War Correspondent Trey Yingst Recounts the Horrors of October 7 and Its Aftermath

My team and I were riding, late at night, through the lightless Gaza Strip in an open-air army Humvee, wide open to rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fire from the darkened buildings above, hoping against hope we were going in the direction of the border with Israel. I was wondering what I was doing with my life.

This embed—a correspondents’ attachment to military units in armed conflict—already dangerous enough, had become by far the most dangerous thing I’d ever done. On what was supposed to be a two-hour assignment, we’d been off the grid—no cell, little GPS—for more than four hours. We hadn’t been able to check in with New York, and our bosses would be worried.

I hadn’t been able to text my dad, in Pennsylvania. Since my mom died in 2022, he’s been even more focused on my career than before. He, of course, would be concerned as well.

And now we were lost in the war zone in Gaza.

I’d been embedded in order to visit Al-Shifa hospital. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had bombarded and partially occupied it. I’d seen sleeping soldiers on the floor of the cafeteria, go bags stashed behind an MRI machine, a gaping hole blown in the wall through which we entered the complex, so dark that as we climbed through it, I couldn’t see my hands. It was critical for me to report on that scene—beyond the front line of Israel’s war against Hamas.

Now, though, I was questioning my choices.

Exposure to danger like this had become a repeating pattern. Exactly four years before, to the minute, I had been reporting from Gaza City because I’d gotten trapped there when a conflict broke out between Israel and Islamic Jihad. Tonight I was back, and the situation was even more perilous. Going in, we had ridden through the war zone in an armored personnel carrier (APC), on roads and paths cleared by the Israeli military—and that had been tense enough. Then, after the hospital visit, the officers at the staging area hadn’t been able to find us an APC for the trip out. Our only option: open-air Humvees with a bunch of young soldiers. And though I knew the soldiers were trying to keep us safe, they kept doing everything wrong.

As the tires spun in mounds of sand and dirt, they told us to keep our seat belts on, but Sean, our security member, muttered to me and Yaniv, the cameraman, not to listen. Stay unbuckled. If we got hit or ambushed, we’d need to be able to bail quickly. The soldiers argued about which way to go, took dark streets not yet fully under the control of the Israeli military, and turned the headlights on, then off, then on again.

My focus went into hyperdrive, as it always does when I’m in danger. I could see better. Hear better. Smell better: decomposing people buried under the rubble, the stench hitting me in the face.

Body tense, I gripped the Humvee’s metal cage. With each bump, my left shoulder slammed the ammunition box mounted on the vehicle’s edge. It seemed more and more likely that we’d never get out…

How did I get myself into this? What am I doing?

At this point, the war had been underway for nearly forty days. Two and a half weeks earlier, Israeli ground forces entered the strip to take the battle to Hamas in the aftermath of the October 7 attack and massacre. Active ground fighting was unfolding in numerous locations.

Even before October 7, it had been a year of even greater tension and conflict than usual between Israel and Gaza. A Palestinian territory lying between the Israeli border and the Mediterranean Sea, blockaded by Israel and governed by Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist organization avowedly dedicated to Israel’s destruction, Gaza has been a frequent source of operations carried out against Israel by Hamas. For its part, Israel has frequently assassinated leaders of Hamas and smaller organizations.

On January 3, 2023, militant forces in Gaza made their first attempt of the year to target southern Israel. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has a history of taking extreme public positions regarding Palestinians, had visited the area known by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. Hamas had warned that such a visit would ignite the region, and indeed a rocket was launched from Gaza that day. While the fire fell short and didn’t lead to a major clash, the day set the tone for the year.

Tensions further escalated just a few months later, in the spring of 2023, giving us the first major sign that the year could see a larger war. A four-day conflict erupted between Israel and Islamic Jihad in an operation the Israelis called Shield and Arrow. The death of Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan after an eighty-seven-day hunger strike drew rocket fire from Gaza in early May. Rather than respond immediately, Israel waited a week before targeting and assassinating Islamic Jihad commanders. That move was as much about deterrence as it was about sending an internal message that attacks against Israel won’t be tolerated.

