The New Yorker:

Yahav Winner’s final work captures the dissonance of life along the Israel-Gaza border.

Film by Yahav Winner
Text by Daniel Lombroso

On the morning of October 7th, as Hamas militants paraglided over Israel’s razor-wire fence to carry out a mass killing, Yahav Winner was waking up to his newborn daughter, Shaya, in his family’s home, in an idyllic desert community with fields of sunflowers and rows of palm trees. Winner and his wife, Shaylee Atary, both filmmakers, had started their family where Winner grew up, in the Kfar Aza kibbutz, a village of some seven hundred residents, just a few kilometres from the border that separates Israel and Gaza. That morning, she described, seventy Hamas militants surrounded Winner and Atary’s home. When a Hamas fighter’s arm burst through their bedroom window, Winner seemed to grasp that the entire family couldn’t survive. He fought off the intruders, and flashed a hand signal for his wife to flee. Atary, who has a disability that affects her left leg, limped out the door with their sleeping daughter in her arms. Outside in a courtyard, the militants were going from house to house—Atary could hear the muffled whistles of gunshots through silencers. She found refuge in a garden shed, and hid among empty pots and topsoil. After what seemed like an hour, her sleeping baby woke and began to cry. Sucking on Atary’s pinky didn’t quiet the infant. So Atary ran again, trying each house, until she found refuge for herself and Shaya in the safe room of some family friends. When they emerged, twenty-seven hours later, Atary found the village in ruins, and her husband missing. She hoped that he was among the more than two hundred hostages taken by Hamas to Gaza. She found out while being interviewed on live TV that he had, in fact, been killed. “He gave his life, I feel, to love me,” Atary told me. “I’ll miss him for the rest of my life.”

The violence of the Israel-Palestine conflict marked Winner’s life early. During a previous round of fighting, in 2008, when Winner was in his twenties, he was working in the garden with his best friend’s father when a Hamas-fired rocket landed and blew the other man to pieces. Atary says the experience shaped Winner’s life: “His soul broke,” Atary told me, when we spoke. “His trauma started there.”

Go to link