The findings of the IDF probe into its failure to protect Kibbutz Nirim from Hamas on October 7, 2023, were released on Friday.
Around 150 Hamas terrorists in three separate waves invaded Nirim and the surrounding areas, murdering five civilians and taking five now-deceased residents hostage.
Further, in the battles in and around the kibbutz, Hamas’s invaders killed 10 soldiers and took another eight hostage.
Prior to the war, Nirim had a population of just over 400 residents. It is located close to Kibbutz Nir Oz, which was also utterly abandoned by the IDF until the early afternoon hours of October 7, when it was mostly too late to confront Hamas’s terrorists, who had by then almost entirely returned to Gaza.
Residents did acknowledge to The Jerusalem Post that there are many more IDF positions nearby now and that Nirim’s White House – a small nearby outpost – now has four times as many military personnel as it did on October 7, including more tanks.
While aspects of the report, especially where the IDF admitted its across-the-board failure to defend the residents, were appreciated by some of Nirim’s residents, they still felt abandoned now.
Nirim resident and Mako Website reporter Shai Levy told the Post during a recent visit to the village, “The IDF deserted us on October 7. Many residents were slaughtered before any real help came. My family and I only survived by keeping the invaders out of our safe room.
“While security is better now than before October 7, eighteen months after [the massacre], the IDF still has an emergency order preventing most residents from returning – unless they are part of the local security squad like me,” Levy said.
“We hope we can restart schools here in September, but the IDF and the government still have not made clear promises, and at some point, more residents may decide not to come back.”
In addition, residents said that they were suffering from almost constant military noise – from rockets to warning sirens to Israeli drones.
Nightmarish invasion
Mostly, the feel of the village during the Post’s visit was of an area that was only starting to recover from the nightmarish invasion, even as much of the rest of the country had returned to a version of normalcy long ago.
Due to the IDF’s orders limiting residents from returning, there are still many heavily damaged houses, with some repairs that the Post witnessed just beginning.
Nirim is just across from Khan Yunis, and though residents said there were more forces than before, multiple parts of the fence appeared to have zero IDF soldiers defending them despite being only some hundreds of meters from the kibbutz.
The current hope is that the new soldiers in Gaza and near Nirim will be enough to protect the village in the future, even though parts of the border fence itself do not have a noteworthy security presence.