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The phrase election integrity sounds noble on its face. But in recent years, election deniers have used it to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of the 2024 election.

A few months after Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed an executive order establishing the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” The Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time that “there is strong reason to suspect this Commission is not a legitimate attempt to study elections, but is rather a tool for justifying discredited claims of widespread voter fraud and promoting vote suppression legislation.” That proved prescient. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2016 or 2020 elections—or in any other recent elections, for that matter—Trump and his allies have fomented the narrative that such interference is a real problem in America, employing it in the illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election and their reported plans to claim that the 2024 race is rigged.

As part of this strategy, right-wing activists and lawyers have organized initiatives under the auspices of election integrity, warping the meaning of those words to sow distrust. Through her Election Integrity Network, the right-wing activist Cleta Mitchell has been recruiting people—including election deniers who will likely continue to promote disinformation and conspiracy theories—to become poll workers and monitors, in an effort that was reportedly coordinated with members of the Republican National Committee. Poll watching in itself is a timeworn American practice, although it has been misused in the past; now, however, election-denial groups are sending participants to polling places under the presumption that fraud is taking place.

More recently, Elon Musk—in addition to his own brazen efforts to get Trump reelected—has invited X users to report activity they see as suspicious through an “Election Integrity Community” feed, an effort almost certain to trigger a flood of misinformation on the platform. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit has gone to great lengths to seek evidence of fraud; in one case, nine armed officers reportedly appeared with a search warrant at the door of a woman who had been working with a Latino civil-rights organization to help veterans and seniors register to vote.

The RNC, especially under the influence of its co-chair Lara Trump, has taken up “election integrity” as an explicit priority: As she said at a GOP event over the summer, “we are pulling out all the stops, and we are so laser-focused on election integrity.” Her team created an election-integrity program earlier this year and hired Christina Bobb, who was later indicted for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona (she has denied wrongdoing), as its lead election-integrity lawyer. As The New Yorker reported earlier this month, the RNC plans to staff a “war room” with attorneys operating an “election-integrity hotline” on Election Day. Such initiatives have helped inject doubt into a legitimate process. Despite the clear lack of evidence to suggest fraud is likely in this election, nearly 60 percent of Americans already say they’re concerned or very concerned about it, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll; 88 percent of Trump supporters said they were concerned about fraud (compared with about 30 percent of Kamala Harris supporters).

The “consistent, disciplined, repetitive use” of the term election integrity in this new context is “designed to confuse the public,” Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. A sad irony, she added, is that those who use this framing have done so to push for restrictions that actually suppress voting, including strict voter-ID laws and limitations on early ballots, or to threaten the existence of initiatives to ensure fair voting. Many of the same activists promoting “election integrity,” including Cleta Mitchell, organized a misinformation campaign to undermine a bipartisan state-led initiative called the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was created in 2012 to ensure that voter rolls were accurate. Multiple states eventually left the compact.

The term election integrity isn’t entirely new—Google Trends data suggest that its usage has bubbled up around election years in recent decades. But its prominence has exploded since 2020, and the strong associations with election denial in recent years means that other groups have backed away from it. “Like so much charged language in American politics, when one side really seizes on a term and uses it in a loaded way,” it becomes “a partisan term,” Clapman told me. Now groups unaffiliated with the right are turning to more neutral language such as voter protection and voter security to refer to their efforts to ensure free elections.

Election deniers are chipping away at Americans’ shared understanding of reality. And as my colleague Ali Breland wrote yesterday, violent rhetoric and even political violence in connection with the election have already begun. This month so far, a man has punched a poll worker after being asked to remove his MAGA hat, and hundreds of ballots have been destroyed in fires on the West Coast. Election officials are bracing for targeted attacks in the coming days—and some have already received threats. If Trump loses, the right will be poised—under the guise of “election integrity”—to interfere further with the norms of American democracy.

