Heartbreak and hope reporting on the October 7 – Latest News
After 14 years of writing at The Post, I by no means thought of myself to have anybody beat — fortunately overlaying a broad solid of quirky New York characters and their hijinks that form the metropolis.
That modified two years in the past Oct. 7, after I woke up in New York to study that 100 Israelis — at that time — had been murdered in a shock terror assault in contrast to any the tiny nation has witnessed.
I watched in horror as the death toll ticked upward, digesting the brutality’s scope.
In a second of shock and helplessness, I did the solely factor I felt might help me course of the horrifying info: I began to report.
From that second on, my beat has been Oct. 7.
That black Saturday actually modified the face of Israel and the world, and as a reporter who’s Jewish, it modified me.
It grew to become a two-year search to uncover the details, together with the people behind the tales, each tragic and inspiring.
In the afternoon hours of that interminable first day, I lastly linked with a former New Yorker turned kibbutznik alongside the Gaza border sending real-time messages to the world whereas hiding in her protected room.
She advised me her son-in-law killed terrorists who invaded his home, saving her grandchildren’s lives.
Then I interviewed a New Yorker who’d simply secured a midnight flight to Israel so he might voluntarily be a part of his outdated Israel Defense Forces unit into the unknown — abandoning his budding startup, lazy weekend brunches and the simple life.
“No one is expecting me to come,” he advised me, however “my heart is in Israel — there’s no chance anything would stop me from coming back.”
Despite hundreds of video footage, some New Yorkers refuse to consider Hamas dedicated such atrocities Oct. 7.
While Israel was in fight-or-flight mode, so too had been journalists overlaying the aftermath.
It’s been two years of wall-to-wall reporting on life in Israel and the antisemitism that burst like an earthquake with unabating aftershocks in the tragedy’s wake.
I interviewed Oct. 7 survivors who replayed particulars about how working in a single direction over the different proved to be lifesaving, noting time can’t shake that unmistakable odor of death.
Their “second chance at life” now proudly contains pro-Israel advocacy.
I had painful conversations with hostage households going on religion in lieu of info.
Just as life was cruelly stolen, it additionally started anew, heartbreak mingled with miracles.
The widow of a school-bus driver who took his own life in the very bus he used to evacuate shell-shocked kids from Kibbutz Be’eri opened up about the wrenching tragedy to honor Haim Ben Arye’s legacy.
And the fiancée of a fallen IDF reservist who (*7*)delivered a child some 19 months after he was killed in Gaza confirms hope is at all times obligatory.
Holocaust survivors shared their fears of echoes of the Thirties, retraumatized and painfully reliving the horrors they thought they left behind.
Tsili Wenkert, who survived the harmful Ukrainian ghetto and noticed family murdered, advised me, “The only thing that keeps me going is the hope I’m going to see him” — her hostage grandson, Omer Wenkert, who was launched in February.
“God performed a miracle for me and now he needs to return all the kidnapped,” she advised The Post final week.
Upper East Sider Jamie shows her {custom} coat with footage of all remaining Hamas hostages. Doree Lewak
I interviewed refugees — these compelled to flee Israel after their beloved houses got here underneath relentless assault from rockets, strangers in a unusual land attempting to make a new life for themselves in New York.
“I feel really guilty that I’m here,” Korin Katanov mentioned after leaving her lifelong home of Sderot in southern Israel, underneath siege from rockets after the Jewish state’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. “I’m at the age that I’m supposed to go to the army and protect my country, and I’m here.”
And I talked to Americans who made the holy land their new home, together with a lifelong New Yorker who mentioned she bought all her belongings to fund the transfer as a result of “in the midst of war-torn hell, Israel needs all of us right now.”
I’ve met severely injured troopers visiting the Big Apple on sponsored medical journeys, one after hobbling on one leg from a booby-trapped building in Gaza.
Yet the most pronounced characteristic is the smile on their faces reflecting the pleasure of their mission and nation.
“I’m not going to sit at home and feel sorry for myself,” one mentioned.
“We only have one homeland, and we’re going to defend it,” mentioned one other.
For the previous two years in these pages, I’ve written about the New York Jewish group’s unity standing up to overwhelming hate — at school, at work, on the streets of their beloved metropolis that’s turned on them.
They dutifully show up each Sunday in Central Park on behalf of the hostages trapped deep inside Hamas hell, chanting, “Let my people go.”
And they defiantly affix outsize Hanukkah decorations which might be the speak of the city, declaring, “Let my people glow.”
Raif Rashed, a New York chef who survived the Nova music pageant, the place he manned a Druze food truck, opened a restaurant this spring the place “healing is on the menu.”
And there’s Jamie, an Upper East Sider who triumphantly wore her solidarity on her sleeve, fashioning a custom-made black trench coat with vertical chains hanging images of each hostage nonetheless in Gaza — the chain carrying “intentional symbolism.”
There have been infinite tales of keffiyeh-clad unhealthy actors hijacking college commencements and ripping hostage posters throughout the metropolis, even together with one Adams administration staffer caught on video viciously tearing down the poignant footage that function a call to conscience.
I’ve seen the heartbreak of a 25-year-old Nova survivor who simply completed telling her story endure a panic assault when a mob armed with Hamas and Hezbollah flags descended on a downtown exhibit meant to memorialize the pageant that noticed a lot bloodshed of younger people in the prime of their lives.
“I was shocked. I thought, ‘How can this be happening again?’ ” she mentioned, dismayed by the “intifada” outdoors.
Protesters interrupted a Columbia class and handed out these antisemitic flyers. X/LishiBaker
Indeed, as the best and worst of humanity share a single grid, Jewish New Yorkers have palpable fears about their very security in a metropolis they are saying forgot them.
Even noon espresso runs risk undesirable consideration, as some people disguise their Jewish-sounding names after they place their drink order after spiking antisemitism.
My direct messages are flooded with suggestions no reporter desires to get: teenagers dealing with harassment at school as a result of of their Jewish identification, medical professionals who don’t act very professionally writing “Long Live Hamas & Hezbollah” and hailing the perpetrators of the wicked Oct. 7 assaults that included rapes, burnings and beheadings as “noble resistance and freedom fighters.”
Yet the fortitude of a battered however unbroken people endures.
As one New Yorker shared with me on the first anniversary’s eve final yr, that passage is taken to coronary heart:
“The strange thing about all of this is that this has made me prouder to be Jewish,” mentioned Amy Cook, who’s been referred to as a “genocidal Nazi” for posting posters of the Americans Hamas kidnapped.
“Being targeted has oddly enough strengthened my connection to my faith and background.”
When preventing a common enemy appears like a battle of good versus evil — and justifying one’s proper to dwell and defend a homeland occurs 24/7 on the digital frontlines — The Post has run numerous tales on humble heroes who sanctify the reminiscence of 1,200 souls viciously taken Oct. 7.
Covering this beat has been powerful — but it surely’s additionally been fulfilling.
I’ve met people with unusual resolve and braveness, seen heroism up close and watched resilience redefined.
But generally a reporter must put her pen down.
And this Oct. 7, I’ll spend it commemorating the day as a proud Jew in New York.
