Ninety-Five Percent Heaven, Five Percent Hell
Writing and Photography by Mattanah DeWitt on June 12
Israel, January 2024
I walked into a village of color that had become a ghost town. I'd been to the kibbutz less than a year before—a place where children laughed and played and ran freely. You never knew who their parents were, because everyone in the village looked after them.
Kfar Aza was like an oasis in the south of Israel, next to the Gaza border. The homes connected to each other, not by streets but by winding walkways. I remember it as a quiet maze of gardens and clothes hung out to dry, while the playgrounds had slides that doubled as bomb shelters.
As the residents said, Living here, it's 95 percent heaven, five percent hell.
And now, no one lives there.
The families who lived there chose to do so, because they believed in peace with their neighbors on the other side of the fence. They wanted to be the ones to build the bridges even while enduring the barrages of rockets, because this was their home.
The awful irony of it all hit me as I walked in with my team that day. We were one of a few small groups allowed into Kfar Aza since the October 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists.
I was there, just six months prior, before this small part of the world tipped over, bringing with it a chain of horrific events that continue still today.
In the kibbutz, it was a different kind of calm by that point. IDF soldiers stood nearby with their assault rifles draped across their bodies. It was January 2024, and the border had been secured in the months since the attack. But the war continued. I could hear the sounds of explosions, distant pop-pop-pops, artillery being fired from Israel. All happening next door. I saw Gaza in the distance and wondered what sights belonged to the sounds reaching my ears.
I heard the stories too. I watched strong people with trembling hands tell of their loved ones killed in cold blood, and watched them blink away the horror from their eyes.
…
The morning of October 7, 2023, was Shabbat. This Shabbat fell on a holiday, Simchat Torah—a day in which the Jewish people celebrate the end of the annual cycle of Torah readings and the beginning of another.
The morning of October 7 started with a barrage of rockets. Unusual in quantity, but also not unheard of. Everyone knew what to do. But sheltering for 30 minutes turned into 30 hours. And because the shelters were built to withstand rockets, not infiltration, they didn’t lock from the inside.
The morning of October 7, they were in their beds. They messaged I love you and goodbye and they're almost here to loved ones they'd likely never see again.
The young people's section of the village was near the fence. On the other side were fields and then Gaza. That's where the terrorists entered. And they took their time ravaging this section first. Gunning down anyone in sight. Pulling women out of their homes—stripping, binding, raping, and shooting them.
I walked through this neighborhood that once housed the community’s young adults. It still felt like a fresh crime scene, everything ravaged and taped off.
A woman who lived there said that for days, bodies were scattered around the whole village because the fighting continued and the area wasn't secure yet. This was especially the case near the young people's neighborhood.
I could imagine how it used to be, before all of this.
Late at night, the single streetlamp in the center of the dirt pathway would glow. I imagine the 20-somethings would start campfires, play music. They would dance. One person would cook enough food to feed the people living in the houses adjacent to hers.
None of them had much space, but they didn't need it. Most probably had pictures of their parents and siblings and boyfriends and girlfriends hanging on the walls of their first-ever home to call their own. Some had returned from the IDF and were studying at university. Most had family living just up the pathway from them—those were the family members who received texts from their daughters and sons, sent from underneath their beds: I love you. I hear them coming. If this is goodbye...
For some of those family members, it wasn't long before they too were gunned down.
One mom hid with her children and made a plan for how she would kill them quickly and without causing them pain, should the terrorists break into her home to torture them. They were rescued just in time by the IDF.
She said the thought of how she would have spared her children torture by killing them herself haunts her today in a way she can’t explain.
…
When we first arrived at Kfar Aza, there was what turned out to be a false alarm of an incoming rocket attack. We were all told to run to the nearby bomb shelter. All 40 of us crowded in, shoulder to shoulder, barely enough standing room. We breathed. We tried not to make eye contact with each other. I think we were afraid of what we'd see in each others' eyes and what they'd see in ours. When we realized it was a false alarm that was meant for a village some distance away, we came out of the shelter into the fresh air, our hearts still beating fast.
And then, I thought, that was nothing. Nothing at all, by comparison.
…
The path through the young adults’ neighborhood is one I’ll walk in my memories for years. The doors and front walls of the homes torn down in the violence made it easier to see the bullet holes that ripped through the thick walls, the floors, everywhere.
What stayed with me was the image of these small, destroyed homes with remnants of beautiful and ordinary lives once lived there. Household items like microwaves, TVs, couches torn to shreds, bicycles. Everything broken and shattered—yet enough left to allow the imagination to rebuild what it was before. That alone was both a cruelty and a gift.
The dusty path, running between rows of miniature homes facing one another, bore witness to such violence and bloodshed the human mind isn’t built to comprehend. This dusty path became sacred, like many dusty paths in Israel, but for a different reason. I thought of Abel's blood crying out to God from the ground after he'd been murdered by his brother. How this ground must cry out.
…
I think of the way we remember and venerate things and places.