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Today’s News

Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, was released from federal prison after completing his four-month sentence for being found in contempt of Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris's speech tonight—which she says will be her campaign’s closing argument—will be delivered from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., the same location where Trump spoke on January 6, 2021. Israel’s Parliament passed two laws yesterday that include provisions banning UNRWA, a UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, from operating in the country. Israel has accused several members of UNRWA, which distributes the majority of aid in Gaza, of participating in the Hamas attack on October 7.

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Earlier this year, the Lakers unveiled a Kobe Bryant statue with oddly stretched proportions and a too-angular face. It made Bryant look like a second-rate Terminator villain, and to add insult to injury, the inscription at its base was marred by misspellings. In 2017, fans of Cristiano Ronaldo were so aghast at a sculptor’s cartoonish bust of the legendary footballer that they hounded him into making a new one.

It gives me no pleasure—and, in fact, considerable pain—to report that Dwyane Wade’s statue may be the worst of them all.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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There are two Michael Jordans, both widely regarded as the Greatest of All Time. One is an NBA legend. The other is a pumpkin. In 2023, the 2,749-pound Goliath set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. Michael Jordan weighed as much as a small car and was even more massive—so broad that it would just barely fit in a parking space. Like all giant pumpkins, its flesh was warped by all that mass—sort of like Jabba the Hutt with a spray tan.

It is hard to imagine how a pumpkin could get any bigger. But you might have said the same thing about the previous world-record holder, a 2,702-pound beast grown in Italy in 2021, or the world-record holder before that, a Belgian 2,624-pounder in 2016. Each year around this time, giant pumpkins across the globe are forklifted into pickup trucks and transported to competitions where they break new records.

Michael Jordan set the record at California’s Half Moon Bay Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, considered the Super Bowl of North American pumpkin-growing. The first winner of the competition, in 1974, weighed just 132 pounds. In 2004, the winner clocked in at 1,446 pounds. “At that time, we thought, Gee whiz, can we push these things any farther?” Wizzy Grande, the president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an organization that establishes global standards for competition, told me. Yet in just another decade, the record passed the 2,000-pound mark. “We’ve zoomed past that now,” Travis Gienger, the grower from Minnesota who cultivated Michael Jordan, told me. For champion growers, there’s only one thing to do next: try to break 3,000.

Last year, Michael Jordan weighed in at a world-record 2,749 pounds. (Alex Washburn / AP)

Giant pumpkins aren’t quite supersize versions of what you find in the grocery store. All competitive pumpkins are Curcubita maxima, the largest species of squash—which, in the wild, can grow to 200 pounds, about 10 times heavier than the common Halloween pumpkin. But decades of selective breeding—crossing only the largest plants—has created colossal varieties.

Virtually all of today’s champions trace their lineage to Dill’s Atlantic Giant, a variety bred in the 1970s by a Canadian grower named Howard Dill. Very competitive growers source their seeds from one another, through seed exchanges and auctions, where a single seed can be sold for thousands of dollars, Michael Estadt, an assistant professor at Ohio State University Extension who has cultivated giant pumpkins, told me. Seeds from Gienger’s champions are in high demand, yet even he is constantly aiming to improve the genetics of his line. “I’m looking for heavy,” he said.

Yet even a pumpkin with a prize-winning pedigree won’t reach its full size unless it’s managed well. Like babies, they require immense upkeep, even before they are born. Months before planting, at least 1,000 square feet of soil per pumpkin must be fertilized and weeded. Once seedlings are planted, they have to be watered daily for their entire growing period, roughly four months. No mere garden hose can do the trick; each plant needs at least one inch of water a week, which allows the pumpkin to gain up to 70 pounds in a single day. The fruit and leaves must also be inspected at least once daily for pests and disease—no small feat as their surface area balloons. Quickly spotting and excising the eggs of an insect called the squash-vine borer, then bandaging the wounded vine, is paramount. One day, you might have a great pumpkin, “then boom, the next day, all of the vine is completely dead,” says Julie Weisenhorn, a horticulture educator at the University of Minnesota who has grown giant pumpkins—named Seymour (744 pounds) and Audrey (592 pounds).

