SHOKEDA, Israel—The massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, which took the lives of more than 1,200 Israelis, also took a toll on man’s best friend.
Dogs were among those killed by Hamas terrorists that day in their raid against Israel’s communities near Gaza.
Many more had to be abandoned as their owners fled or evacuated after the attack. An estimated 2,000 dogs escaped in the area in the days after Oct. 7.
On March 9, one of those dogs, a German shepherd named Sky, returned to his owner and home after five months of separation.
Sky had been fostered for several months by Roni and Michal Gilo, who live in Beit Hashmonai, a community near Ben Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv.
Eden Kogan, who became something of a social worker for dogs after Oct. 7, accompanied them on the hour-long drive to Shokeda to the home of lemon farmer Shalom Peretz and his family.
Mr. Kogan wanted to ensure that the day went well for all involved—the Gilos, the Peretz family, and of course, Sky. He knew that the dog would be stressed, leaving the Gilos’ home after having become acclimated to it, and might need a watchful eye as he readjusted to his old dwelling and original family.
Mr. Kogan had worked as a dog handler in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). He always had had a gift for working with dogs, he told The Epoch Times, recalling when, at age 5, he trained feral dogs to accompany him to the trash can to protect him from the feral cats that lurked there.
Learn to Speak Doggish
On Oct. 11, Mr. Kogan came to Shokeda. The moshav—an agricultural community with privately operated farms—is just a few minutes from the Be'eri kibbutz, one of the massacre’s hardest-hit communities.Mr. Kogan thought that someone could use his expertise with dogs.
He went to Be'it Kama, a moshav just outside of the attacked zone where the military and aid organizations were all staging. There, he found two rooms being used to house abandoned dogs.
“I wasn’t connected to them. I just came in and told them, I’m a trainer for almost 30 years, and someone needs my help,” Mr. Kogan said.
He met the woman who had set up one of the rooms, Liraz Meir, a lawyer. She told him of a dog chained up in Shokeda. Barking and agitated, the dog had bitten someone who had tried to feed him, and now others wouldn’t approach him.
“She said, ‘Come with me,’” Mr. Kogan said.
They had to enter the town through surrounding fields because soldiers weren’t letting anyone in the gate. Hamas rockets were still falling.“And we found Sky. He wasn’t aggressive. He was scared to his bones. It took me about 40 minutes to an hour just to get him calm, calm enough to come with me,” he said.
Sky later went to a municipal dog pound and then found shelter with the Gilos. The couple, in their 60s, enjoyed having a dog around. They'd usually had them; their most recent dog died during the COVID-19 pandemic.
German shepherds are naturally protective, and Sky became a formidable watchdog. When a reporter from The Epoch Times rented the apartment behind the Gilos’ house, Sky barked relentlessly at him.
Mr. Kogan gave the reporter a lesson in the language of dogs. When extending a hand for the dog to sniff, do it with a closed fist, he said; the dog finds it less threatening than an open hand. And don’t look at the dog; he regards that as a challenge. The reporter followed his instructions, and, lo, the dog calmly sniffed and walked away.
“It’s on us to learn to speak doggish,” Mr. Kogan said. He understands how dogs think—quite differently from humans—and their body language.
To understand Sky, Mr. Kogan said, it was important to realize that the dog was not an alpha, a leader. Only 1 percent of dogs are, he said. The rest are followers and feel more secure when someone else—nowadays usually their human master—is in charge.
Searching for Stevie
Rebecca Geller said another dog rescuer, Yoram Erez, found her dog. A public relations professional who until summer 2023 had her own agency, Ms. Geller now works at the headquarters of the Hostages and Families Forum in Tel Aviv, a center for aid to families of the Hamas hostages held in Gaza.
She said she was visiting her native London on Oct. 7, 2023. A friend caring for her dog, Stevie, had taken him with her the day before to see her boyfriend, a pineapple farmer in Talmei Yosef.
The settlement is a few miles south of the Gaza city of Rafah and a few miles east of the Egyptian border. Ms. Geller said Stevie loves going there.
When the sirens started, though, he ran away. Stevie’s caregivers couldn’t go outdoors to look for him as the air raid sirens continued to blare all day.
“Someone in the moshav saw all the dogs running toward a hole in the fence,” Ms. Geller said.
She came back from England and started looking for Stevie. Ms. Geller put up flyers, posted a missing dog notice on Facebook, and searched online for notices about stray dogs near Gaza.
She found that various people had jumped in to help with missing dogs, although they had to wait for military clearance to get into the area.
Stevie was found 40 days after going missing, on Nov. 16, 2023, miles away near the Egyptian border.
One of the missing-dog organizations had searched for him with a drone but couldn’t find him.
Two days later, a soldier called Ms. Geller and said he had Stevie. He had identified him from one of her missing-dog photos; he had a distinctive mohawk.
Stevie had lost a third of his body weight, she said.
A Happy Reunion
Mr. Kogan had to keep Sky calm during the hour-long drive from the Gilos’ house to Shokeda.
Mr. Peretz, his wife, Lipaz, and their daughter May were there. So were other relatives who had gathered for the Shabbat meal, including his mother, Esther Peretz, who had immigrated to Israel from a small Moroccan town when she was a young woman.
When she moved to Israel, Esther Peretz told The Epoch Times through a translator, it was the first time that she'd ever seen electric lights or lived in a house with them.
After letting Sky out of the car, Mr. Kogan kept the dog on a leash as Sky strained to get to his old house and say hello to everyone. Mr. Kogan released him after a little time had passed and let Sky roam the yard and those of neighbors to check things out.
Shokeda somehow dodged Hamas’s bullets during the Oct. 7 attack.