The ‘As Time Goes By’ piano from the movie Casablanca became the most expensive piano sold at auction ($3.4 million). Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag on the surface of the moon. Stonehenge, a prehistoric monument in Europe, inspires awe in countless visitors. Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, is a tourist destination for Elvis fans.
Then I think of the ground I walked in Kfar Aza, the ground that cries out. I think of the shattered household objects and bullet holes littering the walls. The yellow tape sectioning off the areas most damaged. The vacancy and silence of a place once so full of life. These are all that remain to aid in the remembrance of what was, to bear witness to the brutality that claimed so many lives.
To commemorate, to venerate, anything else feels cheap now. Unnecessary. Sacrilegious. And yet, it’s important that we do.
In the book of Deuteronomy, the Israelite elders were commanded to make atonement for innocent blood shed on their land, in circumstances when it wasn’t possible to hold the murderer accountable. In the book of Joshua, the Israelites placed memorial stones on the west bank of the Jordan to commemorate the faithfulness of God. The responsibility of the people of God to bring righteousness back into the land continues in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul puts it like this: “For the eagerly awaiting creation waits for the revealing of the sons and daughters of God” (Romans 8:19, NASB). In verse 22, he adds that “the whole creation groans” for this.
It matters what we do in the earth, what we choose to commemorate. The actions of humans, for good or bad, embed themselves in the very soil we tread. That said, the eschatological vision of the Bible involves a land in which “justice [rolls] out like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). That responsibility falls to us, yet sometimes it feels crushing.
…
I’d been to Israel and the West Bank almost 10 times before this. The people there are my friends. And while it’s true that I knew the Israel I was coming to in January, it was also just as true that I had no idea at all. How could I have prepared for the stories of the survivors I interviewed—not only from Kfar Aza, but from other communities too? I couldn’t have known the guilt that would hit me when I asked those survivors to tell their stories and thus relive the most horrific moments of their lives.
…
Each story could take an eternity to tell. I heard so many, and they all live with me.
A young mother, whose own mom and dad were gunned down in their home, was evacuated under fire with her baby and husband and barely made it out alive. A 20-something living in the young people's neighborhood had two best friends—twins—who were taken as hostages to Gaza. A father fought the terrorists entering his village only to find his son dead in the hospital morgue later that day, piled alongside dozens of other bodies with bullet holes or worse. He had to go home and tell his wife that their son had been killed by terrorists while fishing with his friend that morning. Another man tried to help rescue people in his village, only to find that his best friend had been shot, was bleeding out, and nothing could be done. He held his friend while he died in his arms. His friend’s last words were calm: Tell my family I love them.
Each story with a terrible end once held a blessed ordinary that we all can recognize. Preparing a bottle for your baby in the morning. Buying groceries. Graduating from university. Hosting a birthday party for your 11-year-old. Going fishing with a friend. Drinking wine and talking late into the night.
It all ended so suddenly, fragments of lives lived to be gathered up and reassembled well enough to move on. Except nobody could move on.
…
In my own life, I’ve experienced a kind of “moving on” that for so many in and around Israel has not been possible. I can’t look forward to the new in my own life without first looking back.
When I returned from that trip in January 2024—when I flew home to normal—no one was able to tell me what I was supposed to do next. And the people who traveled with me didn’t know either. The war continued on as hostages remained in Gaza (many are still there today). We all did our best to help how we could. It never really got better. I guess that's war. The longer it goes on, the less sense it makes and the less human we all become.
But, the harder it becomes to hold onto the light, the more essential it is to try. Holding onto the light looks different for each person. I found a way. Maybe writing this is part of it.
What I realize is that the tragic taking of life—in any context, in any part of the world, on both sides of a conflict—can so quickly become minimized and politicized. Attempts to justify the taking of life, the end making the means necessary, permeate strategic conversations by world leaders at the highest levels.
What I’m convinced of is that winning a war can’t heal anything. Throughout history, there have been some wars fought that needed to be won. Regardless, all the blood spilled for what we consider even the most righteous of causes still cries out from the ground. And we’d know the sound is deafening if we dare listen.
The cycles of hatred, tragic loss, retaliation…and hatred and loss and retaliation all over again, will never stop until we choose a better way. And it doesn’t start with world leaders or soldiers or the impressive thinkers of our day.
It starts with a broken person choosing to grieve, to face every bit of the pain no matter how long it takes. And, in time, to let grief make a space and capacity within them for Love. This path isn’t an easy one, in fact it’s taken by few.
As a follower of Jesus, I’m reminded of challenging scriptures that tell us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. I’d be lying if I said that mandate isn’t deeply uncomfortable and confusing after the things I’ve seen people do to other people. And for the people those things have been done to, and for their loved ones, there really are no words.
Yet even so, I am reminded of deeply comforting scriptures, assuring me of the better way, amidst the impossibility of letting go and the impulse to let ourselves be swallowed up by the cause of avenging the blood that cries out. It is the presence of the Divine Person, Jesus Christ, who stoops down into the remains of our shattered hearts and communities and world, and weeps.