People & Histories
7 October 2023 – ceasefire of 10 October 2025 (aftermath ongoing)

7 October 2023 and the Gaza war

Hamas-led militants kill about 1,200 people in Israel and take 251 hostages; Israel's war in Gaza that follows kills tens of thousands of Palestinians and leaves the territory in ruins.

Debated by historians warterrorismhostageshumanitarianidentitypersecutionmemory

Part of the story of Israel, Palestinians and Jewish people.

7 October

Early on Saturday 7 October 2023, a Jewish holiday, Hamas fired thousands of rockets and sent some 3,000 fighters, joined by other armed groups and civilians from Gaza, through the border fence into southern Israel. They overran army posts and attacked kibbutzim and towns such as Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz and Sderot, and the Nova music festival near Re’im, where more than 360 young people were killed. Families were killed in their homes and safe rooms; homes were burned.

  • AFP tally of deaths in the 7 October 2023 attack, based on official Israeli figures — Agence France-Presse, AFP (2024)
  • Israel-Hamas War — Encyclopaedia Britannica

About 1,200 people were killed (an AFP tally of official Israeli figures gives 1,198), most of them civilians, including children, elderly people and foreign workers. 251 people were taken to Gaza as hostages. A UN special representative reported in 2024 that there were reasonable grounds to believe sexual violence occurred during the attack; Hamas denies this.

  • AFP tally of deaths in the 7 October 2023 attack, based on official Israeli figures — Agence France-Presse, AFP (2024)
  • Israel-Hamas War — Encyclopaedia Britannica
The army took many hours to reach some communities, and the failure of Israel’s intelligence and military is still bitterly debated.

The war in Gaza

Israel declared war, imposed a full siege for a time, and launched a massive air campaign followed by a ground invasion from 27 October 2023. Its goals were to destroy Hamas’s military and governing power and free the hostages. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Iran also fired on Israel, and Israel fought a war with Hezbollah in 2024 and a twelve-day air war with Iran in June 2025. On 28 February 2026 US and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and a wider regional war followed.

The toll in Gaza has been immense. By mid-2026 Gaza’s Health Ministry, run by the Hamas-led government, reported more than 73,000 Palestinians killed since October 2023. The UN treats its counts as broadly reliable and several independent studies suggest they are an undercount; Israel disputes the figures, says they do not distinguish fighters from civilians, and has claimed many thousands of combatants killed.

The UN estimated that around 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.1 million people were displaced, many several times, and most buildings were damaged or destroyed. In August 2025 the IPC food-security monitor confirmed famine in Gaza Governorate; Israel rejected the finding.
  • Reported Impact Snapshot: Gaza Strip — UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt), United Nations (2026)
  • Gaza Strip: Famine Confirmed in Gaza Governorate (IPC Analysis) — Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, IPC (2025)
Hundreds of Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting.
  • Israel-Hamas War — Encyclopaedia Britannica

Hostages and ceasefires

A week-long truce in November 2023 freed 105 hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. A second ceasefire in January 2025 broke down in March. A US-brokered ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025; the 20 living hostages still held were freed on 13 October in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, and the remains of the last hostage were recovered in January 2026.

  • Israel-Hamas War — Encyclopaedia Britannica
As of October 2026 Gaza remained devastated and divided, its future governance and reconstruction unresolved, and deadly incidents continued.

A wave of antisemitism

Far from the Middle East, antisemitic incidents surged. Even before the attack, 96% of Jewish respondents to an EU survey in 2023 said they had encountered antisemitism in the past year.

Afterwards came deadly attacks on Jews in diaspora cities: outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington in May 2025, at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur in October 2025, and at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December 2025, where at least 15 people were killed. Many Jews describe hiding visible signs of their identity, synagogues and schools often need guards, and the war has divided Jews politically, across generations and within families.

Two peoples, two griefs

For Israelis, the images of 7 October, the posters of hostages and the “Bring Them Home” rallies in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square are the defining memory of their time. For Palestinians, the images are of children pulled from rubble, tents on the beach at Mawasi and lines for flour. Many on each side find it hard to see the other’s suffering, and outsiders often take sides by choosing which images to look at.

  • Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor — Yossi Klein Halevi, Harper (2018)
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
Both griefs are real, and understanding either people today means knowing what this war has meant to them.

How it's seen
Israeli view

An unprovoked massacre of civilians by a genocidal terrorist organisation, which forced Israel to fight to destroy Hamas and bring the hostages home. Hamas embedded itself in tunnels under homes, hospitals and schools, and bears responsibility for civilian deaths; genocide accusations are a blood libel.

  • AFP tally of deaths in the 7 October 2023 attack, based on official Israeli figures — Agence France-Presse, AFP (2024)
  • Israel-Hamas War — Encyclopaedia Britannica

Palestinian views

Palestinians differ about 7 October itself: some saw it as resistance after years of siege, many opposed the killing of civilians, and many say they were never asked. Almost all see Israel's war as collective punishment and many as genocide, aimed at making Gaza unlivable.

Many Jews in Israel and the diaspora

7 October revived the oldest fear, of being hunted for being Jewish. The speed with which some celebrated or denied the atrocities, and the rise in attacks on Jews far from Israel, felt like proof that antisemitism had only been sleeping.

Jewish critics of the war

A significant minority of Jews, especially younger and left-leaning ones, mourn the 7 October victims but condemn the scale of death and destruction in Gaza, and reject treating all criticism of Israel as antisemitism.

International bodies and scholars

The ICJ ordered Israel in January 2024 to prevent genocidal acts while the case brought by South Africa proceeds; the ICC issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Netanyahu, former defence minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas commander Mohammed Deif; a UN commission of inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide. Israel rejects all of these, and scholars of genocide and the laws of war remain divided.

  • Application of the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel): Order on Provisional Measures, 26 January 2024 — International Court of Justice, ICJ (2024)
  • Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza under the Genocide Convention — UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, UN Human Rights Council (2025)
  • Israel-Hamas War — Encyclopaedia Britannica

Why it matters today

Israel

7 October was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and shattered Israelis' faith that their state could protect them. The hostages became a national obsession, the war divided the country over priorities and blame, and Israel faces unprecedented international isolation and legal challenges.

Palestinians

For Palestinians the war in Gaza is the gravest catastrophe since 1948, a second Nakba: tens of thousands dead, most of the population displaced, famine, and whole neighbourhoods erased. It has touched every Palestinian family in the world and shapes how a generation sees Israel and the West.

Jewish people

Many Jews say the period since 7 October 2023 has changed how safe they feel, at synagogues, on campuses and in daily life, and has strained friendships and political loyalties. It also exposed painful arguments among Jews themselves about the war in Gaza and Israel's government.