Many stories of heroism and horror have already been told about Hamas’ massacres in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Much has also been written about the failures and events leading up to that fateful day, with, no doubt, more still to come.

Yet, if there is one neat book that eloquently sums up the personal, national and historical tragedies endured by the Israeli people on the darkest day since the country’s founding, it could be the forthcoming account by Israeli journalist and author Amir Tibon.

In The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival and Hope on Israel’s Borderlands, out Sept. 24, Tibon, Haaretz’s diplomatic correspondent and a resident of Nahal Oz, one of Israel’s now-devastated southern border communities, captures the personal horrors he and his young family endured on that day, as well as recapping the brave efforts of his retired IDF general father as he attempted to reach the family. Tibon also methodically lays out the sequence of political and strategic events that brought the country to that nightmare point, as well as the grueling war that has lasted nearly a year.

“I didn’t want to participate in the construction of a narrative in which the history of the Israeli communities attacked on Oct. 7 began on Oct. 7,” Tibon told Jewish Insider in a recent interview as he explained why it was important to him to recount personal experiences alongside the history of a community that has grappled with the fate of Gaza and its people since its own inception.

“These communities, including Nahal Oz, have existed on the border for decades,” he told JI. “Nahal Oz was founded in 1953, some of the other communities that were attacked were actually created even before the State of Israel, in the 1940s.”

“They have a long history of life alongside the Gaza border, with a lot of ups and downs, with good periods of relative quiet and coexistence and dreams of peace, and more difficult periods of war and conflict,” Tibon explained, adding, “I felt that without telling that story, you cannot really understand Oct. 7.”

Throughout 12 chapters, an epilogue, plus multiple maps and photographs, Tibon intersperses his family’s personal drama on that day, describing how he, his wife and young daughters were forced to remain in total darkness in their safe room for 10 long hours as gun battles raged right outside their door and as they waited for his father, retired IDF Gen. Noam Tibon, or the IDF to save them.

In between his own telling of the terror that he faced on Oct. 7, Tibon also recounts the personal stories of other kibbutz members, both past and present, and documents the broader political and military events, as well as their implications for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Israeli-born Tibon, who penned the book in English with the goal of reaching a broad international audience, plots the points that brought Israel – and the Palestinians – to the dramatic moment when more than 3,000 Hamas terrorists, followed by thousands of civilians, infiltrated into Israel from Gaza, attacking nearby army bases, villages, towns and a music festival taking place in the area.

Roughly 1,200 people were murdered on that day and another 240 were kidnapped to Gaza, while civilians such as Tibon hid in silence fearing for their lives. More than 100 people are still being held hostage by Hamas, which over the past 11 months battled against a fierce Israeli military onslaught. Hamas’ Health Ministry in the coastal enclave reports that more than 40,000 people have been killed, although it does not distinguish between civilians and its combatants.

In Nahal Oz, where Tibon and his wife, Miri, have lived since 2014, 15 people were murdered and seven kidnapped – among them Judith and Natalie Raanan, American citizens who had been visiting family; two young sisters, Daphna Elyakim, 15, and Ella Elyakim, 8; and an elderly woman, Elma Avraham. The Raanans were released after two weeks, while Avraham and the Elyakim sisters were set free during a weeklong cease-fire and prisoner exchange in November. Two men, Omri Miran and Tzachi Idan, remain in Gaza, and most of the residents, including Tibon and his family, have yet to return to the kibbutz.

“We are going through challenging days right now because our community is basically splitting,” Tibon explained. “We have about half the community living in Mishmar Ha-Emek, which has been hosting us very generously since Oct. 8, and the other half is moving south to apartments in Netivot.”

“It is going to be a big challenge having half the community over here and the other half in the south, but the biggest challenge, topping everything else, is that we still have two friends in the hands of Hamas,” he emphasized. “As a community, we can’t really turn the page on Oct. 7 as long as they remain in the hands of the enemy.”

Tibon, who spent three years in Washington as Haaretz’s correspondent there, said with the one-year anniversary of the massacre drawing close, he can’t believe that his friends are still “in the tunnels of Gaza, that we are still out of our home, that the government of Israel is still the same government, and that [Hamas leader] Yahya Sinwar is still alive.”

Despite the turmoil, Tibon has put together a comprehensive breakdown of events from both a broader and narrower perspective, a process he says was “therapeutic.”

“Initially, I wasn’t really interested in writing about this because I felt that a lot of attention had been already given to our specific story,” said Tibon, referring to his father’s daring rescue story that made headlines worldwide, and his own writings about the events.

“We also had personal issues to deal with and I just couldn’t think about finding the time and the energy to do this, but then I realized I could tell a bigger story, taking my family’s experience and putting it in a wider context of what happened to my community on Oct. 7, and also add the context of the road to Oct. 7 and how we got there,” he continued.

After being approached by publishers, he began sketching out a plan for a book that would intertwine the personal with the community and with the broader historical events. The personal chapters, Tibon said, were the easiest ones to write, while the historical chapters required multiple trips to the kibbutz’s archives, which miraculously were unharmed on Oct. 7, and interviews with some of the kibbutz’s founders.

“I really understood the meaning of the phrase ‘knowledge is power,’” he said about the research and writing process. “The more I discovered about what happened, the more information I collected from people, the more knowledge I gained about the events, the better I felt … to some degree … and things began to make sense. I began to understand what happened.”

Using those personal stories, Tibon sets Nahal Oz against the backdrop of historic events such as the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel first took over Gaza, the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement in 1979, which left the Strip under Israel’s control, the Oslo Accords in 1993, which brought hopes for peace between the sides, and the controversial Gaza disengagement in 2005, which instantly turned the kibbutz back into a dangerous border community. He also explores Israeli government policy and strategy over the last two decades, particularly the shortcomings of the 2014 war with Hamas and the decision to allow the entry into the enclave of millions of dollars from Qatar with little to no oversight.

In the final chapters of The Gates of Gaza, Tibon’s chronicle culminates those government policies colliding with his own personal experiences and stories from his friends and neighbors on the kibbutz. The outcome is, of course, horrific and tragic, but he also leaves many questions — such as what specifically caused the barbaric attack and how he, the community, or even the country, will now move forward — unanswered.

“It would be unfair to point at one thing that caused this, it’s several processes that collided into the perfect storm … failures of intelligence, failures of military preparedness, failures of senior political ranks and all of them together brought us to this moment,” explained Tibon. “I really tried to show how this was brought upon us from several directions and, honestly, I tried to answer questions in the book about what happened, but no book, no newspaper article, no television investigation will be able to answer all those questions.”

Instead, he said, “what we urgently need in this country is a national commission of inquiry that has to be set up by a governmental decision … and the fact that we have not had one yet is a total disgrace, and the next failure is just a matter of time.”

“Jews in the Diaspora need to understand that if the problems that led to Oct. 7 are not properly investigated and fixed, then Israel will not be an insurance policy for them, their children or grandchildren,” Tibon emphasized, adding, “we are facing a fork in the road where we can investigate what happened and demand accountability, removing from power all those who contributed to this disaster so we can do some kind of a restart to this country, or we can keep going with the same people, which will take us in a very bad direction.”

As for his personal future, Tibon told JI that he hopes to return to Nahal Oz eventually.

“I love the place, I have a strong connection to it and I really hope for it … whether we will actually do it,” he said, “I can’t answer that.” Tibon will speak about his experience on Sept. 22 at Washington Hebrew Congregation, and will appear at The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center in New York on Sept. 24. The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival and Hope on Israel’s Borderlands (Little Brown) goes on sale Sept. 24, 2024.