WATCH: Shiri Bibas' sister speaks to Noa Tishby about losing her sister and nephews

In a modest home on the edge of Kibbutz Nir Oz, where the October 7 Hamas attack left an indelible mark on this once-peaceful farming community, Shiri Bibas's sister Dana walks slowly through empty rooms that still bear traces of her sister's family life.

"Me and Shiri were the only children in our family. We had really good connection with my parents too," Dana says, pausing beside a window overlooking fields that border Gaza. Her voice falters. "It's crazy that I was the only one to survive this Holocaust. It was a Holocaust."

Dana met well-known actress and Israel advocate Noa Tishby, who hasn't stopped her intense efforts to raise international awareness about the Hamas attacks. Tishby, who served as Israel's Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and the Delegitimization of Israel from November 2022 to April 2023, has been a prominent voice during the ongoing conflict, particularly in American media circles.

As afternoon light filters through curtains that haven't been adjusted since October 7, Dana struggles to speak in the past tense about her sister.

"She was the best aunt in the world," she says, momentarily brightening before grief reasserts itself. "It make all the situation much difficult for us. We don't really know how to process it. We can't understand it, how we really feel."

The Bibas home retains an eerie stillness. A child's toy lies abandoned on the living room floor. Family photographs line the walls, documenting happier times that now feel impossibly distant.

"I never, never thought that something like that could happen," Dana continued.

The attack on Nir Oz killed approximately a quarter of the kibbutz's residents, with dozens more taken hostage, representing one of the highest per capita casualty rates of any community targeted that day.

"Nir Oz was a peacemaker community," Dana explains, noting the bitter irony. "What Hamas did on October 7th, it's completely opposite from what the Nir Oz people believed in."

Dana now bears the impossible burden of being the sole survivor of her immediate family. When told that people worldwide are following the Bibas family's story and holding them in their thoughts, a complex emotion crosses her face – something between gratitude and the recognition that global attention cannot restore what she has lost.

"I want you to know that you and she and the kids and Yarden and your parents, may they rest in peace, are held by so many people around the world," Noa told her. "You are loved and people think about you and they pray for you and they pray for the family."

For Dana and the other surviving residents of Nir Oz, the path forward is unclear. Many remain in temporary housing, unable or unwilling to return to homes now haunted by absence. The community that once prided itself on peaceful coexistence now struggles with profound trauma and loss.