Israel began its commemorations Monday of the first anniversary of Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack, with an outpouring of emotion at vigils at massacre sites and rallies calling for the return of hostages.
Ceremonies and events are planned across Israel and in cities around the world to mark the anniversary of the unprecedented attack by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip, which claimed 1,205 lives.
President Isaac Herzog began the day with a moment of silence at 6:29 am — the exact time the attack started — at Kibbutz Reim, the site of the Nova music festival where at least 370 people were killed by heavily armed Hamas fighters in the deadliest attack on October 7.
Families of those killed attended the memorial, many of them crying, as Herzog met the crowd, an AFP correspondent reported.
In the city of Tel Aviv, too, families of hostages and supporters rallied before dawn to call for the return of their loved ones, holding banners and placards bearing their pictures.
On Sunday, tens of thousands of people attended events in cities around the world, some organised to pay tribute to the victims of Hamas’s attack and others to voice support for the Palestinian people after a year of war in the Gaza Strip.
“Coming to this event one year after this terrible massacre that happened on October 7, it’s very touching,” said organiser Solly Laniado at a ceremony on Sunday in Tel Aviv to remember the victims of the Nova attack.
The anniversary comes with Israel still fighting in Gaza and engaged in a new war to the north in Lebanon against Hamas ally Hezbollah.
It is also preparing its retaliation against Tehran over an Iranian missile attack last week, raising fears of all-out regional war.
The Israeli army said Monday that at least four projectiles were fired from Gaza just minutes after the commemorations began, adding it had “struck Hamas launch posts and underground terrorist infrastructure throughout the Gaza Strip”.
Hamas’s armed wing said in a statement that its fighters had fired rockets at “enemy gatherings” at Rafah crossing, Kerem Shalom crossing and Kibbutz Holit near the border with Gaza.
The military also said sirens sounded Monday morning in northern Israel, which has experienced daily rocket fire from neighbouring Lebanon.
In a statement, Herzog said the world “must support Israel in its battle against its enemies”.
In the early hours of October 7, 2023, Hamas launched its attack by firing thousands of rockets towards Israeli border communities.
At the same time, Hamas fighters stormed across the border and attacked nearly 50 different sites, including kibbutzim communities, army bases and the Nova music festival.
Militants killed festival-goers en masse and went door-to-door in farming communities, shooting residents dead in their homes.
Hours later, Israel launched a blistering military offensive on Gaza that has reduced swathes of the territory to rubble and displaced nearly all of its 2.4 million residents at least once amid an unrelenting humanitarian crisis.
Hamas’s October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on the latest official Israeli figures.
Some 251 people were captured and taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip, of whom 97 are still held captive in the coastal territory, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
An Israeli campaign group on Monday announced the death of a hostage held in Gaza named Idan Shtivi, 28, who was abducted at the Nova festival.
On Sunday he vowed to achieve victory and said the military had “completely transformed reality” in the year since Hamas’s attack.
“A year ago, we suffered a terrible blow. Over the past 12 months, we have completely transformed reality,” Netanyahu said during a visit to the Lebanon border, according to his office.
He has since expanded the objectives of the war sparked by the attack to include a vow to ensure tens of thousands of Israelis forced to flee Hezbollah fire on northern Israel can return to their homes.
Since last month, Israel has conducted massive strikes on Hezbollah strongholds around Lebanon and launched ground operations across the border.
The war has killed more than 1,110 people in Lebanon and forced more than one million to flee their homes.
But Israel’s campaign in Gaza is far from over. In the north of the Palestinian territory, the Israeli military said it had encircled the Jabaliya area after indications Hamas was rebuilding there.
Rescuers said 17 people, including nine children, had been killed on Sunday by Israeli air strikes in the area.
According to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, 41,870 people, the majority of civilians, have been killed since the start of the war. The figures have been deemed to be reliable by the United Nations.
Despite the sheer scale of the destruction and loss of life, Hamas on Sunday called the October 7 attack “glorious”. It said the Palestinians were “writing a new history with their resistance”.
On Monday, Hezbollah also vowed to keep up its fight against Israeli “aggression”, describing the country as a “cancerous” entity that must be “eliminated”.
But on the ground, people were yearning for an end to the violence.
“If I had known that the war would last a whole year, I would never have moved from northern Gaza,” Mona Abu Nahl, 51, told AFP in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip.
“We no longer have the energy to bear all this… I would have put a tent over my destroyed house and sat down, rather than endure this humiliation, hunger and displacement,” she said.
“It feels like the world stopped on October 7,” said another displaced person, Israa Abu Matar, 26.
“I have grown old while watching my children hungry, scared, having nightmares and screaming day and night from the sound of the bombing and shells.”
The fighting in Gaza and Lebanon has been accompanied by the threat of war with Iran, which last week fired more than 200 missiles at Israel in retaliation for the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian general Abbas Nilforoushan in a September 27 strike on Beirut.
Tehran on Sunday said it had prepared a plan to hit back against any possible Israeli reprisal before Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant warned Iran it could end up looking like Gaza or Lebanon’s capital Beirut.
