‘The memories are too much’: Sderot residents return six months after Hamas attack

Families are being offered grants to go home but many have stayed away and others are already thinking of leaving again

Downtown Sderot, an impoverished Israeli town just a kilometre away from the north-eastern corner of the Gaza Strip, is still quiet six months after 7 October. There is no longer any trace of the police station where Hamas militants took hostages and engaged the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in a two-day battle before the Israelis decided to blow up the building. The site has been levelled and is now home to flags and a memorial.

Seventy people were killed and about 90% of the town’s 28,000 residents were evacuated, most of them put up in hotels up and down the country. A huge new mural saluting the town adorns a wall of a block of flats.