When Ayala Metzger walks among the ghosts of Nir Oz, it almost feels like she isn’t quite sure whose story she wants to tell first. For the better part of the last year, she has been regularly leading tours along the dusty paths between the kibbutz’s gutted low-rise homes, located just four kilometers from the Gaza Strip. To anyone who will listen, she recounts what happened here on the morning of October 7 in vivid detail, like a forensic scientist reconstructing a crime scene.
Forty-one members of Nir Oz and 11 Thai workers were killed in the kibbutz that day, while 71 residents and five more workers were kidnapped and taken back to Gaza. But Metzger doesn’t view herself as simply the groundskeeper of a plaque-less memorial; as the daughter-in-law of Yoram Metzger, whose body was brought back to Israel in a military operation after he was killed in Hamas’ captivity in February, and of Tamar Metzger, who returned alive in November last year in the hitherto only hostage deal, she knows time is not on the side of the remaining hostages…..more
