It’s dusty, sweltering, crowded. Waves of people start to arrive.

Some have suitcases. Many, just the clothes on their backs. There are some walking alone, others in groups or with their families.

Nearly all look exhausted, bewildered, worried.

We’re at Islam Qala in Afghanistan, on the border with Iran. The people we’re seeing crossing over are some of the 1.3 million Afghans who Iran has deported this year.

Many left their homeland for economic survival. Now they’re being forced back to where they started, full of anxiety and some, with stories of violent arrests.

Rohullah Mohammadi stands out. He’s wearing a smart blue suit and loafers. He has a youthful but serious face. He looks ready for a business meeting, not a sandy border crossing.

He went to Iran to build a better life and earn money to send back to his struggling family. But like many we meet, he crossed illegally, living undocumented in Iran until the police caught up with him.

“They took everything I had and sent me back to Afghanistan,” he says.

“They even beat me. They injured my ear. Is this how Islam is supposed to be practised?”

At its peak, as many as 28,000 people have come through this border crossing in just a single day.

Some manage to stay for a day or two, helped by the UN alongside the Taliban authorities.

But the pressure of returning to the difficult life you left, and working out how you’ll survive going forward, quickly hits people.

‘Never paid’

In a tent for families, we meet Fatimah. She says she took her children to Iran to escape poverty.

“My two daughters worked from six in the morning until 8.30 at night,” she recalls, wiping tears from her eyes.

“But they were never paid. The Iranians didn’t give them any money.”

’16 days beaten in detention’

Lots of children we meet are alone. They all say they were smuggled into Iran, taking on debt owed to the traffickers.

At just 15, baby-faced Tahir says he’s the breadwinner for his six siblings and two parents.

He tells us he’s just spent 16 days being beaten in a detention centre. And yet he is already feeling compelled to return to Iran – feeling the weight of responsibility for his family.

“I love my homeland Afghanistan deeply and I am even ready to sacrifice my life for it,” he says.

“But if there is no work here, how can I survive? I have a family, and they have expectations of me. I must work.”

In a room close by, we meet 15 others like him. A whole room of unaccompanied boys who have crossed the border.

The UN is moving them to the nearby city of Herat, where they will stay for a night before being reunited with their families across Afghanistan.

We join them on the journey. Most are strangers to each other.

‘Kicked on concrete floor’

For Tahir, it’s a soft landing, but a hard adjustment. He looks disorientated as he watches some of the others play football.

He says he can’t stop thinking about the brutal detention centre he’s just left.

“They would force us to lie down on the concrete floor and kick us,” he says.

“In the detention rooms, if someone spoke up they would be forced to lie on the ground. If they protested, they would be sent to a dark solitary cell.”

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What is shocking to learn is that nearly every single one of the boys we met says they were smuggled to Iran by traffickers – and nearly every single one says they were beaten in detention.

But Tahir is already making plans to return to Iran. He doesn’t think he has a choice.

“I would rather kill myself than see my father begging for money for his hungry children,” he says. “I couldn’t bear it.”

Tahir is one of millions caught up in Iran’s crackdown on illegal immigrants. Authorities there set a deadline in September for all undocumented Afghans to leave.

But human rights groups say those living legally in Iran have also been swept up in deportations, and that the numbers crossing have pushed Afghanistan to breaking point.

The country is also being squeezed on its eastern border – Pakistan too has deported tens of thousands of Afghans this year.

We asked the Iranian government about the allegations made by the Afghans we met, including Tahir, but it did not respond to our request for comment.

Girls fleeing Taliban restrictions

Other expelled Afghans we meet fled for an education – girls who were no longer able to attend secondary schools in Afghanistan.

We speak to one mother recently forced to return – struggling with the fact she’s now back.

“Every day brought a new restriction, a new policy aimed at preventing women from working,” she says.

“There was the compulsory niqab, and also limitations on education for women and girls.”

She seems overwhelmed. “When you see the future of your daughter, of your children, slipping away day by day, it’s devastating,” she adds.

Her daughter tells me she used to love reciting poetry. But when the Taliban returned to her city, she was forced to stop.

Bittersweet family reunion

Tahir hasn’t seen his family for two years, and it’s a bittersweet return.

His siblings rush out of the house to greet him. His mother cries as she embraces him.

The living room is packed with the siblings he’s been financially supporting. They’re a wonderful, kind and close family.

His mother Gulghoty sobs as she explains why she had to let him go and likely will again.

“Life here was very hard for him,” she says.

