BE'ERI, ISRAEL — The ruins hold the stubborn memory of a town massacred 21 months ago.
Houses gape like broken teeth. Doors torn from their hinges. Windows shattered. Lives remain scattered in the dirt: a single shoe, scorched photographs, a child’s mug proclaiming "World’s Best Dad."
One house, where Paul Castelvi devoted to caring for the elderly, is a blackened carcass. Forty years old. Filipino caregiver. He died refusing to leave the couple he held until the end.
They were three of the 102 residents killed on 7 October 2023, when Hamas terrorists turned this kibbutz into a slaughterhouse and the world’s eyes could only stare and parse blame.
Danny Majzner walks through the rubble. Australian-Israeli, former IDF, now a bike-path builder. His elder sister was among the dead. He pauses at Paul’s doorway. Silence hangs. Then he speaks as if the world has been lying to itself since 7 October.
The words are a hammer to headlines that sanitize death. This is what happened. This is the truth. "Paul was family," he says. "They burned this house with people inside."
Be’eri was supposed to be secure. Inside the Gaza envelope, a few kilometers from one of the most militarized borders on the planet. Cameras. Patrols. Early-warning systems. The arsenal of a state that prides itself on never being surprised.
Families here kept faith in that promise. They built gardens, raised children, baked bread in kitchens now blackened by fire.
They believed soldiers would arrive before anything truly unthinkable could happen.
Instead, residents waited behind locked doors, sending texts for help into a limbo, while the gunfire came closer.
That morning began with militants smashing through the gates at 6:30 a.m. Majzner reckons 350 of them Hamas terrorists at one stage in this kibbutz alone.
Paul helped barricade his employers into the safe room. At 9:17, a neighbor texted friends: they were alive, pinned down, biding for a safe out.
Minutes later, gunfire. Investigators believe Paul stepped out, thinking Israeli forces had arrived. He was shot. Then the house was engulfed in flames.
Seven hours. That is the time residents of Be’eri waited, Majzner said, while terrorists hunted house to house. Seven hours. The IDF, uncharacteristically, has been muted in its defense. Its usual mythology collapsed here.
Israel calls 7 October a failure of intelligence. In Be’eri, it feels like abandonment.
"The left us to die," Majzner says, nudging a scorched remnant with his boot.
“Normally, when there’s something… in 20 minutes, the army’s here. In two hours, it’s everything back to normal. And here… seven hours, it took you guys to get here."
Majzner spits. Each word a bullet.
“One of the strongest armies in the world. Definitely in the Middle East. You saw what we did in Iran, Lebanon, Syria. And here, we can’t do it. Were you trained for this for so long?"
"I think there’s a chain reaction of fuck-ups. We want a proper inquiry about what happened on October 7. But the government don’t want a proper inquiry."
Paul was one of at least four Filipinos killed that morning, the Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed. Across Israel, 30,000 Filipinos live, mostly caregivers, quietly keeping others alive while their own lives can vanish in a morning.
His widow lived and returned home to give birth. Yet life itself becomes a measure of loss when survival is a complicated, hollow inheritance.
Survivors receive $3,000 a month from the government. Crews are building 120 new homes on Be’eri’s less-damaged side. The kibbutz will recover in structure, albeit not in spirit.
Majzner stops among the ruins, eyes sweeping the blackened doorways.
"Who’s to say that the next 7th of October is not just around the corner?"
The state can send more troops, more cameras, more barbed wire. Some say the ruins should be rebuilt. Others say they should be left to rot as proof that this happened
But it cannot restore certainty that when the worst comes, someone will stand between you and the door.
Majzner stops at a makeshift memorial outside Paul’s house and places a small stone atop the pile.
“They promised us security,” he says. “On October 7, that promise burned with him.”
In Be’eri, the questions are permanent, and cast a shadow over hollow assurances of the state. Paul could have run. He stayed. That’s who he was.
He lingers in every scorched doorway, every ruined home with a Filipino caregiver on 7 October, a defiant testament to courage when the world promised protection and they became the shield it could not be.