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That short conflict was relatively intense—but it never drew in Hamas. Some analysts said that was because Hamas was looking forward to a more stable political future in Gaza and the territory on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Observers online even went so far as to say Hamas was changing as an organization, becoming more moderate. To many, that idea seemed like a fantasy. Hamas leadership routinely made threats against Israel. They held rallies calling for the destruction of the Jewish state and jihad (holy war) against Jews. And Hamas had often made serious miscalculations about Israeli responses.

Tension between Israel and Gaza is the rule, not the exception. Multiple skirmishes and limited conflicts can erupt during a single year. The sparks have varied: sometimes prisoners on hunger strike, sometimes clashes at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and rising tension around the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The fire, though, was always the same: rockets launched from one of thousands of positions in Gaza, followed by heavy Israeli bombardment of Gaza, coupled with artillery and naval shelling. Sometimes, as in the fifty-one-day war in 2014, a limited Israeli ground component was added to the equation before a cease-fire solution was arrived at: more money into Gaza, aid projects, extended work permits for the Palestinian population.

Such interactions had become routine. Still, the months after the Shield and Arrow conflict saw bloodshed on a scale uncommon even for Israel. Two thousand twenty-three became the deadliest year for Israelis and Palestinians in decades. The state of tension and conflict was becoming categorically different.

How did I get myself into this? What am I doing?

Simple: I always wanted to be an international journalist. Every day after school, in our rural part of the suburbs of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, my twin sister, Aly, and I walked across two fields to our grandmother’s house. An avid traveler and adventurer, she had ventured around the globe. She had stories, coins, and gifts that piqued our interest in far-off lands.

I was also fascinated with Indiana Jones and Egypt. My grandmother promised that when I turned sixteen, and she turned eighty-two, she’d take me there. She made good on that promise.

In November 2009, my grandmother and I were at the end of a riverboat cruise down the Nile when I went to her cabin and found her very pale and looking like a deer in headlights. She asked me to find our local guide. It turned out that she was having a heart attack, ultimately a stroke. In Aswan, Egypt, five hundred miles from Cairo—not a place you’d expect the best medical treatment.

But my grandmother survived the ordeal. She lived into her nineties. And it was on that trip that I started to journal, to write notes of our adventures in this faraway land. When she died, I buried those notes with her—with the exception of one page. It described seeing the Pyramids of Giza.

I took that page back to Egypt and floated it on the Nile.

And now I was stuck. Literally, stuck in the sand, under immense threat. And emotionally, trapped by the necessity of putting myself in danger to get these stories, knowing there was no other choice.

Sean pulled out his phone and got a ping of GPS signal. My anxiety spiked. We were about a mile off the exit route, in an unlit, destroyed neighborhood full of tall buildings. “Maybe don’t tell New York about this,” he whispered in my ear.

As we contemplated the possibility of being targeted at any moment, few words were spoken. I scanned the buildings and piles of rubble for militants who might try to ambush us. So did Sean and Yaniv.

I started thinking of all the things I would miss if I died. I realized that for the first time in my life, I was truly contemplating death. But just in case we made it out unharmed, I was also making a deal.

No more embeds, I promised. At least for a while—maybe the whole war.

That’s what I told myself.

On the morning of October 11, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel for scheduled meetings. While the trip had practical aspects, Blinken was largely sent as a display of U.S. solidarity with the Israeli people.

The big questions were now looming: “Will Israel invade Gaza?” “If so, when?” Hamas claimed they had dozens of hostages, but hundreds were still missing. The international attention and pressure surrounding the story was growing, and many were already starting to criticize Israel’s response.

With the Israeli air campaign in full force, my team and I needed to simultaneously gather information about the attack on the seventh, understand the scope of the attacks at the Nova Music Festival and in the kibbutzim, cover the war that was unfolding, and cover the rising death toll inside Gaza.

To get information out of the kibbutzim was especially difficult. We could get to Sderot. We could get to areas where rockets were landing in southern Israel. We could get reports from people inside Gaza and updates from the military. But we couldn’t get into the communities along the Gaza border: the army had declared the area a closed military zone.

I knew that reporting from that zone would be the most important thing. Having covered wars for a decade, I know that even in the most horrific circumstances, people can forget why wars start. It’s part of our role as journalists to write that first draft of history, to give our audience immediate context yet also cement the truth in the history books with evidence of crimes that have been committed.

