NIR OZ, Israel—Irit Lahav, a 58-year-old professional tour guide, knows how to walk clueless foreigners through unfamiliar terrain.
But in the year since she survived the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre and mass abduction in her kibbutz, Nir Oz, Lahav has struggled to explain to international media what happened that day. No matter how many interviews she arranges with her grieving neighbors or tours she gives of their burned-out homes, some journalists have continued to tell the story of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust as another chapter in Israel’s supposed persecution of the Palestinians.
"People are saying Israel is bad," Lahav, a former peace activist, told the Washington Free Beacon late last month during a visit to Nir Oz. "What? The Palestinians are holding our hostages ... How would one feel if it was their daughter, their grandfather, their father, their 2 -year-old children, baby Kfir [Bibas in Hamas captivity in Gaza]?"
"The Palestinians are very good at PR, they've done a very good job, and Israeli people say, 'We don't need to explain ourselves because we know that we are moral people,'" she added. "But at the end of the day, people only see what the media shows."
Major English-language news outlets have faced scrutiny for apparent anti-Israel bias in their coverage of the Oct. 7 terror attack and Israel’s resulting war to destroy Hamas in Gaza and bring home the hostages, which has expanded into a multifront conflict with Iran and its other terrorist affiliates. The Washington Post has distinguished itself with repeated factual errors at Israel's expense and a foreign desk packed with former employees of Al Jazeera, a Qatari media network that the Jewish state recently banned from operating in the country, citing alleged ties to Hamas.
Lahav recalled with anger how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported on the August funeral of Avraham Munder, 79, who was abducted from his home in Nir Oz on Oct. 7 along with his wife, daughter, and grandson. Munder's son was murdered in the attack. Munder "suffered bodily and mental torture for months" in Hamas captivity before he was killed, according to the Nir Oz community.
The CBC report, which aired on the state broadcaster’s flagship nightly news program, "The National," made no mention of the Oct. 7 attack or what happened to Munder or his family other than to question "whether it was Hamas or Israel's attacks [on Hamas] that killed" him. Mourners were interviewed only about the Israeli government’s failure to secure the release of the remaining hostages. Then, the segment cut to footage of Palestinians in war-torn Gaza.
"Some of their gruesome injuries, including small headless bodies, are just too horrendous to show," reporter Chris Brown said.
Lahav accused CBC of having "completely erased" the horrors of Oct. 7.
Chuck Thompson, the head of public affairs at CBC, told the Free Beacon that Munder’s "funeral was an important part of Chris Brown's story however it was not the entire focus of his piece. The story, both for The National and the written version, focused on where things are politically with this conflict, and the ongoing suffering on both sides."
Nir Oz, located about a mile from Gaza, was one of the first Israeli communities to be overrun on Oct. 7, and it was among the hardest hit. About 120 heavily armed Hamas terrorists led a mob of nearly 1,000 Gazans, including women and children, into the leafy kibbutz over the course of the daylong pogrom, according to the Nir Oz community. The Palestinians killed or abducted 117 people from among about 400 residents and destroyed most of the kibbutz’s modest one-story houses and other buildings.
Across Israel, 6,000 Gazans, including 3,800 Hamas terrorists, carried out similar atrocities on Oct. 7, according to Israeli estimates. A total of about 1,200 people, most of them Israeli civilians were killed, and 251 were taken captive.
An Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal in November led to the release of 105 of the hostages, 40 of them women and children abducted from Nir Oz. Of the 97 hostages who remain in Gaza, according to Israel, 36 were taken from Nir Oz, including 20 of the 64 presumed to still be alive. Talks for a second hostage-ceasefire deal have gone nowhere.
After Oct. 7, survivors of the massacre in Nir Oz were evacuated to a hotel in Eilat, a resort city at the southern tip of Israel, and then in January to apartments in Kiryat Gat, a city north of Gaza. Locals furnished and equipped the apartments for the newcomers, providing everything from clothing to artwork. Volunteers from around Israel have brought them cakes every Friday.
"It's a very nice gesture," Lahav said as her neighbors gathered to collect the cakes from the lobby of an apartment building in Kiryat Gat late last month. "Some of the people here who are receiving cakes and fruits are people who lost their loved ones or [whose loved ones] are still hostages in the hands of the Palestinians. You look at them, you would not even imagine that they're going through this emotional stress right now. But these are the people."
The Nir Oz community has started developing a three-year plan to rebuild the kibbutz, but disagreements have emerged over how to do so in a way that honors the dead and missing. Some members, especially those with young children, are not sure they will ever feel safe enough to go home.
In the meantime, Lahav has continued to drive back and forth between Kiryat Gat and Nir Oz almost every week—about an hour each way—to give journalists tours of the kibbutz’s wreckage. She said she keeps telling the real story of Oct. 7 in hopes that the world will put more pressure on Hamas to release the hostages.
"My friends who are there [in Gaza, like] Oded Lifshitz, who was like my second father, how would he feel if I would just be sitting around doing nothing?" she said. "I think they expect us, they expect the whole world to turn every stone and say, 'No.' They wait for us. They wait for us to rescue them, and 'us' is the whole world, the whole [of] humanity."