Two sides of a tragedy

Please note there is a clarification and apology at the end of the article.

I have been to more than a handful of mass killing sites in my life. Some as a reporter covering yet another bloody episode of a rural village faction fight, a taxi industry dispute over long distance routes or intraparty political conflict — all of which wiped out entire families.

A few others were as a fearful teenager in the strife-torn outskirts of mid-to-late-80s Durban, where groups of schoolboys would be mowed down for wearing school-shirts or ties deemed to be associated with one or another of the then warring political organisations.

But none of that prepared me for the Nova Festival Victims Memorial site. The scale is astounding. Row upon row of photos, each attached to an iron rod and bearing the face of a person killed by Hamas while attending an overnight outdoor music festival here.

Of the 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7 2023, when Hamas fighters staged mass attacks across the southern part of the country, 364 were massacred on this open field.

It is located in Re’im, a secular kibbutz in southern Israel, just 4km from Gaza.

One of the survivors, Rita Yedid, is guiding us around the scene and relating her harrowing experience of that morning. She had arrived at the festival the night before with her husband and her sister.

As she tells the story of the dancing and fun they had with their friends as the sun began to rise, she whips out her mobile phone from her back pocket and begins to play an upbeat dance song she says was on when darkness descended upon them.

“Just think how joyful and happy you are when you listen to music like this and there is such a large group of happy and dancing people around you. And they are all here for one reason, to feel the freedom and to let themselves be who they are, who they want to be. And then, suddenly, the music stops and the deejay on the mic is screaming Tzeva adom! Tzeva adom! (Red alert! Red alert!) And when you live in Israel you understand that when you hear those two words it means there are so many rockets in the sky and you have to run, you have to hide, you need to find a place to feel secure. 

“But guess what, around here there were no shelters and so the police and security said all four thousand of us had to leave... Four kilometres away we have Gaza and the sky from there, the sky all around here, turned black, completely, from hundreds of rockets that were shot at the same time,” Yedid explains.

Amid the chaos, she began hearing the sound of semi-automatic rifles and witnessed a rocket-propelled grenade hit an ambulance nearby. As they ran for cover, she started seeing the wounded and bodies of the dead. Her husband was among the wounded, shot twice on the side of his upper torso while trying to shield her from the flying bullets.

As Yedid tells her story, thundering sounds of rockets dropping intermittently on the other side of the fence — in the Gaza Strip — can be heard.

They forcefully drive home the point that the violence she is speaking of is not just history but part of a live and ongoing conflict, that people continue to die as she speaks.

Given the opportunity to get to the other side, how many stories would we hear similar to hers, albeit happening over a prolonged period of almost two years?

According to media reports quoting health officials in Gaza, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed and about 100,000 wounded since Israel began its war on the territory in retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attack.

Israel has since been condemned by the UN and most of the international community for what UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres describes as “collective punishment of the Palestinian people”.

In its bid to stop the killings, SA approached the International Court of Justice, where it accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

It was a move that earned praise for SA from many across the world who want to see Palestinians, like Israelis, enjoying self-determination in their own sovereign state.

However, SA’s court action angered Israel and some of its closest allies. The growing tensions between Pretoria and President Donald Trump’s administration in Washington, it would appear, can be traced back to the ICJ case rather than Trump’s imaginary seizure of land from white Afrikaner farmers.

But how has this part of the Middle East region changed since fighting flared up again in 2023? Have SA’s arguments at the ICJ at least caused Israel to rethink its approach?

These were some of the questions dominating my mind when we arrived in the region. The invitation to the trip had come at a time when Egypt, Qatar and the US appeared to have succeeded in convincing both Israel and Hamas to enter into a ceasefire agreement, and a new road map to peace seemed a distinct possibility.

Bombings had momentarily stopped, many of the Israeli hostages were being released in return for the freeing of Palestinians from Israeli jails. Though not involved in talks, SA seemed to be getting what it was campaigning for. 

I am not happy, OK, that civilians get killed, but I cannot feel sorry for the murderers who are still there. You know what I am saying? And if it is my kid or their kid who has to be safe, I hope it is my kid

—  Orit Tzedikovitch, spokesperson for kibbutz Kfar Aza

But by mid-March Israel had resumed its air strikes on Gaza, arguing that it was doing so to force Hamas to release the 59 remaining captives.