I wished I could also have been in Gaza, reporting on what was happening to Palestinians there, and the aftermath of the Israeli response. But I could only be in one place at a time. So far, I was still reporting only from southern Israel.

Early on the eleventh, I quoted a post on X with the simple comment. “Read this post. It’s important.” It was a statement from a Palestinian woman:

“I am a Palestinian who doesn’t celebrate Hamas actions. It’s personal, it’s my Jewish friends hurt. I am terrified for my family & friends in Gaza & West Bank. This US vs. THEM paradigm is wrong. This isn’t Arabs vs. Jews. Many of us on the same side of justice & peace.”

A story like this involves very high emotion. I had to make sure that our coverage wasn’t demonizing Palestinians. Some Palestinians entered Israel to slaughter Israelis, some entered to loot, some to look around. Others never entered but cheered when hostages were brought back to Gaza. Others, albeit quietly, condemned the actions of Hamas as setting the Palestinian cause back decades. It was my role to understand the nuance on both sides of the conflict and take it into consideration, even as I reported from the scenes of murders committed on the seventh.

I had fallen deeply asleep the night before, after a failed attempt to get to a kibbutz near the border with an intelligence contact. Having passed out without bothering to take off my clothes, I woke up on the morning of the eleventh, quickly washed my face, and took the elevator downstairs. Just before 10 a.m., we headed back toward the border.

En route, I got a text message from my friend Hamdah Salhut that detoured us to Sderot. Then an i24 journalist, now an Al Jazeera correspondent, Hamdah, a Palestinian American, was alerting me to bodies being pulled from rubble in the city. There’s Hamas bodies here, she wrote. Still at the police station. She sent a photo and said, They are preparing to move them.

The security situation in Sderot was still uncertain. Further infiltration attempts had been reported along the border. This time we approached the police station from the other side, but I couldn’t even make out where we were: they’d begun to completely tear the building down and remove the debris. With dust filling the air, we walked around to the other side.

The Israeli volunteer civilian rescue unit ZAKA, in full white disposable body suits with blue gloves, was using a yellow JCB backhoe to drag the bodies of Hamas militants out of the wreckage of the station. The bloated body of a fighter lay facedown, a red rope tied around the waist. Next to that one, two other corpses were transferred into white body bags.

In the background, another backhoe, this one with a jackhammer attached, blasted away at the pile of twisted metal and concrete.

I met up with Hamdah, giving her a hug. “This is crazy,” she said. Her eyes were sad. Hamdah is one of the strongest and hardest-working people I know—but I could tell she was affected by the war erupting all around us.

We headed to an artillery position nearby, in a field, and reported from there throughout the morning. At this point in the war, our hits were usually multiple times an hour on Fox News Channel and Fox Business. Israeli units in the field were firing constant barrages, raining shells into the eastern side of Gaza. A variety of shells sat next to each cannon. The crack of outgoing missiles raised dust around each position before the next order was given.

Occasionally, rockets were fired from northern Gaza. This was a true exchange of fire.

During one live report on Mornings with Maria, I held the mic in one hand and my ear with the other. Back in May I’d been standing too close to an Iron Dome battery when it launched an interceptor. That, along with not using enough ear protection during the Tulkarem raid in September, had damaged the hearing in my right ear. I’d been to the doctor in Jerusalem and was told it could be temporary.

Now I reported: “The military is telling us today that more than three thousand targets have been hit since Saturday morning. I’m going to step out of the way here and just show you what it looks like as this shelling is taking place.” We panned to soldiers in the distance, marching in a straight line, training for their mission ahead. The chyron read, “Israel Prepares for Ground Invasion of Gaza.”

“Fields have been turned into bases, dirt roads have been turned into arteries for the army to deliver supplies and to deliver weapons to their fighters because it is not a question of if Israel will go into Gaza, but rather a question of when,” I reported.

Before our hits for Fox & Friends, we ran into Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, the international spokesman for the military, and his team on the side of the road. Hecht and I had a good relationship, and I figured this could be a good chance to interview him live.

“Where do things stand now in terms of preparation? It appears the Israelis are staging to enter Gaza.”

