Israeli reconstruction near Gaza lacks a key building block: Trust

The paint is not yet dry and a large outdoor sign has yet to be hung at the newly expanded facilities of BionicHIVE, a warehouse-automation startup.

The company is part of an upstart tech hub in this southern Israeli city, just minutes from the northeast border of the Gaza Strip.

Like the rest of Sderot and nearby farms and kibbutzim, BionicHIVE was hit hard when Hamas fighters poured across the border Oct. 7, killing 50 Sderot residents and abducting others, destroying infrastructure, and leaving an emptied region in their wake.

Half the company’s 30 employees and their families evacuated the area and scattered around Israel. About a third were called to reserve duty to join the war effort.

But now in BionicHIVE’s test lab, a smiling orange-and-black robot named SqUID is back to plying the tracks along towering storage shelves, placing and retrieving packages based on QR Codes and a lab engineer’s commands.

SqUID’s return to work three weeks ago – along with many of the engineers and other employees in quadruple the workspace of the previous location – is one sign of life and economic activity returning gradually to an area devastated both physically and psychologically.

A government report last week said about half the estimated 120,000 Israelis who evacuated from southern Israel have returned.

In Sderot, where the population had plunged overnight from 31,000 to fewer than 5,000, families are returning and strip malls reopening. Red and yellow snapdragons brighten roundabouts.

Indeed, the hum of activity at BionicHIVE is testament to the rebuilding of confidence that life – families, jobs, schools, public activities – can resume and flourish, securely, once again.

“It’s been a challenge to convince people that they can come back in safety and build our work community together, but we’re getting there,” says Yoram Ilan, BionicHIVE’s vice president of operations.

To enhance a sense of security, the company added a hardened shelter to every floor of the new facility. To rebuild a sense of community, an ice cream “happy hour” was added to the workweek.

Yet while more employees are ready to return to the building to work, what remains more difficult is what Mr. Ilan calls “that next step”: bringing families back to live here.

“Families need safety,” he adds, “but also an ecosystem of schools, all kinds of services and activities for the kids, and many don’t see that happening yet.”

Distrust of government

A bigger challenge still, he says, is overcoming the traumatic sense of abandonment that people felt on Oct. 7 – and are still experiencing.

“On a higher level, the country, the government has not yet rebuilt the trust of the people,” Mr. Ilan says. “That is going to take some time.”

Fifteen minutes south of Sderot, at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, Amir Adler checks out his avocado orchard and banana plantation as he offers a similar assessment of prospects for southern Israel.

“I have full trust in the army and what they are doing over in Gaza,” the farmer says, motioning to buildings visible to the west. The collective farm’s crop rows stretch right up to the border, less than a kilometer away. “But I haven’t got any trust back in the government and what they are saying about the ‘day after’ here,” he adds. “Their plan for our return is not in any way sufficient in my eyes.”

The tidy kibbutz neighborhood of new whitewashed homes where Mr. Adler’s family had lived for only nine months is silent. For now, only the army and a few returned Thai farmworkers live on Nahal Oz. When a boom and distant gunfire pierce the calm, Mr. Adler gazes skyward and says that this is why his family remains at a temporary home two hours north, near Haifa.

“You see what is still happening,” he says. “Could you bring your family back to that?”

The sounds of war are an unnerving reminder that across Gaza, fighting has returned to some areas that the Israeli military said it had cleared of organized Hamas forces.

“Trust we had in working together is gone”

Indeed, like many people in the Sderot area, the kibbutznik is keen to point out that something else shattered Oct. 7: a nascent trust in the people of “the other side” – before the attack 20 Palestinians from Gaza worked on Nahal Oz’s farms – and a sense that two different communities separated by a border could live and work together after all.

“After Oct. 7 we realized that this was an attack on agriculture as well, that a big part of their plan was to push us off this land,” he says.

After a first wave of fighters raced through the kibbutz, killing and abducting residents, a second wave of what Mr. Adler calls “looters” arrived.

“They destroyed the irrigation systems, dismantled the water pumps. They burned the milking barn and the hay for the cows. They even killed a Thai worker with a shovel,” he says.

Pointing out recent deliveries of new irrigation pipes and the return of milking operations at the dairy, Mr. Adler adds, “Physically we can repair the damage, but any trust we had in working together is gone.”

For now the only goal is to reestablish the community’s hold on the land, he says, so that someday its people – including his own family – can decide if they want to return.

“The way I see it, we’re doing what we can to make a future possible here. We’re rebuilding; we’re planning for new crops to keep the place alive,” Mr. Adler says. “But whether or not the people will decide they can come back, today I would say that is unknown.”

Across the region, the sense Mr. Adler articulates of dashed hopes for some kind of peaceful coexistence with Gaza is never far from the surface. So are worries over the impact that lingering feelings of an unsafe and even hostile environment might have on southern Israel’s development.

At Carrar, a thermal management systems startup tucked into Sderot’s Sapirim industrial park, engineering and testing manager Dor Peretz proudly displays a cutting-edge immersion cooling system designed to address the problem of heat generation in electric vehicle batteries. Some of the world’s biggest names in EV manufacturing are invested in Carrar.

Mr. Peretz, who is from the Sderot area, is proud that Carrar is part of southern Israel’s fledgling tech hub. But he says there is no doubt that Oct. 7 and the war mere kilometers away have set back development goals.

“We have to keep going”

The government has a plan, called SouthUp, to encourage high-tech development, he notes, while a new program provides subsidies to families willing to return to their homes.

But Mr. Peretz says the only real solution for securing southern Israel’s future will be victory in the war to wipe out a hostile military and governing force in Gaza. Until then, people will live and work here because of their attachment to the land, he says, not because they are confident of their safety.

“We will stay here because this is who we are and this is what we do,” says Mr. Peretz, whose family now lives 40 miles away. “We are not feeling safe,” he adds, “but we have to keep going. That’s it.”

Back at BionicHIVE, Mr. Ilan describes with enthusiasm the many ways his little company is really an international enterprise. The rails SqUID runs on are made in Kentucky, and Amazon is a key investor. The system’s biggest market will almost certainly be North America.

But those high hopes turn bleak when he considers Sderot’s closer international neighborhood. Any sense that the proximity of a border is an asset has vanished.

“I never trusted Hamas in any way, but I was trusting the people of Gaza, that they could behave in a different way and we could be a benefit to each other,” he says.

Noting that before Oct. 7, some 50,000 Palestinians regularly crossed the border for work, he adds, “After what we experienced, it will be 20 or 30 years before we might get back to something like that.”

In the meantime, Mr. Ilan says he and others in Sderot are working hard to reestablish a sense of normalcy. And every day he sees evidence that the revival is happening, from a reopened favorite lunch spot to reports from employees that they are feeling more secure about returning.

“Just yesterday,” he says with a smile, “one [employee] told me, ‘I’m starting to feel like Oct. 6 again.’”