JERUSALEM, Israel – This week, Israel is marking three years since October 7th, 2023, the deadliest day in the nation’s history CBN News recently returned to the communities devastated that day and met with Christians who have come to Jerusalem with a message for the Jewish people: You are not alone.
Just days after the Hamas massacre and kidnappings in 2023, CBN News traveled to Kibbutz Be’eri, where about ten percent of the community was either murdered or kidnapped.
The area is about four kilometers away from the Gaza border, and we could see signs of devastation everywhere. We got a sense of how desperate the battle was.
We asked an Israel Defense Forces officer, “What happened here?”
The officer replied that four people had been killed there, two men and two women, and that another 14 or 15 were inside.
At nearby Kibbutz Nirim, Adele Raemer and her son spent eleven hours hiding in their safe room as Hamas terrorists attacked their community.
She recalled, “We sat in that safe room petrified, just waiting for the end to come at any second; I’ve never looked death in the eyes like I did that day. I was certain I would never see another sunrise, nor my son, nor my children or grandchildren.”
Near the Nova Music Festival site, Rafaela Triestman and her boyfriend sought refuge in a roadside bomb shelter. She survived. Her boyfriend did not. Afterward, she faced another painful struggle: convincing people to believe what she witnessed.
“It’s unbelievable how people, they don’t believe,” she marveled. “Like, they say like we’re… Like, am, am I making something up? Like, is, isn’t it enough to, like, go through that and then, feeling like my mission is to convince people that I actually saw that? Like, isn’t it… It’s crazy. It’s, it’s weird. It was all supposed to be like that. People don’t believe our voices, and you’re a person unless you’re a Jew, and that’s still true.”
Looking back, Honest Reporting’s Gil Hoffman maintains that even as Israel counted its dead, another battle was beginning over how the world would understand what happened.
“The world tried immediately to make Israel look like the aggressor, even though more Jews were killed on that day than any day since the Holocaust,” he told CBN News. “And since then, there’s been libel after libel falsely accusing Israel of deliberately starving children, deliberately killing journalists, you name it.”
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This week on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem, more than one thousand pastors and Christian leaders launched Ambassador’s Summit, 2026. They came to pray and stand with the people of Israel and Jews worldwide.
Jon Hamill of Lamplighters Ministry explained, “We’re not just having a ceremony or not just listening to preaching. We’re not even being commissioned. We’re coming here to pray, to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, to stand in solidarity with the land and the people of Israel.”
CBN News White House Correspondent Kelly Wright told us, “I wanted to come stand with Israel, to let Israel know, but to let the whole world know that this is a place, the Jews are a people, that God loves, and God cherishes.”
For Pastor Jim Scudder, this is a moment for Christians to speak up. He noted, “This is like one of those Esther moments, ‘For such a time as this.’ When the world is turning against Israel and the Jewish people, we can come and gather together and represent millions of Christians and say, ‘We object to the vilification of Israel and the Jewish people,'” he stated.
For October 7th survivors such as Adele Raemer, that support reaches far beyond the Mount of Olives gathering. It helps give Israelis strength to rebuild.
Raemer declared, “Just knowing that you all are out there and have our backs and pray for us and support us in any way that you can gives us strength and helps us be able to do what, what we are doing, which is being resilient and coming back and rebuilding and, and replanting and ensuring that the desert will continue to bloom.”
