted towns of Sderot, Ashkelon, Ofakim and the kibbutzim lining the Gaza border. Other chapters analyze the historical and geopolitical contexts of the Gaza Strip and outline a history of Israel’s prior wars.
This multifocal approach is meant to give readers a more complete historical foundation to better understand the conditions that contributed to the tragedy of Oct. 7.
In the location-based chapters, Yaron seamlessly weaves gruesome retellings of the attacks from the perspectives of the people she interviewed, alongside detailed personal histories of the dead as told by their families and loved ones. Where relevant, Yaron also includes important background information on the victims’ countries of origin before they immigrated to Israel.
One account comes from the Kusenov family, who escaped to Israel from Ukraine in February 2023, one year after the Russian invasion began, and found refuge in Ashkelon.
“During one attack in May of their first year [in Israel], they sat on their balcony, beers in hand, watching the Iron Dome intercept one missile after another,” Yaron writes in the chapter “Odessa to Ashkelon.” “Marina said that after managing to escape Putin’s bombardment of Kharkiv, she wasn’t afraid of anything.”
On Oct. 7, the Kusenovs had to escape hostile fire once again. When they returned to their apartment two weeks after the attack, they discovered a pile of rubble where their home once stood, forcing the family to start over yet again.
I haven’t seen the news. I’m here, in person, and let me tell you: It’s a massacre. Rabbi at Nova site
The accounts in “10/7” provide a glimpse into the chaos that prevailed as the military, police and other emergency services were overwhelmed, and as breaking news reports at first failed to capture the full extent of the destruction.
A chapter on the victims from the Nova festival near Kibbutz Re’im starts with testimony from Haim Utmazgin, founder and head of Zaka, Israel’s volunteer search and recovery organization that responds to terrorist attacks and disasters. Working in close cooperation with the state’s emergency services and security forces, they are responsible–among other functions–for collecting human remains to ensure their proper burial according to Jewish customs.
On the evening of Oct. 7, Utmazgin received a call from a rabbi who said he had been asked to guard 100 bodies near the festival site, and he needed advice about the proper way to handle them. Utmazgin had been listening all day to news reports that were missing critical information, and so he was at first skeptical of the rabbi’s account and the numbers he was reporting.
“I haven’t seen the news,” the rabbi told him. “I’m here, in person, and let me tell you: It’s a massacre.”
Yaron also writes about the communities in the south where many have low socioeconomic status and the ways in which the Israeli government has overlooked their needs, which in turn contributed to the extent of the casualties and damage suffered in these towns and villages.
The most acute example given in the book is the Bedouin communities in the Negev Desert. Because the Bedouins lack official recognition by the state, they also lack rocket warning sirens and municipal bomb shelters, and are not shielded by Israel’s Iron Dome rocket interception system.
The Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages in the Negev has calculated that the disparities make the residents in these communities 2,200 times more likely to die from rocket attacks than the general Israeli population.
The experiences Yaron details in “10/7” make for a difficult read, though she never sensationalizes the human trauma. She also makes a point to highlight stories of cooperation and heroism among neighbors and strangers on October 7 and the harrowing days that followed. These stories can instill glimmers of hope and help readers move forward, albeit with grief in tow.