Growers can keep pushing the pumpkin weight limit by ensuring that a plant isn’t pollinated by a variety that has subpar genes. To do so, they hand-pollinate, painstakingly dusting pollen from a plant’s male flowers into the female ones. This usually leads the plant to bear three or four fruit, but only the most promising is allowed to survive. The rest are killed off in an attempt to direct all of the plant’s resources toward a single giant. In the same vein, wayward vines are nipped, and emerging roots thrust deep into the ground, in hopes of harnessing every last nutrient for the potential champion.

Still, some factors are beyond anyone’s control. The weather can literally make or break a pumpkin. Too much rain can cause a pumpkin to grow too quickly, cracking open its flesh, which would disqualify it from competition. Too much sunlight hardens the flesh, making it prone to fractures. It’s not uncommon for giant pumpkins to have custom-built personal sunshades. North America’s giant-pumpkin capitals—Half Moon Bay, Nova Scotia, and Minnesota—have nature on their side, with low humidity and nighttime temperatures. Cooler nights mean less respiration, which means less wasted energy.

Yet nature bests even the world’s champions. This year, Gienger couldn’t break the record he set with Michael Jordan; he blames cold and wet weather, which made it harder to feed micronutrients to his pumpkin, Rudy. (At 2,471 pounds, it still won the Half Moon Bay competition.) And no matter how big a pumpkin grows, it needs to pack a few extra pounds for the road: Once they’re cut from the vine, they rapidly lose their weight in water. A pumpkin can drop roughly 10 pounds in a single day.

All of the experts I spoke with believe that 3,000 pounds is within reach. “It’s still an upward trend,” said Grande, who noted that a 2,907-pounder has already been recorded, albeit a damaged one. Pumpkin genetics are continually improving; more 2,000-pounders have been grown in the past year than ever before, according to Grande. Growers are constantly developing new practices. Each year, the Great Pumpkin Conference holds an international summit for growers and scientists to trade techniques (last year’s was in Belgium, and this year’s will be in the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field). Shifting goals have precipitated new (and expensive) methods: Carbon dioxide and gibberellic acid are being used as growth stimulants; some pumpkins are fully grown in greenhouses.

The reason that giant-pumpkin weights increased 20-fold in half a century is the same reason that runners keep running faster marathons, that skyscrapers keep clawing at the sky, and that people spend so much on anti-aging. To push nature’s limits is a reliably exhilarating endeavor; to be the one to succeed is a point of pride. Food companies, in particular, build their entire businesses on developing the biggest and best. Wild strawberries are the size of a nickel, but domesticated ones are as huge as Ping-Pong balls. Industrial breeding turned the scrawny, two-and-a-half-pound chickens of the 1920s into today’s six-pounders. There’s still room for them to grow: Strawberries can get as big as a saucer, and the heaviest chicken on record was a 22-pounder named Weirdo. But foods sold commercially are subject to other constraints on growth, such as transportation, storage, processing, and customer preference. Unusually big foods are associated with less flavor, and their size can be off-putting. When it comes to food, there is such a thing as too big.

Giant pumpkins, by contrast, have a singular purpose: to become as heavy as possible. They don’t have to be beautiful, taste good, or withstand transport, because they are not food. When companies develop boundary-pushing crops and animals, that tends to be an isolationist enterprise, shrouded in secrecy. But in the giant-pumpkin community, there is less incentive to guard seeds and techniques. Most competitions are low-stakes local affairs, and nobody ever became rich off giant pumpkins, not even Howard Dill.

Breaking records is largely seen as a communal effort. “The secret to our success is that we are a sharing community,” Grande said. In a few contests, the investment is worth it—the Half Moon Bay prize for world-record-breakers is $30,000—but “it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme,” Estadt told me. People do it, he said, “for the thrill of the win.”

All of the pumpkin experts I spoke with acknowledged that there must be a limit. But nobody has any idea what it is. Four thousand pounds, 5,000—as far as growers can tell, these are as feasible as any other goal. Every milestone they reach marks another human achievement, another triumph over nature. But even the most majestic of pumpkins inevitably meets the same fate: devoured by livestock, and returned to the earth.

