On the morning of October 7, 2023, Amir Tibon and his wife were awakened by mortar rounds exploding near their home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a progressive Israeli community less than a mile from Gaza City. Soon, they were holding their two young daughters in the family’s reinforced safe room, urging them not to cry as gunfire echoed just outside the door. With his cell phone battery running low, Tibon texted his father: “The girls are behaving really well, but I’m worried they’ll lose patience soon and Hamas will hear us.” Some 45 miles north, Amir’s parents had just cut short an early morning swim along the shores of Tel Aviv. Now, they jumped in their Jeep and sped toward Nahal Oz, armed only with a pistol but intent on saving their family at all costs. In The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands (Little, Brown and Company), Tibon tells this harrowing story in full for the first time. He describes his family’s ordeal and the bravery that ultimately led to their rescue alongside the histories of the place they call home and the systems of power that have kept them and their neighbors in Gaza in harm’s way for decades. More than one family’s odyssey, The Gates of Gaza is the intimate story of a tight-knit community and the broader saga of war, occupation, and hostility between two national movements – a conflict that has not yet extinguished the enduring hope for peace.
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