“So before talking about Gaza,” Richard replied, “again I’m here, you’re here, to see what happened here. We’re around and with the communities. Yesterday I entered Kfar Aza with journalists to show the world what happened there and it was an ISIS, even worse than ISIS carnage. Bodies, decapitated people. Horrific.

“And we are now preparing ourselves,” he said. “We’re now striking Gaza also from the air and all future options are on the table. We are focusing mainly on compounds in Gaza and it’s a very, very severe strike right now in order to take out their capabilities.”

The crack of outgoing artillery.

“In Kfar Aza,” I said, “we understand there were mutilated bodies. Decapitated women and children. Is that accurate?” I had seen the reports but was skeptical—I needed to continue investigating the claims. “Yes. We spoke to soldiers. It wasn’t me speaking as a spokesperson.

We went in there, there were Israeli reserve paratroopers. And they told the stories. They told the stories. And again, I’m still recovering from that day. I even get emotional thinking about it.”

After the interview I talked with Keren Hajioff, a longtime contact, friend of my friend Ariel, who was now in reserve duty. Keren is the former spokesperson for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. “You’re coming, right?” she said.

She was talking about Kibbutz Be’eri.

Established in 1946 in the northwest of the Negev Desert, Be’eri was known for its art gallery. And the small farming community of just over 1,000 people looked like a painting itself. Rolling hills lead to luscious fields. A small printing factory employed many of its residents, and like many kibbutzim along the Gaza border the community had good relationships with Palestinians and was home to many peace activists. Its proximity to Gaza, only three miles from the border, nevertheless left it vulnerable to frequent mortar and rocket attacks.

Families in Be’eri knew the drill. Mortars or rockets came a few times a year. If there were sirens, you entered your bomb shelter, known in Israel as a mamad, and waited for the all-clear. By 2023, the red-alert sirens iPhone app, serving as yet another warning of incoming fire, was as common as the calculator app. The attacks were never much of a problem.

On the night of October 6, residents had gathered in the dining hall to celebrate seventy-seven years since the founding of the kibbutz. It was Shabbat, so the wine flowed, as neighbors gathered for a small party. It was also the last day of the weeklong Sukkot holiday. The crisp October evening turned into a chilly night. As in most communities in the Negev Desert, the lack of light pollution allowed residents a clear glimpse of the stars on their walk home. It was quiet. It was peaceful.

Early Saturday morning, everything changed.

Loud blasts pierced the air of Kibbutz Be’eri as Qassam rockets were intercepted overhead in that initial 6:29 a.m. barrage. The blare of rocket sirens echoed through the streets. “Zeva Adom, Zeva Adom”: Red Alert. That was an alarm clock for Be’eri residents. They woke up and hurried into their safe rooms.

Meanwhile, in flight from the Nova Music Festival, Yasmin and Tal had seen the militants at the bomb shelter, fled, run into a traffic jam, and pulled a U-turn; now they were arriving at Be’eri. The community was known to Yasmin as one of the richer kibbutzim in Israel, a protected and safe place. With rockets flying, they drove up to the yellow sliding gate behind another car, which opened the gate.

A few hundred feet inside, they encountered the Be’eri security team, in the process of responding to the rocket alarm. “Hello, we are from the party,” Yasmin told them. “There was a terrorist at the migunit [outdoor bomb shelter]. Please help us!”

They were told to get out of the car and get into one of the Be’eri miguniot.

They did, but back at the entrance to the kibbutz, what would become an hours-long nightmare for Be’eri—and for Yasmin and Tal—was now underway.

CCTV video shows the beginning of the attack on the kibbutz:

At 6:55 a.m., two Hamas fighters approach the yellow sliding gate at the entrance of Be’eri, Kalashnikovs in hand.

The first militant, dressed in camouflage, tries to slip under the gate.

Unable to make it through, he gets up, goes to the empty guard post, smashes the window with the butt of his gun, and climbs inside.

Seconds later, a bluishgray Mazda approaches the gate.

The Hamas gunmen ambush the car as the gate slowly opens.

That’s how Be’eri was breached. Minutes later, militants began to flow in on motorbikes, two to a bike and carrying weapons, including RPGs.

Yasmin and Tal had spent ten minutes in the shelter when they heard the whole security team outside yelling, running. “Go out from here!” one man yelled at them. “There are terrorists all over the kibbutz!”

