The moshav, or agricultural community, of Ein HaBesor, Israel, survived the unprecedented Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7 without losing a resident, fending off an assault that devastated neighboring communities, leaving some with little to no population and no usable infrastructure.
The security situation has made it impossible for the 320 families who live there to return home, forcing them into crowded hotels with no timeline to return to their crops, which represent about 60 percent of all produce grown in Israel. Community leaders, aided by the U.S.-based charity organization CityServe, are working to make Ein Habesor inhabitable again, return workers to their crops, and build temporary housing for the residents of nearby kibbutzes as they wait for Israel’s military operations to prevent a second Hamas onslaught to conclude.
CityServe is an organization dedicated to “disaster relief,” Uri Steinberg, its Israel director, explained to Breitbart News in an interview this week, responding to “fires like we saw in Maui, if the people in Ukraine need help, CityServe knows how to get into this operation mode of disaster relief.”
“However, in Israel, the situation is different,” Steinberg explained, as those in need are not destitute and need specialized services such as mental health relief and temporary housing in communities that understand their way of life.
“Honestly, these are really proud people that do not want a handout and yet, you want to give them kind of a hand up, you want to help them go through this phase until they are kind of able to get on their feet,” Steinberg explained.
The people of EinHabesor, he explained, “it’s 320 families, 400 kids, they’re all stuck in a hotel. Yes, their community was not burned to the ground, but they still need some assistance to get on their feet.”
CityServe helps the children of EinHabesor, Israel, following the October 7 Hamas attack. (Courtesy CityServe)
“They need a new fence, they need new safe rooms, they need mental health care. And we said we’re going to step up our game and we’re going to help them out,” Steinberg said.
The genocidal terrorist organization Hamas, which controls the nearby Gaza strip, organized an attack it has branded the “Al-Aqsa flood” on October 7 in which terrorists raided Israeli residential communities, killing entire families in door-to-door assaults, abducting hundreds of people as young as nine months old, and engaging in torture, gang-rape, and other atrocities. Ein HaBesor was spared the worst of the assault as a resident shut the gate that protects the community two minutes before the Hamas terrorists drove there on pickup trucks, giving the moshav‘s community defenders enough time to arm themselves and fight off the jihadists. The community tallied two injured defenders and no abductions or deaths.
The contrast is significant from the total devastation less than one mile away, in kibbutz Nir Oz. Hamas terrorists killed or abducted about a fourth of the 400 people living there and burned down as many homes as possible, cutting gas pipes and igniting them to maximize the destruction. Many of the homes are not salvageable, leaving the traumatized residents indefinitely displaced.
WATCH (Graphic) – Breitbart News’ Joel Pollak visits Kibbutz Nir Oz:
Steinberg, speaking to Breitbart News, described what happened in Ein HaBesor as a “miracle,” and the community as a starting point to help both its residents and those of communities such as Nir Oz.
“Because this moshav, the people there, were saved, and because it was not burned to the ground like the surrounding communities, this moshav and the people there feel they have a role to play,” he explained. “And the role that they have to play is that this entire region will be revived, we believe, only through the strength of this specific community.”
“Other communities less than a mile away, kibbutz Nir Oz, that was completely almost burned to the ground. A quarter of the people over there are either dead or kidnapped. This community can be revived and get back on its feet only with the assistance of such a community like ours,” he added.
CityServe, Steinberg explained, is seeking to use Ein HaBesor’s land for temporary housing, and in turn, help bring workers who can save the crops forcibly abandoned there since October 7.
“They’ve got 240 plots of land in Ein HaBesor that can and will be used for caravans or tiny homes to host in the next foreseeable future the residents of nearby communities,” Steinberg observed. “So there is this layer of, hey, through the assistance to this community we’re going to actually take care of other communities who are completely broken and need different help.”
CityServe is using its resources, he explained: to “a) take care of mental health b) allow this community to rebuild the fence to create a more sophisticated fence, to create [a] more protected elderly club, for example, and to create doors that can really withhold and sustain a terror attack.”
“At the same time, the tiny homes, the caravans, all of that is also big, big investment that we want to put in in order to allow such kibbutz or communities that can be adopted or hosted and be part of this community,” he noted.
Steinberg told Breitbart News that, for outside observers seeking to help, “it’s important to be on the ground, so whenever people can come and feel that they have the ability to come and spend some time volunteering in the fields in Israel, whenever things do calm down, not right now necessarily, it is important.”
He added, “Giving to an organization that you feel know what they’re doing on the ground, that is not just going out there, and you can see that 100 percent of what you’re putting out there really goes to doing what you thought they’re doing is extremely important.”
Steinberg also praised Ein HaBesor as a symbol of hope and a starting point for those trying to rebuild.
“I do feel that this area, Ein Habesor, is the crystallization of Zionism – it’s kind of the perfect story of people who got into an area that is a tough region to grow anything but they made it happen, they made it happen because that’s the way we roll,” he told Breitbart News. “Three miles from there you have the Gaza strip. Nothing is blooming there. There’s no agriculture, there’s nothing.”
“The people here have decided to make this desert bloom.”
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.