Israel marks two years since October 7 Hamas attack with sombre memorials

Mourners attend a dawn memorial service marking two years since October 7, 2023, in Kfar Aza, southern Israel. The second anniversary of the attacks comes with peace talks under way, but with hostages still in Gaza, more than 67,000 Palestinians dead and Israel more isolated than ever. Photo / David Guttenfelder, The New York Times

Israel marked the second anniversary of the Hamas-led attack that began its longest war in subdued fashion today, with new hopes of ending the conflict but with hostages still in captivity and its exhausted military adding to the death toll of Palestinians and to the destruction in the Gaza Strip.

The arrival of the Jewish harvest festival, Sukkot, a national and religious holiday, shut down most businesses across Israel for the day.

The Government delayed official remembrances of the war’s traumatic first day until October 16, after the High Holiday season.

But the milestone was inescapable.

There were quiet gatherings at some of the kibbutzim near Gaza that suffered the most in the massacres of October 7, 2023, and informal events drew participants throughout the country.

Many Israelis say that the sun has still not set on that October day.

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv’s central park for the anniversary’s main memorial event, an emotional ceremony organised by families of the victims that was screened live on national television and at dozens of locations around the country and abroad.

Earlier, hundreds of Israelis came to Hostages Square in the centre of Tel Aviv, silently meditating over art installations and memorials to those still captive and citizens killed on October 7 or while in captivity.

Israel believes that about 20 living hostages are still being held in Gaza with the remains of 28 others who died in captivity.

Ilana Yahav, 69, a therapist, said October 7 had opened so many wounds that it was impossible to care for everyone who was suffering.

“If you were there, or someone in your family was there, or you only saw a video – it will be a lot of years of treatment,” she said.

Tzlil Sasson, 38, and her husband had driven from Lehavim, east of Gaza, with their three young children.

“It was important for us as parents to bring them here, to remember, and to pray,” she said. “Maybe, in a couple of days, the hostages will be free – we hope.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged the anniversary in a statement issued after sundown local time.

“Our bloodthirsty enemies have hurt us badly but they did not break us. Before long, they discovered the enormous strength of the nation of Israel,” he said.

The night-time ceremony in Tel Aviv, funded by donations, began with a minute’s silence and included prayers, readings and performances by survivors of the assault, bereaved relatives and some of Israel’s most celebrated artists.

Organisers and attendees said that since the Government that oversaw the policy and intelligence failures that allowed the surprise attack is still in power, and refuses to accept responsibility or sanction an independent commission of inquiry, they were not willing to entrust the memory of the disaster to the Government.

In Kfar Aza, a tiny kibbutz less than 3km from Gaza where at least 62 neighbours were killed and 19 taken hostage, several dozen residents held a memorial that began with a moment of silence at 6.29am.

That was the moment on a Saturday morning when Hamas began launching thousands of rockets, overwhelming Israel’s air-defence system.

Under cover of that aerial onslaught was the main Hamas offensive: an invasion by thousands of assailants who swarmed across the fence separating Gaza from border towns and dozens of tiny agricultural communities.

They killed residents in their homes, gunned young people down at a music festival and overran Israeli military bases.

All told, Hamas killed some 1200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 captives back to Gaza. It was the bloodiest day in Israel’s history and the deadliest for Jews anywhere since the Holocaust.

A shocked Israel mobilised to unleash a devastating military response that has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, including both civilians and combatants, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

The bombardment has wounded tens of thousands more, flattened thousands of buildings and reduced much of the territory’s infrastructure – and its landscape – to rubble, shrapnel and sand.

The war has forced Palestinians in Gaza into a punishing cycle of fleeing Israeli attacks by taking shelter in a supposed haven in another part of the territory, only to have to flee again.

And food shortages and obstacles to supplying and distributing humanitarian aid to Gaza residents led an international group of experts on hunger crises to declare in August that part of the enclave was suffering from famine.

In Israel, the war and Netanyahu’s failure to end it in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages have bitterly divided society, exacerbating fissures that existed before the October 7 attack.

Many Israelis contend that he has extended the war and passed up opportunities for a ceasefire even after the decapitation of Hamas’ leadership so that he could keep his right-wing coalition together and extend his hold on power.

The prolonged conflict has forced reservists to serve multiple lengthy tours of duty, while inflaming long-standing resentment of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are exempt from military service.

Israel’s conduct of the war has prompted widespread allegations that Israel has committed genocide.

Israel denies this and insists that its military works to protect Palestinian civilians, and it blames Hamas for endangering civilians by fighting from the cover of hospitals, schools and other populated areas.

Outrage over the war has fuelled a global rise in anti-Semitism and violence against Jews.

That has included the killings of an elderly woman at a march in Boulder, Colorado, to support the hostages; of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington, DC, outside a Jewish museum; and of two worshippers at a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

The prolonging of the war has also ratcheted up Israel’s isolation on the world stage. That was never clearer than in late September, when 10 countries recognised Palestinian statehood for the first time.

Hamas issued a statement today calling the October 7 attack a “glorious crossing”, and a spokesperson for the group, Fawzi Barhoum, said the attack had “stirred the conscience” of people worldwide to support the Palestinian cause.

Yet by some measures, Palestinian political aspirations appear farther out of reach than ever.

The October 7 attacks caused the Israeli body politic to shift rightward, with many liberals who might have once belonged to the Israeli peace camp now feeling betrayed and saying they oppose a Palestinian state on Israel’s border.

On both sides of the Israel-Gaza border, the war seemed far from over today.

Though Hamas is weakened and its arsenal depleted, after 7am, rocket sirens sounded in Netiv HaAsara, an Israeli community on Gaza’s northern border, and the Israeli military said a projectile had fallen in the area.

In Deir al-Balah, in Gaza, Israeli warplanes could be heard overhead at 1am and again after 5.30am. As the sun rose, gunfire could be heard in the eastern part of the town.

Ahmed al-Haddad, 51, a Gaza resident who said he, his wife and their four children had been displaced five times, said their suffering had surpassed what his grandparents had told him about the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, when Palestinians were displaced in Israel’s war for independence.

“This war is the harshest, the most merciless,” he said. “It feels like history repeating itself, only harder.”

Back in Israel, a moment of silence in kibbutz Kfar Aza at 6.29 was anything but, as drones whined, helicopters flew overhead and explosions frequently ripped through the air.

Zion Regev, a municipal leader, read out an adapted version of the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning. His voice dropped as he noted that “our Gali and Ziv” – two brothers from Kfar Aza still held hostage in Gaza – had yet to return home.

“Some say what happened is receding into the distance, but for me, it’s stronger than ever,” said Nitzan Kaner, 37. She said she was trapped for about 30 hours when militants attacked.

Today, she said she had experienced a sleepless night. “I couldn’t stop thinking about what we went through.”

A few minutes away, hundreds of Israelis visited the site of the Nova music festival, where more than 300 people were killed. Signs bearing the faces of the victims are arranged in rows, like dancers at a rave.

Anat Magnezi held a poster with a photo of her son Amit, 22, who was killed, over her own face.

“I wish that all the world would see this and know what happened to us and that it is real,” she said. “But all the world is against us now.”

Roman Fourmann, whose stepdaughter Dana Petrenko, 23, was killed with her boyfriend, stood with his family at a small memorial erected in their honour.

“It feels no different today than when it happened two years ago,” he said. “We go to work, we keep on living. But we can’t shake the feeling that it’s still October 7.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: David M. Halbfinger

Photograph by: David Guttenfelder

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