Senior Israeli correspondent describes scenes at Kibbutz Nir Oz following Hamas attack
(CBS DETROIT) - Itai Anghel is an Emmy-nominated war correspondent and documentary filmmaker for Israel's Channel 12.
In 2019, he completed the Knight Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
He has spent the past 32 years covering the war in Bosnia, Croatia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq, and recently Ukraine.
When he heard the news of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, he booked a flight and returned home, camera in hand, but this time it wasn't a foreign assignment.
"It is something that we never, never thought would happen," said Anghel. "And let's talk about the things that are going to happen. Things are only going to get worse. So many innocent people are about to die on both sides. It is terrible. It is just terrible, and the mood here is absolutely awful."
He said he was smuggled into Kibbutz Nir Oz by residents who wanted him to document the horrors that took place there despite a complete closure by the Israel Defense Forces on the area.
He spent two days there, filming the remnants of what was once a peaceful agricultural community.
"You see hell," he said. "It's like you visit a nightmare. I remember that's what I felt when I came back from Rwanda, the genocide, when I came back from Syria, Iraq, when I witnessed what ISIS did. And I felt it in Nir Oz. I mean, you see houses completely burned. You see bodies completely burned, mutilated.
"You know, I can express myself pretty good, but I cannot express the smell; it's something that sticks and stays with you. This is horrible. You see the handle of the safe room in every house. It's twisted. It's a sign of the people inside who tried to give a fight in order to not let the Hamas terrorists enter."
He said the only thing that pulled him through was his camera and the job he came there to do.
"In a strange way, I thank God that I have the camera with me, you know, to hold it, to occupy myself with filming, to aim at something, because if I hadn't had anything, I would collapse, I would have a heart attack," he said. "So, it enables me just to work and to operate and not to think or reflect because you're going to lose it if you start thinking about what you were just documenting."
Anghel ran from rockets that continue to be fired at communities in Israel.
"When I was there, you had two alarms of rockets, and you have, like, between 10 and 15 seconds to hide," he said. "And it is pretty accurate in comparison to Tel Aviv … over there, everything is landing. And this is my work in this absolutely burned destruction. You know, people still want to annihilate you even if you managed somehow to survive."
This week, he visited a shiva for his former colleague, Yaniv Zohar, a cameraman in the south, who was killed in his home with his wife and two daughters. Zohar's youngest son went out for an early morning jog that same day and survived. He is now an orphan.
"You see him, and you don't have anything to tell him, anything to say to him," said Anghel. "You give him a hug. I'm numb. And from this morning, you go to another funeral, to another house."
When asked if residents he interviewed were determined to return to their community one day, he said it's too early to tell.
"I want to believe that they will come back because houses are gone. You can build houses," he said. "The question is whether you can rebuild a soul."
Roughly 100 people from Nir Oz have been kidnapped, murdered, or are missing, which is a quarter of the population of the kibbutz.