“We have a delivery cart but with that alone he could not pay for himself and take care of me. He needs a stable life and a future.”

Tahir says, with sobering pragmatism, that he must go back to Iran and “endure the oppression” to save his family.

It’s a dynamic playing out across Afghanistan. Huge burdens on young shoulders and a country unable to share the load.

Donald Trump has expressed optimism about ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, as Israelis mourned those killed two years after the October 7 attacks.

The US president described the negotiations as “very serious”, adding: “I think there’s a possibility we could have peace in the Middle East”.

Latest updates from the war in Gaza

One of the key mediators, Qatar’s prime minister, along with senior American diplomats Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, will now head to Egypt to join the third day of indirect negotiations between the Palestinian militant group and Israel.

Memorial events took place around the world on Tuesday, including in Israel, as grieving families gathered and relatives hoped a ceasefire deal could see the remaining hostages freed.

It has been two years since thousands of Hamas-led militants poured into southern Israel after a surprise barrage of rockets.

They stormed army bases, farming communities and the outdoor Nova music festival, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, including women, children and older adults.

The attack plunged the region into a devastating war, including a brutal retaliatory offensive by Israel on Gaza that has left tens of thousands of people dead, turned entire towns and cities to rubble, triggered a widespread famine and displaced around 90% of the population.

Hamas abducted 251 others, most of whom have since been released in ceasefires or other deals, with 48 hostages remaining inside Gaza, around 20 of them believed by Israel to be alive.

Israel mourns October 7 victims

In Tel Aviv, dozens gathered at a memorial site that was set up in a city square.

Others visited the scene of the Nova music festival in the border community of Reim, where nearly 400 Israelis were killed and where portraits of the kidnapped and dead have been erected.

Thousands of people visited throughout the day to share memories of relatives and friends who were killed.

Pro-Palestinian rallies, opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza, were also held in several European cities including Paris, Geneva, Athens, Istanbul, Stockholm, and London.

Sir Keir Starmer labelled the UK protests as “un-British” and said they showed a lack of respect.

Hamas wants ‘guarantees’

On the second day of talks, top Hamas leader Khalil Al-Hayya told Egyptian state-affiliated Al Qahera News TV the group had come “to engage in serious and responsible negotiations”.

He said Hamas was ready to reach a deal, yet it needed a “guarantee” to end the war and ensure “it is not repeated”.

US officials have suggested the talks should initially focus on the first phase: halting the fighting and working out logistics for the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners.

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A spokesperson for Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani of Qatar said he would attend the talks in Sharm el-Sheikh “with the aim of pushing forward the Gaza ceasefire plan and hostage release agreement”.

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The failure by Hamas to return hostages has left Israel deeply divided, with weekly mass protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It has also left Israel more isolated internationally than it has been in decades.

The war has already killed over 67,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants.

Experts and major rights groups have accused Israel of genocide – something Israel vehemently denies.

The International Criminal Court is seeking the arrest of Mr Netanyahu and his former defence minister for allegedly using starvation as a method of war.

For a long time, Rita Lifshitz would come back to Kibbutz Nir Oz every week, sit outside the house of her father-in-law, Oded, and have a drink.

To raise a glass to the people who had gone. To remember October 7.

Follow updates on Israel-Hamas war

“We used to drink a beer every weekend,” she tells me, her eyes trained on the small little table on the patio where they would sit and talk.

“So for 500 days I came to have a beer outside the table. Here I put the beer for grandpa and I put the beer for me. He was my psychologist for 500 days.

“He was only a few kilometres from me and I just imagine him coming in with a big smile.”

Around her, the charred remains of violence, death, and devastation. The burnt-out wreckage of happy lives that came to a horrific end.

I spent two hours walking around this kibbutz with Rita. She showed me the places where friends had been murdered, where loved ones had been taken hostage, and where her best friend had been shot and then dragged away, his blood still smeared over the floor of his home.

“It is a trauma,” she says. “And all of us, the whole kibbutz, wakes up every morning to the 7th of October.”

On the morning of 7 October 2023, this small kibbutz, which sits within sight of the border with Gaza, was overrun by Hamas fighters.

In total, 117 people, more than a quarter of those who were there that morning, were either killed or kidnapped. No other kibbutz suffered such a high proportion of casualties.

Among them, Oded Lifshitz and his wife, Yocheved. Both were in their 80s, and both had volunteered for charities promoting peaceful relations with Gazans. Both were taken hostage on October 7.

Oded used to drive sick children from Gaza and take them to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Now we stand in the charred remains of their home.