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I hesitate to speak for other Never Trumpers, but we’ve gotten used to losing, haven’t we? In three consecutive presidential elections, our doughty gang of dissidents has failed spectacularly in its attempts to shake Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP. At this year’s Republican National Convention—that great festival of Trumpian celebration—Never Trump Republicanism was invisible, for the second convention in a row. Never Trump writers and pundits have frequently contributed to national media outlets (including here in The Atlantic), but in the GOP itself, the group has been derided and purged.

Now some Never Trumpers are finding a place elsewhere: Last night in Wisconsin, I was invited to moderate a discussion between the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, and her new ally Liz Cheney. The two had spent the day on a campaign tour through the so-called blue-wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Seeing them together felt surreal: As I said at the event, Harris and Cheney make an odd couple—and their alliance is a sign of a not-at-all-normal election. It also marks a crucial shift in the focus of the Democratic case. When Harris launched her campaign this summer, she leaned heavily into a message of joy and good vibes. Her vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz, rose to prominence by calling the Trumpists “weird,” rather than an existential menace, as Joe Biden had argued during his campaign. But then the polls tightened, and Harris brought in Liz Cheney.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how unlikely this development is. Among many Democratic voters, the name Cheney is radioactive, going back to the years of her father’s vice presidency; Liz Cheney herself spent years as a fierce right-wing ideological warrior and party loyalist, rising to the leadership ranks of the House GOP. Cheney was not an original Never Trumper. Unlike those of us who have been publicly expressing our concern since he came down the golden escalator in 2015, Cheney says she voted for Trump twice, and in Congress, she backed his administration more than 90 percent of the time. Then came January 6. Although her disillusionment with Trump had obviously been festering for some time, the insurrection led to Cheney’s full-throated denunciation. Her willingness to sacrifice her standing with the party and her seat in Congress made her a symbol of principled GOP resistance. Her role as vice chair of the Select Committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol made her the most famous Never Trumper in the country.

And there she was Monday night with a Democrat she had once denounced as a dangerous radical. The usual alignments of right and left and Democrat and Republican simply don’t apply anymore, because Donald Trump poses a unique danger to the entire American order. “We’ve never faced a threat like this before,” Cheney said, “and I think it’s so important for people to realize this republic only survives if we protect it, and that means putting partisan politics aside and standing up for the Constitution and for what’s right and loving our country.”

This is what Never Trumpers have been shouting into the GOP void for the past nine years. And in the last two weeks of the campaign, Harris and her team have decided to make it their closing argument. Although Harris now frequently refers to Trump as “an unserious man,” she also warns that the “consequences” of his return to power are “brutally serious.” Sounding that alarm also has meant reaching out to the battered remnants of the Never Trump movement. (Bulwark’s publisher, Sarah Longwell—a leading figure of the Never Trump movement—moderated the Harris-Cheney event in Pennsylvania.) Why the Never Trumpers? Because they have been making the case for years that voting against Trump isn’t a betrayal of party principles. They are particularly well positioned to argue that it isn’t necessary to embrace Democratic policies to vote for Harris, because the stakes are so much higher than mere party politics. And that’s an argument that Harris is now trying to make to swing voters. The question is, will that argument actually persuade these voters in the way Harris hopes it will?

The majority of Republican voters across the country will vote for Trump, and Cheney’s involvement is unlikely to move many of them. Harris also faces challenges in persuading conservative voters to overlook her past stances on issues such as transgender health care, the Green New Deal, and immigration. Meanwhile, the largest known group of undecideds is unsure about voting at all.

But this election could come down to a sliver of a percent, and the Harris campaign has decided to make a concerted play for disillusioned and discarded Republican voters in places like Waukesha County, where we met Monday night. In April’s GOP presidential primary, Nikki Haley won about 14 percent of the vote in Waukesha County. Some of those voters were in the audience Monday when Cheney made it clear to them that voting for a Democrat was okay because Trump should never be allowed in any office of public trust again. Perhaps her words will give a few Republican voters the cover they need to make a decision that might feel like a betrayal but is in fact an act of loyalty to country above all.

