NETIV HA’ASARA, Israel — Before Oct. 7, 2023, Naama Giller let her children roam freely through her Israeli village on the border with the Gaza Strip. Her front door was rarely locked. She liked living in a place animated by communal festivities, outdoor life, the din of boys and girls playing.

Now, she darkens her home at night to avoid being targeted in strikes from Gaza. Most of the children in the village, Netiv Ha’asara, left and have not returned. Military patrols and the thud of bombs are the soundtrack to a spartan, ghostly life.

“Our village now is empty, deserted,” Giller said. “I live here, but I’m scared.”

One year ago, Hamas-led assailants raided Netiv Ha’asara and at least a dozen other villages, setting fire to them, killing residents in their homes and dragging hostages back to Gaza in a terrorist attack that Israeli authorities said killed about 1,200 people and led to the displacement of thousands more. About 250 people were taken hostage.

Most of the residents from the worst-affected villages are still living elsewhere, in hotels or government-funded temporary housing. And for the few like Giller who have dared to come back, they are surrounded by the hard realities of war and daily reminders of the trauma of that day.

The Giller family bought an extra refrigerator to stock up on supplies because there is now no grocery shop nearby and no neighbors to borrow from.

Their youngest child, 8, sleeps in a room with fortified walls so he does not have to rush for shelter in the middle of the night during strikes. Any trip in or out of the village requires passing through a military checkpoint.

Giller, 49, who helps run the family’s farm, returned with her four children in March to reunite with her husband, Eyal Giller, 53. He was the only one of the village’s civilian residents who never left Netiv Ha’asara, which the regional council’s spokesperson said had a prewar population of about 1,000.

Eyal Giller stayed to look after the family’s sheep and goats. He said he spent the first month in almost complete solitude, essentially barricaded inside the village as Israeli soldiers turned part of it into a makeshift military camp amid searches for possible gunmen from Gaza still in the countryside.

After an anti-tank missile hit a nearby home, his morning routine became one of letting his loved ones know that he was still alive.

“She feared I was on a suicide mission,” Giller said of his wife.

Netiv Ha’asara has no collective plans for the rebuilding of the village; that choice is left to individual initiative.

In several communal villages along the border, known as kibbutzim, residents are holding group discussions about how to manage reconstruction. It is a process often fraught with conflicting visions about what returning should entail and whether it should even occur.

In Be’eri, a kibbutz 3 miles from the Gaza border where assailants killed dozens of people, residents have covered fences surrounding several scorched buildings with posters of lush rural scenes.

But longer-term decisions about reconstruction designs have yet to be finalized.

Nili Bar Sinai, 74, returned there in August, one of the 150 residents — a little over 10% of the village’s prewar population, according to a spokesperson for the kibbutz — who have come back. She visited the village frequently in the months after the attack. Returning was never a dilemma.

“Be’eri is my home,” she said.

These days, she leads English-language tours through the kibbutz for international journalists, diplomats and philanthropists. She begins with the good parts: the vast brutalist communal dining hall that has reopened and the winding, tree-lined footpaths flanked by beige bungalows.

Only then does she proceed to the houses where the worst horrors of the raid took place.

Hundreds of assailants attacked Be’eri on Oct. 7, 2023, abducting 30 residents and killing about 100, according to a kibbutz spokesperson and the Israeli military. Bar Sinai lost her husband, Yoram Bar Sinai, who rushed to guard their daughter’s home with a 1940s pistol the couple kept as a relic.

She learned that he had been shot dead on their daughter’s porch nearly 14 hours later, when soldiers rescued her from her home’s safe room, she said.

Still, Bar Sinai said her decision to return was easier than that of families with young children, many of whom remain deeply traumatized by the attack.

She now frequents the village pub and sits at the young people’s table at the dining hall.

“It’s incredibly bucolic — until you reach the war zone,” she said. “Living here is no picnic.”