Israelis Fled These Towns After Hamas Attacked. Now They’re Coming Home.

SDEROT, Israel—On Oct. 7, as rockets streamed overhead and Gazan militants rampaged through her town of Sderot, Keren Elkobi hid with her three sons and husband all day in their home’s bomb shelter, fearing for their lives. The next morning, as the fighting continued, they packed the children in the car and sped away as fast as they could.

Five months later, despite lingering anxiety, they are living in Sderot again, less than a mile from the Gaza border.

“Once you build a community, and it becomes like a family, it’s hard to be anywhere else,” Elkobi said.

The Elkobis are among the tens of thousands of people who have recently returned to Sderot—part of a revival of small Israeli communities near the Gaza border that constitutes a tactical victory for Israel’s government, even as it speaks to the pull of ordinary life.

Sderot was the largest Israeli community invaded by Gazan militants on Oct. 7. The attackers arrived in white Toyota pickup trucks and gunned down passersby on the streets as part of the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history. At least 45 people were killed in the city, according to a spokesperson for the local government.

Now the city, which for months was populated almost exclusively by soldiers and police, is coming back to life. Traffic has returned to the streets. Malls have reopened, and some restaurants are once again packed with customers. Homes damaged by rockets are wreathed in scaffolding to repair the holes.

That revival is a relief to the Israeli government, which worried residents wouldn’t feel safe enough to return to communities near Gaza, effectively shrinking the borders of a country the size of New Jersey. The government has offered financial subsidies amounting to thousands of dollars a month to encourage families to move back.

The communities most affected by the Oct. 7 attack and closest to Gaza, where many homes were destroyed, remain empty and closed to the public. There are also still 60,000 Israelis displaced from their homes in northern Israel due to attacks from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Those displaced from northern Israel are still unable to return home as concerns linger that Hezbollah could target civilians near the border similarly to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.

The dislocation in Israel pales in comparison to Gaza, where 1.7 million Palestinians have fled their homes to escape the destruction wrought on the territory by half a year of devastating combat. A trickle of Palestinians have begun returning to the southern city of Khan Younis, once home to 400,000 people, after Israeli troops pulled out of the city earlier this month.

Many Khan Younis residents are returning to homes partially or completely demolished in the fighting. The streets of the city, like those across much of Gaza, have been pulverized by Israel’s armored vehicles into rivers of orange sand and rubble.

The recent withdrawal of troops from Khan Younis means the Israeli military is no longer running protracted operations in Gaza. The U.S. has pushed a new proposal for a temporary cease-fire, though Israel continues to threaten an invasion of Rafah, Hamas’s last stronghold.

More than 70% of Israelis evacuated from communities on the border with Gaza have returned. The number is 80% in Sderot. Residents there said they were lured back in part by the subsidies, which are set to continue until July. But far more important, they said, was the desire to return to the routines and structure of home, especially for their children.

The Elkobi family, like many others, said they hadn’t been certain of when or if they would be able to go back. Camped out in temporary housing near Jerusalem, they watched as their home became a war zone and a daily target for rocket attacks.

When The Wall Street Journal visited in October, Sderot felt like a ghost town. The streets were empty except for patrolling soldiers and the charred shells of vehicles destroyed by Hamas rockets. Drones and jet fighters flew constantly overhead.

Sderot is still not a normal place. The most recent rocket launch against the city occurred on Friday, sending locals running to bomb shelters, though no damage was done.

But for many residents, the prospect of living with their children in limbo in government-subsidized hotel rooms has outweighed the potential drawbacks of returning.

“For a week or two it is nice in a hotel,” said Mali Nisimpur, a teacher in Sderot with three children. But she said it quickly became clear that “kids need clear borders and that’s what they get at home. Despite the booms, home is where safety is.”

The main trigger for most families to return was the reopening of schools in early March, said residents and city officials.

Children at Sderot’s largest school, which has around 1,200 middle- and high-school students, said they were happy to be back home, though life had changed. The bursts of artillery fire scare them, they said, and they don’t travel around at night anymore.

Reminders of the war abound on campus. A large new mural names the alumni who were among those who were killed on Oct. 7. Desks and walls are decorated with stickers of the pictures of soldiers killed in Gaza.

Nisimpur, who teaches English, said it can be a struggle to get students to study after what they have been through. One of her new tasks is to take them to play with therapy dogs.

Svetlana Hanan, who manages an electronics retail store, plays news on the shop’s big screen TVs, but she said she can’t bring herself to watch images of the war. Customers are quick to anger, she said, which she speculated was a consequence of trauma from the October attack.

“All my life here, I’ve been in a state of war,” said Hanan, one of many elderly immigrants from the former Soviet Union attracted to the city by its affordability. Hanan, who returned to Sderot weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks and whose daughter and grandchildren also live in the city, said she doesn’t plan to leave again. “Starting everything new isn’t easy,” she said.

Orna Didi, a 51-year-old teacher with four children who was shopping for a hair dryer in Hanan’s shop on a recent day, said the Oct. 7 attack had shaken her confidence in Israel’s military. Still, residents had to trust that authorities would do better in the future.

“God help us if we give up. This is our home,” she said.

The Israeli military has repeatedly apologized for failing to respond adequately on Oct. 7 and vowed to win back public trust. Israel’s chief of military intelligence tendered his resignation on Monday, becoming the country’s first senior official to step down in the aftermath of the Hamas attack.

Targeted by periodic rocket fire from Gaza for more than two decades, Sderot isn’t a place that gets rattled easily. Bomb shelters grace the corner of every street, every bus stop and every children’s park.

But the sense of fear is much higher than before, residents said. At the end of March, they said, a false alarm of another infiltration attempt from Gaza sparked terror in those who had returned.

Shira Shechtman, a social worker with three children, said she is torn over the decision of whether to return to Sderot despite having lived there for 20 years. She called the October bloodshed “a deal-breaker.”

Shechtman’s family is renting an apartment near the city of Beersheba, roughly 25 miles east of the Gaza border, and her children were put in a local school. “The state isn’t keeping its part of the contract—to ensure that there will be minimum safety,” she said.

But for others, including some of the city’s political outliers, the lure of home is too strong to resist.

Unlike Sderot’s right-leaning population, which overwhelmingly voted for Israel’s current government, Gali Bessudo has always opposed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A few months ago, she vowed from a podium at a protest in Tel Aviv that she wouldn’t return home until all of Israel’s hostages in Gaza had been freed, the war was concluded and quiet restored.

None of those things have happened yet. But she, her teenage son and husband all missed their lives in the city. They moved back in late March.

“I’m frustrated that periodically Qassam rockets are fired at us,” she said, referring to short-range rockets used by Hamas. “I’m frustrated that I don’t know when the war will end, and that I don’t see any horizon for a better future.”

“But I’m happy to return because I love my home and I love the city,” she said.

Write to Dov Lieber at [email protected]