Daily Kickoff
Good Monday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we interview Rep. Andy Kim about his primary challenge to Sen. Bob Menendez, and report from an Israeli army base where victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks are still being identified. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Dara Horn, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Amb. Michael Oren.
On Saturday afternoons in Tel Aviv, the tayelet, the 3.5-mile stretch from the city’s Old Port in the north to Jaffa in the south, is abuzz with activity: young men playing volleyball, inline skaters and bicyclists cruising down the pavement, buskers playing to the families taking a Shabbat stroll.
But this Saturday, the tayelet was subdued, Jewish Insider Executive Editor Melissa Weiss writes. Absent from the beach were the cigarette smoke and loud music blaring from personal speakers, the 20-somethings under umbrellas with their friends. In their place were a smattering of families. The volleyball courts were empty.
At night, the streets are quiet. Dizengoff Street, known for its lively bar and restaurant scene every night of the week, sits silent after dusk. Some restaurants are open, but the majority of their business is now done through delivery apps.
Posters of the hostages line Dizengoff — but unlike the same posters plastered in cities around the U.S., these remain up, unmarked by graffiti. No one would dare tear down the posters in a city so weighed down by grief. Two weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, families are still learning the fate of their loved ones, as officials work day in and day out to identify the remains of more than 1,400 people. On Saturday night, a block off of Ben Gurion Street, the sound of a young woman wailing — the pitch heard over and over at the hundreds of funerals that have taken place in recent days — punctuated the quiet night.
That’s the new reality in Tel Aviv, where those who haven’t left Israel — and hundreds of foreign correspondents who have arrived over the last two weeks — live in a state of perpetual sobriety, attempting to find some degree of normalcy in a city where the still-open cafes shutter early, previously ubiquitous construction is just beginning to restart after a two-week standstill, restaurants have transformed into assembly lines to feed displaced Israelis and every day involves sirens and a run (or several) to the nearest bomb shelter.
Children have begun returning to school, kindergarten and daycare, to shorter, sometimes non-consecutive days, and others not at all in cases where buildings don’t have reinforced rooms to protect against rocket attacks. The partial return comes after children have spent weeks at home — the Hamas terror attack occurred on Simchat Torah, at the very end of a long string of Jewish holidays during which the education system was closed under happier circumstances.
Those who have ventured out of their homes with their children over the past couple of weeks have been carefully selecting the play areas they frequent, ensuring there is a bomb shelter within a 90-second running distance.
Parents have agonized over whether or not to send their children back to daycare and kindergarten, torn between returning them to the routine that the youngsters crave and a new fear for their safety — born after their sense of security was shattered on Oct. 7.
The looming ground invasion the IDF is expected to launch in Gaza — which the Biden administration has asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to delay so as to allow more time for hostage negotiations and the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza — and escalating tensions with Hezbollah in the north have plunged the city into a state of limbo, unsure of what happens next. With little guidance from the government, the Israeli public follows the news alongside the rest of the world, waiting to know its fate.
eyewitness
Two weeks on, Israel still struggling to identify the dead

Until two weeks ago, the Shura army base was among the quietest military outposts in Israel. Located in central Israel, not far from a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Ramle, Shura served mainly as a logistics center and the home of the IDF’s rabbinate. It was a place where nothing special happened, those serving on the base told Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash on Thursday. That all changed on Oct. 7, after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas carried out a brutal and murderous mass attack on multiple army bases, kibbutzim and towns in southern Israel, as well as a music festival, killing more than 1,400 people.
Abnormal situation: Now, Shura is one of a handful of sites in Israel where the dead are still being brought for identification, a place where the horrific atrocities are being photographed and recorded, and the bodies are cleansed and prepared for burial by their families. And last Thursday, 13 days after the attack, the bodies were still arriving. “We are in an abnormal situation and that is why it is taking so much time to identify the bodies,” Col. Rabbi Haim Weisberg, head of the army’s rabbinic division, told JI, describing a massacre. “In most cases, we have had to identify people via deep tissue DNA or dental records because there is nothing left,” he continued. “And we are still getting bodies, last night we received an additional 73 body parts.”
‘Not seen since the Nazis’: The operation at Shura is not happening in a typical sterile forensic lab but in large white tents erected in an open area, surrounded by eerie rows of refrigerated containers. Inside each container lie dozens of carefully wrapped dead bodies and bags of body parts retrieved from the sites that have yet to be assessed. The smell of the dead is overwhelming. “These are things we have not seen since the Nazis,” Weisberg said. “We are seeing trucks arriving with whole families inside — grandparents, mothers, fathers and children — and we are still collecting bodies from the roads, homes, playgrounds and fields where they were killed.”