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The Israeli military said that one of its air strikes in early October killed Hashem Safieddine, a top Hezbollah leader who was a potential successor to Hezbollah’s recently assassinated longtime leader. Hezbollah did not immediately respond to the claim. A federal judge ordered Rudy Giuliani, a former Trump lawyer and former mayor of New York City, to turn over his New York apartment and his valuable personal items to the two Georgia election workers he defamed. A federal appeals court upheld the conviction of Couy Griffin, the Cowboys for Trump leader who was found guilty of a trespassing charge that was used against many other January 6 defendants.

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Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta at home with her children in Santa Cruz, California Jenna Garrett for The Atlantic

This Influencer Says You Can’t Parent Too Gently

By Olga Khazan

The kids held it together pretty well until right after gymnastics. At the end of a long day that included school, a chaotic playdate, and a mostly ignored lunch of sandwiches, the parenting coach Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta picked up her twins from the tumbling gym around 5:30. The two 8-year-olds joined their 6-year-old sister inside Chelsey’s silver minivan.

Chelsey, an energetic 41-year-old, promotes gentle parenting, a philosophy in which prioritizing a good relationship with your kid trumps getting them to obey you. I was tagging along with her family for a few days to see how her strategy—stay calm, name emotions, don’t punish kids for acting out—works in practice.

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The day started with a whistle—a short, loud shriek coming through our bedroom window. I didn’t wake up; the noise, otherworldly but familiar, blended into my dreams. Miri, my wife, was quicker to realize the danger: “Amir, wake up, a mortar!” We leaped out of bed and sprinted down the hall toward our safe room, a thick concrete bunker, wearing only underwear.

Every house in our kibbutz, Nahal Oz, has a safe room. We live less than a mile from the border with the Gaza Strip—close enough that Israel’s Iron Dome doesn’t have time to intercept artillery aimed at us. When Hamas launches a mortar, we have seven seconds before it lands.

As soon as we shut the heavy iron door, an explosion shook the house. Then a second, and a third. Our two daughters, who sleep in the safe room, had been through this many times before. Three-year-old Galia didn’t even stir. Carmel, nearly 2, raised her head but fell back asleep once she found her pacifier.

This article has been adapted from Tibon’s new book.

It was 6:30. Miri and I took out our phones and quickly discovered that Hamas was firing on dozens of locations across Israel. Whenever violence breaks out, we immediately start packing suitcases so that we can leave the kibbutz at the first moment of quiet. Israel and Hamas would typically announce a cease-fire within 10 days, at which point we’d return and get on with our lives.

But as we were packing, Miri and I heard a sound that told us this time would be different: gunfire. It started in the fields and steadily got closer. Then we heard shouting in Arabic outside our house—a commander telling one of his men to try to break in.

We had woken up to a nightmare: The border had been breached. Hamas was here.

When we moved to Nahal Oz in 2014, no word terrified us more than tunnel. Earlier that year, Hamas had used its extensive underground network to cross the border and kill Israeli soldiers. In response, the government invested more than $1 billion in an underground border wall, digging as deep as 160 feet. Any threat of an invasion had apparently been eliminated: The military began withdrawing soldiers from the borderlands, including from the base a few minutes’ drive from our home. The aboveground border fence, equipped with security cameras and machine guns, was supposed to be impenetrable.

On the morning of October 7, fewer than four full battalions guarded the border with Gaza. (Compare that with the roughly 25 battalions posted in the West Bank.) About 200 soldiers were stationed at the nearby base. It wasn’t nearly enough. Thousands of Hamas fighters bulldozed, blew up, and broke through the fence. Drones had prepared the way by destroying its guns and cameras. By 8:30 a.m., terrorists had captured the base, killing dozens of soldiers. In recent weeks, those soldiers had told their commanders that they had seen Hamas storming large-scale models of Israeli kibbutzim—an obvious dress rehearsal. But their warnings were dismissed. Israel’s leaders didn’t think Hamas would be willing to start a war.

