Be’eri Kibbutz is approached along Route 232 from the southern Israeli city of Sderot. The setting, at the north-west of the Negev desert, is idyllic. Through the secure yellow fence, one’s preliminary impression is still of verdant grounds, a kempt car park and an imposing factory that prints Israel’s banknotes.

Yet on this morning, and on most mornings since October 7, Simchat Torah in the Jewish calendar, one’s second impression is of its enveloping silence – the silence of abandonment. For Be’eri was one of the 20 kibbutzes targeted by Hamas on the bloodiest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and on the first day of what looms as one of the region’s longest wars.