Gal Gadot may have a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, but she is still firmly committed to her homeland, which she proved over the weekend as she visited the sites of the October 7 massacre, opening her heart to victims’ families and survivors.
Accompanied by reporter Almog Boker of Keshet 12 News, she visited a number of kibbutzim where people were murdered by Hamas terrorists, as well as the site of the Nova music festival, where more than 364 perished.
Gadot recently returned to Israel with her husband, Jaron Varsano, who accompanied her on the visit to the Gaza Strip area where the massacre took place.
Boker wrote on his Instagram account: “She asked to see the horrors with her own eyes, to hear from her friends from the [Gaza] Envelope, to be in the homes of the kidnapped, the living and the dead."
During their tour, one especially moving moment took place, Boker reported. Over a year before the massacre, she had visited the region and met with Tal Keren, a teenager from Kibbutz Netiv Ha’asara, and had taken a selfie with him. Keren was murdered on October 7 on Zikkim Beach, where he had gone fishing with his friends, Nadav Tayeb and Or Tassa, both of whom were also killed that day.
On this visit, Gadot hugged his family and heard his father tell of how, as his son was being murdered on the beach, he was defending Netiv Ha’asara and managed to take out one of the terrorists.
Passing Israelis' messages around the world
It wasn’t only the Hollywood superstar’s embrace that was important to the family, but the fact that Gadot “is passing on this message around the world… which has long forgotten what happened here on October 7,” Boker wrote.
Gadot also met with Avida Bachar, a survivor of the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri. Avida was home with his wife, Dana, and his two teenage children, Carmel, 15, and Hadar, 14, when the terrorists attacked. He and Carmel held the door of their saferoom closed as the terrorists shot at the door multiple times. Avida was hit in the leg and Carmel in the arms, as the terrorists then set fire to their home. Hadar called emergency medical services and did her best to stop the bleeding, but she couldn’t save Carmel. Dana suddenly cried out that she couldn’t breathe, and it turned out that she had been fatally wounded. Avida lost a leg, but he and his daughter survived.
In an interview on the Avri and Cherki show on Keshet 12, Bachar said after his meeting with Gadot, “It was incredible… We walked around the burned buildings, the ruins.״ They stopped at his scorched home, and he told her his personal story. “I told her about how I’m coping, in order to move forward. How I go twice a week to hospitals for physical rehabilitation and psychological treatment, and how I’m working part-time… I think that to experience the feel and the smell of being at Be’eri is the way to understand what happened there, and it’s a story that we’ll keep telling the world for 70 or 80 years,” he said.
Gadot also spent time at the Nova memorial site, looking at posters of some of those who lost their lives there.