Just a few months after the bloody October 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities in southern Israel, one of the worst-affected communities, Kibbutz Be’eri, contacted Michael Arad, the Israeli-American designer of the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, for advice on memorializing the 102 people it lost.

Some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, were slaughtered in the carnage, and 251 were abducted to the Gaza Strip, where 47 are still being held.

Arad visited the Gaza border kibbutz, as well as the Supernova music festival site near Kibbutz Re’im, where 364 revelers were massacred and over 40 were kidnapped.

And he went to the city of Sderot, where terrorists murdered at least 50 civilians and, in a major battle at the city’s police station, killed 20 police officers. There, he toured the station site with local officials and took part in a session with other designers to advise on a memorial there that has since been completed.

Arad is a member of a tiny niche of professionals who have created memorials for mass murder through terror. His 9/11 Memorial honors the 2,977 people killed in the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in addition to the six people murdered in the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993.

Two years after 9/11, a competition was launched to design a permanent, national memorial on the World Trade Center site.

Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker beat 5,200 other submissions from 63 countries with their project, Reflecting Absence.

Sitting on approximately eight acres, it features two massive reflecting pools that delineate the location of the Twin Towers before they were demolished. The largest human-made waterfalls in North America feed the pools.

Set within a plaza where over 400 swamp white oak trees grow, the water bodies are framed by bronze parapets that list the names of the victims of the 2001 and 1993 events.

Arad, the son of former Israeli Ambassador to the US Moshe Arad (and no relation of Israeli-British........

© The Times of Israel