I Visited Wartime Israel. Here’s What the Headlines Aren’t Telling You.

From May 30 to June 9 this year, I traveled to Israel with a group, seeing holy sites and hearing from survivors of the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks.

When Iran and Israel began exchanging fire, my phone buzzed. Rockets.

I ran to the stairwell of my Jerusalem hotel. Another guest shared a video showing a missile being intercepted above the hotel. Several minutes passed, and we got the all-clear.

Back at my balcony, I watched commuters driving down the highway, buses making routes, and joggers in the morning sun. This experience was jarring for an American. For Israelis, it was simply part of daily life. American influencers often paint Israel as a shady actor, while legacy media show a war-torn Jewish state divided along ethnic and religious lines. While good-faith criticism is important, the reality is far more complex.

I spent 10 days in early June traveling with a group across Israel and hearing from survivors of the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks. We found a nation varied in culture and religion, and a people scarred by war—but still hoping for peace.

Unlikely Unity

After a full day of travel, we reached Jerusalem and set out for “The Shuk”: a bustling nighttime market with dozens of restaurants and bars. We found people of all different cultures drinking, dancing, and singing. Some of the Israelis noticed we were Americans and broke out in chants of “USA.”

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Several days later, we traveled to the Dead Sea. There, we met several young Palestinians. They were intrigued to meet Americans, asking our ages and where we were from. They were from the West Bank, specifically the conflict-ridden town of Nablus. One tried to give me his hat. Two leaned in and whispered, “Palestine love USA.”

We also traveled through one of Israel’s largest Arab cities, Nazareth—the hometown of Jesus. It is home to the Basilica of the Annunciation, one of the largest Christian churches in the Middle East. Leaving the church, the Islamic call to prayer rang from all directions as thousands of Muslims lived and worshiped freely. Within Israel, there were roughly 1.82 million Muslims as of 2024, according to Statista. Meanwhile, one estimate found fewer than 25,000 Jews across the entire rest of the Middle East in 2026.

This religious diversity is perhaps most evident in the Old City of Jerusalem.

At the center of the city sits the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a holy site for Muslims. Directly below, thousands of Jews and some Christians gather to pray at the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. Here, the world’s three major religions worshiped side by side. Meanwhile, children as young as 4 years old ran and played in the streets. They were unattended and unworried, even during wartime.

Hope Amid Horror

The morning of Oct. 7, 2023, Israelis in the desert villages on the Gaza border awoke to sirens. This was nothing new. With just 10 to 15 seconds of warning, they headed to their safe rooms.

Naor Hasidim and Sivan Elkabetz, partners aged 23, were at home in the Young Generation neighborhood of Kfar Aza. They quickly realized the danger this time was real. “Dad, is your whole house locked?” Sivan texted her father. “We’re hearing lots of gunshots here. What’s going on?”

“The army is handling the terrorists,” he replied. Hamas captured the village in an hour, and it took another hour for the first soldiers to respond. Terrorists began raiding the Young Generation neighborhood around 9:36 a.m. Naor sent the couple’s last text at 11:13 a.m.: “They shot at the house. Any soldiers?”

Soon after, Naor and Sivan were dead. After Hamas invaded, the Israel Defense Forces took three days to eliminate the terrorists. More than two and a half years later, Naor and Sivan’s house remains almost exactly as it did on that fatal day.

I walked through the front door, and death fell heavy upon my shoulders. The kitchen sat in disarray—dirty dishes still in the sink, flanked by shattered glass and broken appliances. Bullet holes peppered the ceilings. Crime scene photos, too gut-wrenching to mention, lined the walls.

In the back room where Naor and Sivan hid for hours, clothes lay strewn across the floor. A torn and battered mattress looked up from the ground, a reminder of the couple’s final moments.

I prayed as I left the home. Outside, the rest of Naor and Sivan’s neighborhood still bears the signs of mayhem and murder.

Our group stood before long-time Kfar Aza resident Shachar Shnurman and his wife, who both miraculously survived the attack. They walked us through the homes where their neighbors once lived. We stopped at the edge of the community, set apart from Gaza by only a barbed-wire fence.

“You can’t destroy a nation,” Shnurman said. “Doesn’t matter what all the smart people in the world say … This is going to be my neighbor for the next 100, 200, 300, 400 years.” The Hamas attack on October 7 ended up killing more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians—the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. In Kfar Aza, terrorists killed 62 residents and 18 security personnel, taking 19 civilians hostage.

Despite his grief and loss from October 7, Shnurman held out hope for peace.

“You don’t have to love me, I don’t have to love them,” he said of the Gazans. “But to live in a place that no one wants to kill you … After that, we learn to love each other. It’s a bonus.”

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