Yasmin thought this must be the two gunmen they’d seen on the road—assuming that those relatively lone gunmen must have made it to Be’eri—and she and Tal left the shelter, made a run straight to their car, jumped in, and drove. But now the gate was closed. Tal made a U-turn and drove uphill toward a parking area.

They jumped out again. They started going house to house, knocking on doors, seeking shelter.

At the first two doors there was no answer. At the third, an elderly man opened the door in his underwear, his wife behind him.

“I’m from the north of Israel,” Yasmin said. “Please help us!”

The man invited them in and made them coffee. He was Adi Dagan, his wife was Hadas. They must be tired after staying up all night at the party, he told the couple. Yasmin and Tal told them what had happened there. Now the elderly couple started receiving WhatsApp messages: the kibbutz security team was responding to the attack—but were out-gunned.

Many of the WhatsApp messages I saw that morning, as I was driving south, were coming from Be’eri. Ella Ben Ami, living on the western side of Be’eri, called in to Israel’s Channel 12. The Times of Israel translated the call: “I need help. My father was taken hostage. I saw a picture on Telegram. A picture of him in Gaza. He was taken there. He texted me that they’re breaking in and taking them. And I couldn’t do anything.” The messages and reports were turning into desperate pleas for help.

At about 7:30 Hadas said they should move from the living room to the bomb shelter. To Yasmin, Tal now seemed very anxious, and Hadas spoke to him, trying to help him to calm down. They watched the updates on their phones, shocked by videos coming out of the Nova party. Their WhatsApp chats from the trance-dance communities were buzzing with people asking for help or searching for loved ones.

Yasmin messaged Inbal, her sister. Inbal told Yasmin the army was surely on the way and to wait in the shelter. Together, the older and younger couples stayed put.

At noon, the electricity went off.

At 1 p.m., Yasmin left the shelter to go to the bathroom. She heard shooting and shouting in Arabic outside and assumed the army had arrived. But no.

At 1:50 p.m., Hadas was looking at her phone. Adi, there are terrorists in Pessi’s house. That was their neighbor. Now both Yasmin and Tal were shaking from fear. “You need to be quiet,” Hadas told them. Tal and Yasmin climbed into the closet of the shelter.

Like Jews in the Holocaust, Yasmin thought.

Five minutes later, an explosion went off—inside the house. “Allahu Akbar!” someone shouted, also in the house. Two minutes later, a knock on the safe-room door. “Open the door,” someone said in Hebrew.

“Adi, come out,” said one of the militants. “I won’t kill you, because you are old.” He must have picked up mail or bills that had been lying on a table and gotten the name. Adi, Hadas, Yasmin, and Tal stayed still and silent. Gunshots were fired into the door. Then more knocking.

After thirty minutes of this commotion, it stopped. Yasmin thought of her kids, two girls and a boy: thirteen, eleven, and nine. She sent them a message on WhatsApp saying she loved them.

The shelter door exploded.

“I can’t hear!” Adi yelled. The blast had deafened him. Three Hamas fighters opened the closet door, held Yasmin and Tal at gunpoint, and walked them out of the room, hands up.

“Please don’t kill me,” Yasmin pleaded. “I have three children.”

One of the gunmen gave her pants and a towel from the floor: she was wearing skimpy attire from the festival; they wanted her to cover up. Ten men were now in the house, some with green headbands. They tied Tal’s hands behind his back. Yasmin was shaking.

One of the men spoke softly and smiled. “Please relax,” he said. “Nobody is going to kill you. They’re just going to take you to Gaza.”

“But I don’t want to go to Gaza,” Yasmin replied.

Scenes like this were unfolding across southern Israel on that gruesome morning. Hamas breaching civilian homes and military bases. Thousands of gunmen flowing freely around the communities with no significant army presence in sight. Residents screamed, but there was no one to hear. No one to come and save them. Some were executed in front of their family members; others were dragged into Gaza as hostages, where they remain today.

From the forthcoming book BLACK SATURDAY: An Unfiltered Account of the October 7th Attack on Israel and the War in Gaza by Trey Yingst. Copyright © 2024 by Trey Yingst. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

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