A few minutes’ drive from the Negev city of Netivot, on route 25, there is a field full of burnt cars. The cars – as well as other vehicles – are stacked on top of each other. One could be forgiven for driving past the burnt cars without noticing them. The area is part of the landscape; it could very well be a large junkyard.
It’s not. It’s the collection of the hundreds of vehicles that were found by the Gaza border after the October 7 attack.
People seek out the stack of burnt cars when they visit sites of the October 7 attack. However, like many of the sites from the attack, the vehicle graveyard is not well marked. Like many of the current sites, it seems torn between two opposing feelings: the want to forget and move on, and the want to preserve and remember. Locked between the two, the sites of October 7 remain in limbo.
I was driving down to the Gaza border on May 4, 2026, to see a training of Kibbutz Nir Oz’s security team. Driving down to the Gaza border for me has always carried with it a sense of coming home. I was at the border on October 7 and have been back many times since. As time goes by, the landscape here changes. This is a landscape of memory and memorial. It is also a landscape of life, of Israelis returning to live in border communities here.
The roads around Gaza are now full of traffic. In the months after October 7, this was a closed military area; it took a long time for any semblance of normalcy to return. Even today, many communities have not fully recovered. What this means is that the border remains in limbo. It is still October 7, and yet it is also May 2026.
How to commemorate the October 7 massacre
For Israel and Israelis, the question of how to commemorate the October 7 massacre has no easy answers. This was the largest massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The entire border area was devastated. Some areas of the massacre are well known, such as the Nova festival site. If one drives along the border road that connects the communities, route 232, it strikes them how many memorial sites there are. Just as striking, however, is the lack of a clear government plan to memorialize the massacre.
The result is that many of these sites have been transformed by the people’s initiative, not the government’s. This means that families are the ones who erect roadside memorials. They place photos or put up a bench and other small areas where people can remember their loved ones. Near Re’im, for instance, is an armored bus shelter where many people were killed on October 7. There are now several memorials here, each with photos of the victims. The bus shelter itself is covered with stickers depicting the fallen. To take stock of the tragedy, all one needs to do is sit and look.
As I drive from Re’im and pass the Nova festival site, I notice there are no signs indicating where to turn to reach the memorial site. The site itself is large, but where are the signs that would direct someone where to go? The access roads created after October 7 have now been blocked by a guardrail along the road. This would make sense if the goal was to route traffic a certain way. But there is no attempt to do so.
For those of us who are familiar with the Nova festival, those of us who went there as I did in the days after October 7, when the field opposite the festival site was still full of the cars that people had fled in, we know where to go. However, this site has larger connotations beyond those it has a direct connection to. It is a site that should mean something to the rest of the world.
One can understand that the families of the victims don’t want these memorial sites to become a tourist attraction. Memorials must be handled with sensitivity and care, with input from the victims and their families. It should have input from many people. Notably, however, there is a difference between an approach that ignores the families and one that ignores the site itself.
Driving along the 232 is always a return to those dark days after October 7. Eventually, one passes by Kibbutz Be’eri, the site of a large massacre. Nowadays, new homes are being built. There are new roundabouts on the road. Construction is underway in various areas.
But some things remain the same.
Down the road from Kfar Aza, toward Sderot, a large sign showing the faces of Avera Mengistu, Hisham Sayed, Oron Shaul, and Hadar Goldin continues to face the road. The sign is growing faded. It must have been here for a decade. Goldin and Shaul were soldiers killed in the 2014 war, and their bodies were held in Gaza by Hamas for a decade. Mengistu and Sayed are Israeli civilians who were held in Gaza for almost 10 years.
The sign is a reminder that, before October 7, many had gotten used to having hostages in Gaza. The sign was an attempt to remind people that they are still there. After October 7, there were signs for the 250 hostages taken on that day. Today, it is a relief to drive here and to no longer have that crushing feeling that there are hostages just a mile or two away in Gaza. In fact, the road here is so close to Gaza that one can see into the enclave. Mostly what one catches glimpses of are destroyed homes and buildings. Israel has leveled the areas of Gaza near the border, and the IDF controls around half of Gaza today.
There are other sites here that should be well-known, yet they seem quietly hidden away. The memorial for the IDF observers, the female soldiers who were murdered on October 7, can be accessed near Kibbutz Sa’ad. The observers were at the Nahal Oz base on October 7 when the attack happened. They were massacred at the base. Many of them were stationed at the command center of the base, where they were watching screens that were supposed to bring back images from Gaza. On that day, the terrorists overran the base and burned the command center.
Fifteen of the IDF observers were killed at Nahal Oz, and seven were kidnapped. One of the kidnapped soldiers was killed in Gaza, one was freed, and five were later handed over during a hostage deal in January 2025. The memorial for the observers also commemorates other soldiers who fell at Nahal Oz.
The sign for the memorial is small, and it appears to be on only one side of the road. That means that, if you come from the direction of Kibbutz Sa’ad, you might see it and know how to get to the memorial. You will know to turn quickly right into a dirt road that cuts across a field and then snakes around to a hill where the memorial is located. Unfortunately, the sign is easy to miss. You have to be on the lookout for it.
Why is such an important memorial hidden away like this? Other memorials in the country, which commemorate sites where many soldiers fell, can be found far more easily. For instance, the memorials for the 1997 helicopter disaster, where 73 soldiers fell, are well-known. There is one in She’ar Yashuv in northern Israel, for instance. What is the reasoning for making the memorial for the observers both hard to find and get to?
The landscape of October 7 will take many years to be developed, and many more to heal. Mourning is always complicated. The sites of October 7 are already going through many changes. Many communities’ destroyed homes have already been demolished. Some things will be preserved, and others will not. Each community will find its own way to memorialize the fallen.
In many cases, however, these communities feel that they have not received the support they deserve. There is a sense that the country is still not ready to face what befell people on October 7. There are attempts to change the name of the war and to present the ongoing conflict, now almost 1,000 days long, as a victory.
This question of how to present October 7 has haunted the country in many different ways. Before this, the question was how to phrase the memorial for the Holocaust. Unlike the Holocaust, where there is a natural challenge of how to commemorate it physically in Europe, October 7 has a landscape here in Israel. The commemoration is in our hands – and we should not let it slip away.