Kfar Aza massacre victims in Israel have been relocated en masse to a hotel in the middle of the country

Their homes in ruins, their loved ones murdered, hundreds of survivors from the Israeli town of Kfar Aza are rebuilding their lives from a hotel in the middle of the country.

Din Tesler, 21, left, survived the terrorist massacre at an electronic dance music festival in Israel’s south last weekend. His friend, Bar Kuperstein, 21, was captured by Hamas.

A week ago, when the world was still whole, Maor Moravia took his family to the home of a close friend in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz in ­Israel’s south, where they sparked up a barbecue for dinner and didn’t stop talking until almost 2am.

One moment sticks out, a snippet of the evening when Mor­avia, filled with contentment, said he would live in Kfar Aza for the rest of his life.

The south, with the warmth of its people and their belief in community, was the most beautiful region in Israel, he always felt.

Now, it’s hard for him to ­imagine returning at all.

“It’s like asking will you go back to live in Melbourne when ISIS is in the next city,” the 37-year-old said.

“Of course not, there’s no way you will go to be a neighbour of ISIS, and Hamas is worse than ISIS.

You can’t be neighbours with these people.”

Their lives in pieces after the weekend massacre, authorities moved quickly to speed the people of Kfar Aza to the centre of the country, uprooting their entire community to one location: the Shefayim Hotel.

To walk inside is to experience a village in miniature. The lobby is abuzz with assistants and social workers. Two renowned comedians, Israel Katorza and Avi Nussbaum, kick back with the residents, providing light relief, the hotel having drawn artists and entertainers all week to try to lift the atmosphere. A separate room is used for families to sit shiva, the ritual of formal mourning for the dead.

“You haven’t been to Walmart?” asks Moravia. It’s not quite the super-sized American chain where one can buy a gun, but down a winding stone path we’re led to a cavernous hall where tables overflow with donated staples – toiletries, T-shirts, iPhone chargers, breakfast cereals – all free to take. In the scramble for safety, most people arrived without much more than the clothes on their backs.

Moravia and his family survived by sheltering in a safe room. He hasn’t a clue what the future holds. Neither do many of the souls wandering about this strange hotel in an unfamiliar part of the country, their days punctuated by burials.

“There are people here who lost their families, their parents. There are orphans. There is a guy whose wife and two children were kidnapped – so how do you comfort this man? What can you tell him?” Moravia says.

It took 20 hours of hiding in a safe room, listening to rifle fire and rocket-propelled grenades, before the Israel Defence Forces finally arrived with their armoured personnel carriers and neutralised the terrorists. Moravia had a pistol with him throughout the ordeal but his own experience in the service told him it would have been useless against the gunmen’s heavy weaponry. “Hitting them with a pistol is like throwing rocks on them,” he said.

By the time soldiers rolled up it was 2am. He and his wife were given five minutes to collect their belongings. “So we took the important things. Wallet, keys,” and he stops, shaking his head with a smirk, “I don’t know, keys for what? I can’t open anything with it.”

Maor Moravia, aged 37, survived the terrorist attack on Kfar Aza, in Israel’s south. His family, along with the rest of the village, are recovering at the Shefayim Hotel in the centre of the country.

They grabbed clothes for the kids and ran into a waiting APC, then on to a meeting point where survivors gathered and the scale of the fatalities, the missing, became bitterly clear. Touring Kfar Aza and its ruins this week, Major General Itai Veruv described the scenes not in terms of war, but in terms of mass murder.

“Mothers, fathers, babies, young families killed in their beds, in the protection room, in the dining room, in their garden,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this, and I’ve served for 40 years.”

Other stories of survival are just as distressing. Din Tesler, a 21-year-old who worked a security job at an electronic dance music festival, the site of a separate massacre in the country’s south, told The Australian his close friend, Bar Kuperstein, was captured when they became separated.

Din Tesler, 21, left, survived the terrorist massacre at an electronic dance music festival in Israel’s south last weekend. His friend, Bar Kuperstein, 21, was captured by Hamas.

“I found myself running alone. I’m running and hear a lot of bullets. You understand you’re in a war zone,” he said. “I saw a big cactus bush and jumped into it, with all the pain. I didn’t care, and I covered myself with dirt, leaves – anything to hide.”

His phone running out of battery, Tesler texted friends and family his location but, like the residents of Kfar Aza, he couldn’t have known the army was responding to a multitude of Hamas attacks at the same time.

At one point, the terrorists came within two or three metres of his location. Miraculously they failed to spot him. “I don’t know how but they didn’t see me,” he said.

Reunited later with his parents in Beer Sheba, Tesler learned of Kuperstein’s fate. “We’re praying for Bar,” he said.