[Read: ‘We’re going to die here’]

Even with the local base out of commission, Nahal Oz wasn’t entirely undefended. The kibbutz has a small security team that was heading off Hamas despite being outnumbered. But there was no chance of a military force arriving quickly enough to save us from the immediate danger. Mercifully, perhaps, Miri and I remained unaware. All we could do was wait.

Within minutes of the base being overrun, I got a call from my father. Cell reception in the safe room was spotty—it would soon go out for good—but I had been able to text him explaining that we were trapped. Our call was brief. He offered me the only words of hope that I would hear for hours: “We’re coming to get you out of there.”

While my mother drove him from Tel Aviv, my father, a retired army general, called all the senior military officials he knew—the army’s chief of staff, the head of the Southern Command, the commander of the Gaza regional division. None answered, so he texted instead, warning them that terrorists were inside Nahal Oz. He received just one response: “I know.”

Rockets flew overhead as my parents entered the border region. My father put down his phone and took out a pistol. Once they got to Sderot, about 15 minutes from Nahal Oz, they saw a police cruiser parked sideways, blocking the highway. Policemen took cover behind it, shooting at some enemy my parents couldn’t see. My mother was preparing to make a U-turn when a young couple darted in front of the car. They were out of breath and—as my father recalled—“dressed for a party.” He and my mother hurriedly let them in.

As my mother drove away, the couple told my parents that they had come from a music festival. “They shot everyone,” the woman exclaimed. “Everyone’s dead.” My parents listened in terror, imagining what might be happening to us in Nahal Oz. They drove the young couple to safety and turned back for the border.

The aftermath of Hamas’s attack on the music festival (Jack Guez / AFP / Getty)

About eight miles from Nahal Oz, my mother suddenly stopped the car in disbelief. Dozens of corpses covered the highway: Israeli soldiers and policemen, civilians, Hamas fighters. Most of the cars were charred; some were overturned. Others were still running but empty inside. My father was stunned. He had served in the Israel Defense Forces for more than three decades, even operating behind enemy lines. And yet, he told me, “I’ve never seen so much death in one place before.” My mother nosed the car forward, slowly steering between bodies.

Within a few minutes, at around 10:30 a.m., my parents had to stop again. They had driven into their second firefight of the day. A soldier directed them to take cover in a nearby bomb shelter, where they discovered a heap of mutilated remains: Hamas had chased Israelis there from the festival and thrown in grenades.

As my parents walked outside in horror, three armored vehicles carrying Israeli special forces were approaching. My father was able to persuade one of the officers, Avi, to go with him to Nahal Oz. My mother stayed behind, knowing that the next phase of the journey would be the most dangerous.

Meanwhile, Miri and I were desperately trying to keep the girls quiet. We pretended to be calm for their sakes, knowing that Hamas fighters might be close enough to hear them if they cried. But around noon, when Galia and Carmel fell back asleep, we stopped pretending. The military still hadn’t come, and we had lost contact with my father. I whispered to Miri that this was all my fault; it had been my idea to live in Nahal Oz. She tried to console me, saying that she loved our life here. “We both chose this place.”

Then, briefly, my cell reception returned. It was my mother: “Dad is getting closer to you.”

My father and Avi were two miles from the border when they heard shots up ahead. Hamas fighters had ambushed a group of IDF soldiers and pinned them behind their Jeep Wrangler. My father and Avi jumped out of their car and ran toward the soldiers. A brigade of Israeli paratroopers arrived at the same time, opening fire on the Hamas fighters as my father made it to the Wrangler. He found five commandos there—two on his right pleaded for ammunition; three on his left stayed silent. Once he realized they were dead, he stripped their ammo and threw it to the survivors. Then he took an M16 for himself and killed a Hamas fighter who was rushing the car. The Israeli soldiers shot at the ambushers until the enemy fire abated. Silence fell over the forest, and one of the paratroopers announced that he’d been hit. My father ran over and saw that he’d been struck in the stomach.