Be'eri, next door, suffered a terrible toll, with more than 100 dead and more people taken hostage. A column of Hamas trucks passed the gate of Shokeda on its way to the larger town of Ofakim, likely not stopping at Shokeda because it was too small, according to Roni Gilo.
Through a translator, Mr. Peretz related how the sirens went off at 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2023. He said he started getting messages on WhatsApp, the cellphone and texting platform that virtually all Israelis use, including videos of Hamas terrorists in trucks.
Mr. Peretz said he knew it was a significant attack but didn’t realize it was so close.
The family turned on the television and saw bombs and shots going off in a forest 1 1/2 kilometers away, between Shokeda and Be'eri.
They wouldn’t understand until the following day what was going on: that 40 well-armed terrorists were hiding in the forest.
One had a rocket launcher and hit an Israeli helicopter. The pilot, on his own initiative, had filled up the helicopter with soldiers and headed for Be'eri. He managed to land safely near Shokeda, and the 40 soldiers took on the terrorists.
Mr. Peretz took his visitors to that forest, a park bordering Be'eri. Still in bloom there in its meadow, in mid-March, were red anemones.
In more peaceful years, in early spring, Israelis would travel for the Darom Adom—or Red South—festival, to see the anemones in blossom, much as Americans go to New England for the fall colors. This year, the annual festival was canceled.
Although Shokeda wasn’t attacked, the Peretzes left their home a couple of days later, when it was safe enough to move. It was too close to the border, and terrorists were still at large.
It was dangerous to stay, and the Israeli army wanted residents out of the area because it couldn’t guarantee their safety.
They weren’t allowed to take Sky; they were evacuated to Eilat but didn’t know where they would be staying or whether they could have a dog.
They left the dog, chained up outside their house, and notified the moshav’s security team, which was staying behind.
The team initially brought food and water to Sky but stopped when he attacked one of the men.
The Peretzes returned Shokeda in January. Out of courtesy for each other, the two families agreed that Sky would not immediately return to his family.
Shalom Peretz told Roni Gilo that he wanted Sky back but didn’t want to uproot him again if he'd found a happy home.
The Gilos grappled with whether to keep him. They loved having him, Roni Gilo said. But they also knew that they were an older couple and Sky was a young dog with perhaps another 10 years of life ahead of him.
“We heard Shalom say, ‘I love this dog. I would love to have him, but I know you have got very attached with him. So it’s your decision. Whatever you decide, OK,’” Michal Gilo said.
Shalom Peretz had suffered so many losses, the Gilos thought—it wasn’t fair that he should suffer any more. Plus, they knew that Sky was going back to a good home.
They were reassured, Roni Gilo said, by Mr. Kogan’s promise to visit with Sky and keep monitoring him.
Mr. Gilo said he and his wife realized that Sky was not well suited to be an indoor animal. “This is a work dog, a fighting dog,” he said.
Sky is ultimately better suited for the Peretzes’ home.
In Shokeda, he’s down the street from the wide open spaces of their 17 acres of citrus. He can roam the lemon and orange orchards and the neighboring farm plots.
And Mr. Peretz offered Mr. Kogan some real help.
Mr. Kogan has formed a dog-rescue agency. The lawyer whom he met the first day, Ms. Meir, now represents the group and sits on its board.
It has helped 70 dogs, focusing on families who, like the Gilos, have welcomed foster dogs.
The agency can be of particular help with dogs who have been traumatized—many were in the Oct. 7 attack—so that they can get along better with their new families, Mr. Kogan said.
He had been looking for a home for his agency.
Mr. Peretz told him that he could use the vacant lot next to his house, and they would bring in a shipping container to use as a building.
Dogs that don’t get the agency’s help will likely wind up in animal shelters and then be euthanized, he said.
On a very practical level, living dogs in homes are better for the economy: They cost their owners about 10,000 shekels (about $3,000) a year.
A dog in a shelter, on the other hand, costs taxpayers money for the 30 days of the shelter stay and then another 700 shekels for euthanasia.
Mr. Kogan talked about his work with dogs in the IDF.
His unit fought in Jenin during the Second Intifada, which began in 2000. Within 10 months, his unit had lost 17 dogs.
“Fortunately not mine, but it hurts the same,” Mr. Kogan said.
That unit has lost at least 30 dogs since Oct. 7, 2023, he said.
“You get the full meaning of it when you see our team of 13 or 15 great warriors standing and giving a standing ovation at the grave of a dog. Because they understand that if not for the life of this dog, it might have been one of them—or more than one,” Mr. Kogan said.
The dogs tracked terrorists trying to infiltrate Israel, but it was understood that the dogs often went first into dangerous situations. Some are shot or stumble on a trip line for a mine.
“Some catch a terrorist, but if an IDF commander decides it’s too risky for soldiers to follow inside, he'll order the building demolished, collapsing it on the terrorist—and also on the dog,” he said.
The most painful dog death that Mr. Kogan recalls was one in which an attack dog inside the house came back through a window. He had been trained to attack anyone with a weapon and in a dominant posture—and he mistakenly attacked an Israeli soldier.
The soldier’s comrade had to shoot the dog.
“I think that’s the most painful of the 17. The guy still hasn’t recovered. He lives somewhere in the outback of Australia,” Mr. Kogan said.
“That’s the worst for anyone—to kill your friend or be killed by your friend. It happens, but it’s twice the weight to carry afterward.”
The trained dog “is this noble, noble creature that is willing to sacrifice himself,” Mr. Kogan said.
“They know it’s risky. And they still go inside and still do the job. And not for any big ideology. But only for one person. Which is you.
“And that’s a tough decision to take, to be the one to sacrifice the thing you love the most.”
