EEight-year-old Emily is trapped in the bomb shelter of her friend Hila's house. Hamas terrorists found the two girls – along with Hila's mother Raya. Like the doors in many kibbutz shelters throughout southern Israel, the doors had no locks because death was expected from the air, not because the killers went door to door. “When they came, we opened it because if we had held the door they would have shot and the bullets would have hit us,” Emily recalled.
It was late afternoon on October 7 last year at the Biri Kibbutz, a farming community paradise for 1,200 Israelis located 50 miles from Tel Aviv and three miles from Gaza. Emily and Hila had spent the night before falling asleep watching The Vampire Diaries. They woke up to a very bloodthirsty reality.
Across Be'eri, a drama played out over and over again: men, women and sometimes children clinging to bomb shelter doorknobs to fend off terrorists, often shot with reinforced steel, sometimes fatally, the same fate as they tried to save their loved ones.
Five and a half hours earlier, Hamas arrived on motorcycles. As neighbors hid as best they could, WhatsApp exploded with unbelievable news. “Where's the army?” “They are killing us – come quickly!” We were told that 14 troops arrived in the middle of the night by helicopter, but withdrew after one was injured. For several hours, the kibbutzniks were on their own.
By midday, houses were ablaze, corpses littered the streets and terrorists were hunting Israelis to kill or kidnap. A few doors down from Raya's dorm, Emily's dad, Tom, doesn't know his daughter's fate. The phones were dead and he didn't dare go out.
One Day in October is composed of heartbreaking survivor interviews with disturbing footage from phones and security cameras. If you want insight into why Israel is doing what it is doing in Gaza and Lebanon, this film might help. This clearly demonstrates that the IDF and Mossad were caught napping on October 7 last year as the very people they were supposed to protect were massacred. Never again, one might think.
If you want to understand why Hamas kills civilians, a day in October won't help. In fact, it does a good job of demonizing the Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, then as shameless civilian looters, breaking into kibbutzim as bodies lay in the streets, where people living in fear hid.
Camera footage of the 4×4, time-stamped at 8.01am, includes audio of the unseen terrorists racing to join the killing field in frenzied excitement. “Time for Jihad Nation! … I swear to God! … We will massacre them! … I want to livestream this! To show the people back home!” A fellow speaker already assures them: Hamas slaughtered Israelis for the audience in real time.
Despite such apparent evil, I am reminded of Cy Endfield's film with the nameless hordes of Zulu-African warriors pitted against the British protagonists we are encouraged to identify with. Television and cinematic narratives often work as other machines in this way. At worst, a day in October, unknowingly, follows the same pattern.
All our sympathies are with the Israelis concerned. Mother sends goodbye messages as she dies of gunshot wounds. A girl sends cute pictures of herself playing with her friends to her mom, who is cowering in a toilet room, hoping she can hear the terrorists breathing outside. In contrast, Hamas terrorists are a common threat on CCTV, whose intentions go beyond a single day in October.
At the end of the film, Énad, a mother of four, recalls the day she returned to work after the attack. She looked out the window of the print shop towards Gaza. Instead of seeing buildings and the sky normally, she saw only black smoke: Israel was bombing the Palestinians. “That's when I understood what war was,” says Aynaud. “It upset me for a moment. But when you think about what they did to us, that feeling goes away. A devastating comment, any glimmer of empathy was quickly dispelled.
About 101 kibbutzniks and 31 soldiers were killed in Biri on 7 October. Of the 32 hostages captured, five have been killed and three remain in Gaza. So far, since October 7, 40,000 Gazans have died, many under a dark cloud that Ainat watched from her window.
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As for little Emily, she reached the age of nine in Gaza before she, Hila and Raya were released. Her father thought she was dead for days.
After her release, Tom was told by psychiatrists not to talk to his daughter about his experiences. However, Emily remembers something horrible again and again – like seeing the dead bodies of her neighbors who were chased away by kidnappers.
Few return to Beery, but Tom prefers. He explains that if people from the south of Israel had not returned to the kibbutzim, which turned into killing zones last October, Hamas would have won. Founded in 1946, Biri is older than the State of Israel, and its cherished realization of a socialist, communal way of life. “I'm going back,” he protests. Fair enough, but I wonder if Emily's psychiatrists thought this was a good idea.