[Franklin Foer: The war that would not end]

By now my father understood, based on all the violence he’d seen, that reinforcements had not likely gotten to Nahal Oz. He faced a painful decision: The kibbutz lay within reach, but the paratrooper wouldn’t survive unless he was evacuated immediately.

My father made the right choice. He saved the soldier, taking him back to my mother, while Avi and the others stayed behind to hunt for remaining Hamas fighters. She drove the paratrooper to a nearby hospital, leaving my father stranded without a car. By some miracle, he ran into a general he knew, Israel Ziv, who agreed to drive him to Nahal Oz.

Their way was clear. More than six hours after leaving home, my father reached the kibbutz. Along the perimeter fence, he encountered a group of soldiers who agreed to let him join their command. An armored vehicle pulled up, carrying the local security team that had been defending Nahal Oz on its own all day. My father listened anxiously as they reported that roughly two dozen Hamas fighters remained in the kibbutz. The terrorists had broken into at least several homes, but the security team didn’t know how many. Then another group of IDF soldiers arrived, making my father one of about 70 fighters assembled on the eastern edge of Nahal Oz. They divided themselves into teams and started searching every building in the kibbutz.

Smoke rises from the Gaza Strip on January 30, 2024, seen behind a gap in the fence bordering Nahal Oz. (Sam McNeil / AP)

It was now around 2 p.m., but Miri and I had no way of knowing. Our phones had long since died, and the room was too dark for me to read my watch. The only light came from Carmel’s glow-in-the-dark pacifiers.

We heard gunfire again, this time in the distance: short, disciplined bursts, nothing like Hamas’s wild shooting from the morning. Miri and I felt a glimmer of hope. Maybe the military had finally come.

Making his way through the kibbutz, my father saw bodies everywhere: in the road, in yards, in driveways, in houses. Most were Hamas fighters. Many still held their weapons. By 4 p.m., he had reached our property. Everything in sight had bullet holes—the house, our two cars, our stroller. A dead terrorist lay on the front porch with a rocket-propelled grenade in his hand, pointed at our next-door neighbors. Two others blocked the sidewalk in front of our door. Another had died next to our lemon tree.

My father walked up to the exterior wall of the safe room, took a deep breath, and smacked the covered window. We heard a bang and then a familiar voice. The air inside was hot and thick by then; we worried that we were running out of oxygen. Galia was the first to speak. “Saba is here,” she said simply, using the Hebrew word for grandfather. I could hear the exhaustion in her voice, but for the first time in hours, she sounded happy.

My father shouted for us to open the front door. It took me a second to start moving. I imagined a terrorist hiding in the house, waiting for me to emerge. Slowly I felt my way through the darkness and opened the safe-room door. The light was overwhelming. I covered my eyes and crept to the front of the house toward my father. We embraced as soon as he stepped in the door. For a few moments, we stood there silently, holding each other.

By evening, the soldiers had finished searching the kibbutz and killed almost 30 Hamas fighters. They had found the bodies of 15 of our neighbors, including a family who were clinging to one another in their safe room when terrorists broke in.

The kibbutz would be evacuated soon, but in the meantime, the soldiers began assembling survivors in our house. By 7 p.m., we had more than 40 people inside, including about 10 young children huddled in the safe room. Rumor spread that those of us who were missing had been kidnapped and smuggled into Gaza.

In the midst of all this, Ruti, a woman who lived across the street, asked Miri where she could find a pot for cooking. Miri seemed confused: “What are you talking about?” But Ruti insisted. “I know we’ve all had a very long day, but there are 10 children sitting in that little room, and they need to have dinner.”

Miri accompanied Ruti to the kitchen. With the help of another neighbor, they made pasta for everyone in the house. As I watched people eating—the children in the safe room, their parents in the living room, and the soldiers on the porch, visible through the cracks that bullets had left in our windows—I realized that Ruti was doing more than feeding us. She was telling us, in very few words, that because we were alive, we were going to have to live.

This article has been adapted from Amir Tibon’s new book, The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.