Zohar Haimi held the door of his home’s shelter for 12 hours during the October 7, 2023 attack. His son Tal was killed while defending Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak. Three years later, Haimi says he is determined not to let hatred shape his life.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, the shelter in Zohar Haimi’s home had no lock. He stood behind the door and held its handle for 12 hours as attackers entered his house and broke things. At the same time, his son Tal, who led the security team at Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak near the Gaza border, was confronting the attackers. He did not survive the day.
Hamas took Tal’s body to Gaza, and his family was able to bury him more than two years later. Photographs of Tal now hang on the wall of Haimi’s home, alongside pictures of Lotan, Tal’s youngest son, who was born seven months after his father’s death. After the attack, the kibbutz community lived in Eilat for several months. Returning was difficult for Haimi, but once he walked through the gate, he knew he no longer wanted to leave.
Haimi says he tries to stop anger from taking hold and wants to live a happy life. He rarely visits the cemetery. “I don’t need a gravestone. I carry my son within me,” he says. The words moved his lifelong friend Oded Bahar, who grew up with him in the kibbutz.
For years, Bahar has volunteered with Road to Recovery, meeting Palestinian patients at checkpoints and driving them to Israeli hospitals. He previously helped patients from Gaza and now transports people from the West Bank. The October 7 attack did not change his decision to continue.
The friends’ conversation revealed a shared hope for coexistence. Haimi says Palestinians are people like them, while acknowledging that this view has become a minority position in Israel. He says he is not naïve, but this is how he wants to live. Bahar hopes that in 10 or 20 years people will look back on October 7 as the conflict’s lowest point, after which things began to improve.
Haimi’s determination to look forward is also visible in the garden behind his home. He paints discarded tires and turns bicycle rims and dairy-farm pipes into new features. Each week he adds something. At night, solar lamps glow among the tires while music plays from speakers. “There is hope. There really is,” he says.