They fled kibbutzim after Hamas attacked. Now, many Israelis must decide whether to go back.

For a few minutes on a recent afternoon, the sun-bathed silence that fills Nadav Tzabari’s neighborhood could almost be mistaken for peace.

Then shelling from Israeli tanks dug in across the fence line in Gaza erupts again, sending shudders through the vacated homes and overgrown gardens of this long-resilient farming community, emptied for months of nearly all its people.

“This is my house,” says Tzabari, a 35-year-old teacher, arriving at a small stucco building with a red tile roof near the center of Nahal Oz. It is so close to the bombed-out buildings on Gaza City’s eastern fringe that before Hamas swept in last October, residents could see their Palestinian counterparts driving through the streets.

Next door, Tzabari recalls, the attackers shot dead his 75-year-old neighbor and wounded her husband as the couple clung to the door of their safe room. Beyond an orange tree in his own yard, a tarp stretches across a gaping hole punched through the roof by one of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza in the months since. Inside, the blast layered every surface in dust and grit.

Yet as soon as Tzabari reenters its cracked facade, he is confronted with vivid memories of Nahal Oz as it was -- and vexing questions about what it might yet be.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. It changes every day,” says Tzabari, who fulfilled a dream with his husband when they bought a home in the kibbutz, but are deeply conflicted about returning. “It doesn’t matter how you twist it or what angle you look at it. This is going to be a really, really long, hard and complicated journey.”

Five months after Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in an early-morning assault, triggering a massive invasion by Israel that has killed more than 30,000 people in Gaza, those who fled ravaged border communities are wrestling with whether, how and when to go back.

The choices are fraught and deeply personal. The trauma of seeing family members and friends killed and others taken hostage remains raw. The attack, which trapped many residents in the dark for 17 or 18 hours, left homes in some communities beyond repair. Artillery fire and the roar of fighter jets make clear that Nahal Oz and nearby towns, built