Family members and friends of those killed and abducted by Hamas at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, visit the site Monday as Israel marks the anniversary of the attacks. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
JERUSALEM — Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip awoke Monday to commemorate the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks in the same way they were roused on Oct. 7, 2023: to the sound of air raid sirens.
At 6:32 a.m. — almost to the minute of the surprise assault last year — militants in Gaza launched four rockets toward those same towns and kibbutzim, sending Israelis into shelters and highlighting how the battle continues to rage 12 months after that fateful morning.
Israeli forces said they intercepted most of the projectiles and immediately struck targets inside Gaza in reprisal. At least two minor injuries were reported in Kibbutz Kfar Chabad when a second barrage was fired late in the morning.
At the same time, Israeli forces were attacking Hezbollah sites in Lebanon. The country also remained on alert for further missile barrages from Iran and Yemen. Israel marked the first anniversary of the deadliest day against Jews since the Holocaust as a country very much still at war.
Despite the fighting, they came together — in groups of fewer than 2,000 to comply with military orders in much of the country against larger gatherings — to remember those who were lost, those who are still being held captive and those who remain unable to return to their homes. About 1,200 Israeli citizens, visitors, guest workers and soldiers were killed on Oct. 7; at least 250 were taken hostage; more than 160,000 fled to safety from towns around Gaza and along the border with Lebanon. Few have come home.
A crowd of a few hundred people gathered near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house in Jerusalem in a demonstration organized by the families of some of the more than 100 hostages that remain in Gaza. “Stay strong survive,” read one sign.
Others held banners showing photos of their loved ones. At 6:29 a.m. the sound of a siren was played to mark the moment rockets began to rain down on Israel a year ago, before the hostages were dragged from their homes and beds at gunpoint on a holiday morning. The crowd fell silent, as did television broadcasters who had begun their marathon coverage of the anniversary the previous evening.
“If someone on October 7 or 8 had told me that a year would pass and 101 hostages would still be in Gaza, and the war would still be going on, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Eitan Buchvall, a 53-year-old high school teacher who had joined the demonstration before work. “It’s been a year, and it feels like things are getting worse. Lebanon, Iran. More fronts. People are dying on both sides. People are refugees on both sides.”
He held a banner with the name of one hostage, Alon Ohel, who was 22 when he was as kidnapped. His age had been crossed out in black marker and updated: 23.
Most of this crowd have demanded a cease-fire deal that would end the fighting in Gaza and see the release of the captives. But a banner hanging from nearby building read “Deal = Surrender,” a reminder of how deeply divided Israelis have become over how to proceed in what is now the country’s longest war since 1948.
At small vigils on thoroughfares, groups waved posters of the captives at passing commuters. “We are all hostages,” the signs read.
By dawn Monday, scores had taken to the fields where at least 364 were shot down or otherwise killed when Hamas fighters stormed the all-night Nova dance festival. Some carried flashlights as they found their way to the dozens of memorials filling the field, each marked with a portrait of the victim and surrounded by small candles and red ceramic flowers.
Family and friends stroked the images, many in tears. One woman collapsed at the base of her child’s photo. Artillery shells boomed under dark clouds.
At 6:25 a.m., loudspeakers aired the song that was playing at the time of the attacks, completing the tune a year later even as rockets flew again.
Ceremonies — and protests — were planned throughout the day, including a controversial official government memorial service that many of the attacked communities were planning to boycott. Emotions were raw on the anniversary and so was anger. Many in the public hold Netanyahu’s government responsible for failing to achieve the release of the remaining hostages.
The Nova crowd was largely silent when, shortly before 7 a.m., Israeli President Isaac Herzog and his wife approached a display of those killed at the site and lit candles. Some mourners released white balloons bearing a victim’s name. Men, Jewish tefillin strapped around their arms, chanted morning prayers.
Some who survived that morning returned to the places where they had danced in joy and then fled in terror a year ago — a scene now transformed with shrines and newly planted trees.
“I think I was there,” one young man, pointing, said to a group of friends who had parked by the road near the area. The hundreds of cars that had been abandoned in the field and surrounding lanes, many covered in bullet holes and blood, had been removed but sit in the empty lot several miles away where they were towed.