Yocheved was eventually released after 16 days as a hostage, but Oded died in captivity. His body was not returned until earlier this year, but he had probably died a year earlier.

And now we stand in the charred remains of their house.

To Rita, this place is both a touchstone to a happier time and also a stark warning of inhumanity. A panel of metal is all that is left of the piano that Oded loved to play.

The couple’s crockery is still scattered in a corner, thrown there when their furniture was upended.

“They started firing rockets at us at 6.30 in the morning, but we didn’t worry because they have been firing rockets at us for 20 years,” says Rita.

“There was one day we had 800 rockets land round here, so we are not scared of rockets. We didn’t get any information about what was happening, no warning.

“The first we knew was when two people working in the fields saw Hamas, and they were the first ones to be killed.”

It is believed that around 540 fighters attacked the kibbutz – far more than Nir Oz’s entire population. It was a massacre. Only six houses escaped attack.

The nursery school workshops, gardens – all of them shot, burnt, destroyed.

We move to the far end of the home, picking our way through the debris that still litters the floor.

There is a steel door, the entrance to the bomb shelter where Oded and Yocheved often slept and where they tried to hide.

Their beds are still here, blackened and burnt. In the door are bullet holes – Oded had done his best to hold the door shut, but he was shot in the hand and the attackers stormed in.

‘The death road’

The last time Yocheved saw her husband was him lying on the floor, bleeding. As she was taken away, rolled into a carpet, she didn’t know if he was dead or alive.

To walk around this kibbutz is to witness the scars of trauma again and again. A black flag outside a house means someone died there.

A yellow flag designates that an occupant was taken hostage. There is a road that Rita calls “the death road,” where almost every house has at least one flag outside.

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We go into the home of one friend, who was murdered in the living room. Her clothes are still there, her handbag hangs on the bedroom door. It feels so intrusive to be here, but Rita insists the world needs to see.

We see Natan, a long-term resident who is now 88 years old. His home was one of only six to escape being ransacked, because the Hamas attackers couldn’t work out how to get through the front door.

He says he came back as soon as he could, despite the destruction around him, insistent he is not fearful.

“This is my home,” he says emphatically.

Rita takes me to the home of her best friend, Itzhak Elgarat. Unlike most of the homes, his was not set ablaze, so it still looks now as it did then.

A bottle of olive oil is on the side, cooking ingredients laid out, a couple of bottles of wine set on the table.

But also bullet holes strewn across the walls, in the furniture. Possessions thrown around and, horrendously, Itzhak’s blood still smeared across the walls, the floor, and the door where he was shot.

The other side

I climb a set of stairs, which used to belong to a house that has now been demolished.

You can see Gaza in the near distance, across a few fields.

And over there, not so long ago, Sabah might have been looking back.

Just as Rita’s life has been torn apart by the war, so has Sabah’s. For Rita, it is the mental torment of what happened on October 7, the struggle to process and to move on.

For Sabah, it is something more fundamental. A Gazan displaced from Khan Younis, she once lived in a grand home near the border, only a couple of miles from Kibbutz Nir Oz, as the crow flies.

It was a home for multiple generations, the pride of her life, “a place meant to give us stability and peace”.

Since then, she has been displaced 13 times, and she worries that her home has been reduced to rubble.

“Personally, I long to go back to even the ruins of my house, to sit among the rubble, simply to be there,” she says.

“Even that would be better than this life. At least then I might find a little peace.”

The last time she saw her home, it had been hit by an explosion. Some of it was destroyed, but other parts were habitable.

But since then, Sabah has been told that it has been damaged by both fire and military action – news that devastated her.

She says: “Someone told me ‘your house was the very first thing they burned. The fire raged inside for three days. And after they burned it, they brought in an armoured vehicle and blew it up’.

“Just imagine losing your home. When they told me what happened to mine, I spent nearly ten days doing nothing but crying.

“It feels like your soul is torn away. Your spirit leaves you.”

She insists that this story is not just about October 7, not just about Hamas, but about decades of struggle that led to this point, about Palestinian anger and accusations that they are oppressed by Israel.

“This goes back generations. What happened on October 7 was not the beginning of the story. I remember my father, my grandfather, and their fathers before them telling what they had endured. We have lived our entire lives under this weight.

“This land is ours, our homeland. We did not buy it. It has been passed down from our ancestors, generation to generation. That is why it is not easy for me, or for any of us, to surrender it.

“The truth is that we are exhausted. We are an oppressed people. October 7 was just one day, but for us, it has felt like living through hundreds of October 7th’s, over and over again.”