Gaza Envelope (Otef Aza)

The Gaza Envelope is the ring of kibbutzim, moshavim and towns in the northwestern Negev that lie within a few kilometers of the Gaza border. Its story of resilience is older than this century. At Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz named for the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 130 defenders held off the Egyptian army for five days in 1948 and bought the time that saved Tel Aviv. Sderot, founded in 1951 for immigrants from Iran, Kurdistan and North Africa, gave Israel its rock music and has lived for more than twenty years with fifteen seconds between the siren and the impact, its shelters painted as art and its playgrounds built as caterpillars.

On October 7, 2023, this region bore the heaviest blow in Israel’s history. Today the Nova festival site at Re’im, the police station memorial in Sderot, the car memorial at Tkuma and the Steel Division memorial are places of remembrance, visited in silence. Yet the Envelope is also a land of fields and life: the Salad Trail, where you harvest vegetables in the fields, the trails of Park Eshkol, and near Nirim the 6th-century mosaic of Maon, with its vine scroll, peacocks and menorot, a floor of peace laid 1,500 years ago. Hoshen Tours visits with the gravity and respect these places demand.