The day also brought news of another Nova festival death. The hostage family umbrella group announced that Idan Shtivi, 28, who was credited with helping two other attendees escape, was killed on Oct. 7 and his body was still being held in Gaza.
A helicopter buzzed overhead. Just a few miles away, the fighting that Israel launched inside of Gaza within hours of the attack last October went on. Black smoke could be seen rising over the enclave.
Weeks of airstrikes followed by 10 months of ground operations degraded Hamas’s military capacity, but has not achieved Netanyahu’s stated goal of destroying the group. For Gazans, the year of war has killed more than 40,000 and trapped more than 2 million civilians in a grinding cycle of displacement, hunger and disease. Israel has lost 346 military members in Gaza in ongoing ground operations.
The United Nations monitoring group for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in a statement, decried what it called “a year of unimaginable suffering.”
“Entire Israeli communities have been displaced, living under the constant threat of indiscriminate rocket fire,” the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. “In Gaza, where Palestinians have already been reeling from the impact of a 17-year-old air, sea and land blockade and repeated cycles of hostilities, Israeli military operations have resulted in a catastrophe.”
Israel remained under heightened security alert as the government weighed the next step in its escalating fight with Iran, which launched almost 200 ballistic missiles into Israeli territory last week. Leaders warned citizens that the second year of war was unlikely to be easier.
“This is a long war, measured not only by capabilities but also by the willpower and perseverance over time,” Israel’s Army chief of staff, Lt. General Herzi Halevi, said in a statement Sunday. But “for our enemies — every month, every week, and every day is worse than the one before.”
For Gazan civilians, who have been under fire since the late hours of Oct. 7 last year, the date returned with no hope in sight for improvement on a year of death and misery. Almost 42,000 people have been killed since the war started, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.
More than 1 million people have fled their home, many having to seek shelter multiple times. Residents near Khan Younis, the site of a large refugee camp in southern Gaza, on Monday received another Israeli military warning to leave combat areas.
“This is my fifth time to be displaced,” Mohamed Abu Taha, 41, originally from Rafah but seeking refuge in Khan Younis, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “This is a terrible day.”
He describes a year of chasing safety and food. A green pepper now costs $7, he said. Humanitarian aid barely trickles in through crossings controlled by Israel, he said, and bandits steal much of what does.
“Is there hope this nightmare ends?” he asked. “We have no energy left.”
Abeer Maher, 36, is living in a tent in the Deir al-Balah refugee camp in central Gaza with her three children, one with hepatitis, the other covered with a Streptococcus rash. Once top students, they haven’t been in school for a year and a day — not since Oct. 6 last year, their “last day of safety and reassurance.”
“Please pray for us,” Maher said. “It is now like the first day of war.”
Hamas, in a statement, hailed the “glorious 7th of October” as a “milestone” and pledged to keep fighting.
Israeli workplaces and schools remained closed in northern parts of the country Monday. In other places, armed parents organized security shifts at school entrances. Some parents created phone trees to scramble babies and toddlers to shelter in case of air raids.
Several of the Israeli towns near Gaza held ceremonies of their own. Survivors from Kibbutz Beeri, where more than 130 people were killed, metfor a rare town gathering; only a few have returned to the community. The event was largely closed to outsiders as residents walked past burned and shattered houses. They wore hats reading “Now” as a plea to free the remaining hostages, including 10 from Beeri. Only three of those are thought to still be alive.
People attend a memorial service in Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel on Monday. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
Down the road in Kibbutz Nir Oz — where 57 were killed and 76 kidnapped, according to a spokesman for the kibbutz — residents and visitors gathered as warplanes flew overhead and tank fire sounded from a distance.
Lotan Cooper, 46, was planting a sapling across from the cemetery where so many of the gravestones bear the date Oct. 7, 2023. His father, Amiram Cooper, who helped found the kibbutz in the 1950s, was one of those kidnapped from Nir Oz, as was his wife, Nurit. She was freed after 17 days in Gaza. Amiram died there.
New trees are part of the healing of his town, which is still far from recovered after a year of war that shows little sign of ending.
“I am very connected to the place, in all my body and my heart,” Cooper said. “Everyone wants the place to grow up again.”
llan Ben Zion in Kibbutz Nir Oz contributed to this report.