One of the people we meet who is supportive of renewed air raids is Orit Tzedikovitch, spokesperson for kibbutz Kfar Aza, which is situated right on the fence with Gaza.

“I am not happy, OK, that civilians get killed, but I cannot feel sorry for the murderers who are still there. You know what I am saying? And if it is my child or their child who has to be safe, I hope it is my child,” she says.

Sixty-four people, including Tzedikovitch’s ex-husband — father to their four children — and her brother-in-law died at Kfar Aza on October 7. Though she was not on the scene on the morning of the attack, Tzedikovitch tells a story of what she sees as “betrayal” by Palestinian neighbours she claims had lived and worked “happily” with the community at the kibbutz for decades.

Like many other Israeli villages in the area, the kibbutz had a communal armoury where rifles and other weapons used to defend the area were kept. But on the morning of the attacks, when the men tasked with keeping the place safe rushed to the armoury, they found men lying in wait for them.

“They were ambushed. So, you may ask, how did they know that there was an armoury here and that the defenders will come to fetch the weapons. It is not like Google Maps can show you that this is an armoury. Clearly, they had information. They knew because, prior to the attack, there were workers here from Gaza building a house. Who do you think worked here? Not people from Israel but people from Gaza. They are the ones who gave information to the terrorists,” she charges.

Tzedikovitch speaks nostalgically about a period when she was young and Israelis and Palestinians from Gaza, she says, lived happily side by side.

“They were happy that there is a kibbutz here and that we provided them with jobs and good salaries. We were happy that we could go to the beach over there because it is the Mediterranean, the same as Tel Aviv. Why would we go all the way to Tel Aviv when the beach in Gaza was close to us? People from all over Israel used to go buy falafel there as it was cheap.”

But now, she says, none of her neighbours and acquaintances has any empathy for Gazans. “We are in a war, they started the war. They wanted the war, they got the war... We need to protect ourselves.” 

Though it is impossible to cross over to Gaza and talk to those on that side of the conflict, we do get to reach Ramallah in the West Bank — the de facto administrative capital of the nominal Palestinian state.

Over there we meet Dr Sabri Saidam, a high-ranking member of the Fatah Central Committee — the leading party in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).

Unlike Hamas, Fatah recognises Israel’s right to exist and Saidam says it is still their official policy to push for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But he acknowledges that the concept no longer enjoys majority support on either side of the divide. The Palestinians, he says, have generally given up on the peace process due to years of being disappointed.

“But we still, officially, say that humanity will have to co-exist”.

As for the Israelis, he argues that their loss of faith in coexistence was not merely as a result of October 7 but because of decades of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu feeding citizens hate.

“If you look at the figures in Israel, many Israelis have been led to believe that coexistence is an unworkable formula and this is not something that merely happened since October 7. It is something that has been masterminded by Netanyahu, who has been preparing for the scene where hatred becomes the rule of the game, instead of ability to survive together,” he says.

While he is appreciative of SA’s support and the country’s case against Israel at the ICJ, Saidam feels betrayed by most of the world’s governments.

“I wonder if those killed were Israelis, would humanity have allowed 50,000 Israelis to be killed? Would it have allowed an area the size of Singapore to be eradicated? We believe that we have been let down, big time... Humanity at large, on the popular level, is with the Palestinians, but as far as the official ranks are concerned we believe that we have been betrayed.”

But what does he say of the argument that October 7 has made it harder for other governments to convince Israel to withdraw from occupied territories and work towards lasting peace and a viable Palestinian state?

“Had it not been for the continuation of the conflict, we wouldn’t have seen October 7... It is the fact that the international community has failed us that this situation continues.”

The answer to October 7, he says, should not have been killing the Palestinians indiscriminately in Gaza. “Does that mean Netanyahu should have a free hand to kill Palestinians, to bomb schools and hospitals, universities, clinics... and that is justified? Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

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Clarification and apology

The Sunday Times published a story headlined “Two sides of a tragedy” on 20 April 2025, written by S’thembiso Msomi after his trip to Israel.

When published, the article contained no reference to who had sponsored the cost of the trip, thus in breach of the Press Code, which prescribes that publications should clearly indicate when an outside organisation has contributed to the cost of newsgathering.

The trip was in fact sponsored by the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies. We apologise that this was not indicated to our readers at the time. The article has been updated. We have taken steps to avoid such an error in the future.

The correction was made following an order by the Press Council’s deputy ombud Franz Krüger. See the full ruling here.

— Editor