On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorists breached the Gaza border, stormed Israeli military bases and communities, and attacked the Nova music festival. About 1,200 people, most of them civilians, were killed in Israel, and 251 were abducted into Gaza. The assault triggered the war in Gaza.
More than 74,000 Palestinians have been reported killed in Gaza since Israel launched its military campaign, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which operates under the Hamas-run authorities and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
President Isaac Herzog and his wife, Michal, began the day’s commemorations by lighting a memorial candle at the presidential residence in Jerusalem at 6:29 a.m., the moment the attack began three years earlier.
“The candle lighting expresses the shared national grief and pain of the State of Israel and its citizens,” the president’s office said in a statement.
The tribute honored those killed in the attack and the war that followed, from infants and children to older people, civilians, and service members.
“Alongside remembrance of those murdered and those who fell, this occasion is also dedicated to standing with bereaved families, honoring those who bear the physical and psychological scars of October 7 and the war, and supporting former hostages and their families on their journey of rehabilitation and recovery,” the statement said.
Across the country, remembrance was accompanied by demands for accountability. Protest convoys set out from several regions, and demonstrators gathered outside cabinet ministers’ homes. Organizers called for a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the attack.
Three years on, no state commission of inquiry has been established. Under Israel’s existing system, its members would be appointed by the president of the Supreme Court. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition has advanced an alternative involving appointments by coalition and opposition lawmakers, arguing that it would command broader public trust. Opponents say officials should not help choose the people who would investigate their own decisions.
The commemorations occurred just 20 days before Israel’s Oct. 27 parliamentary election.
Israel held its official state memorial ceremonies on Monday, Oct. 5, following the date of the attack on the Hebrew calendar. Netanyahu pledged to pursue those involved in the attack and in holding hostages, saying they are “living on borrowed time.” He portrayed Israel’s subsequent military operations as a response to a broader threat from Iran and its allies.
Defense Minister Israel Katz, citing Israeli military figures, said about 4,000 of the estimated 6,000 attackers had been killed. He said Israeli forces would continue pursuing those who remained.
Learning to Live With Loss
For families whose loved ones were killed in the Oct. 7 attack, the past three years have meant learning to live with a lasting absence. In interviews with us, relatives repeatedly described the tension between enduring grief and moving forward with life.
Assaf Schlezinger, a paramedic with Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency medical service, was overseeing medical operations at the Nova music festival, where 378 people were killed.
“When the chaos began on the morning of October 7, he was treating people,” his daughter, Nitzan, told The Epoch Times. “That is how he was killed.”
In the years since, his family has tried to piece together what he did during the attack, drawing on survivors’ accounts and videos from the scene.
“Through survivors I met and videos I found, we learned that my father treated people and saved lives,” she said. “Suddenly, the saying ‘Whoever saves a single life is as though they have saved an entire world’ becomes something real—the realization that he was there, saving lives. Even if it had been just one person, I would have been very proud.”
She was invoking a traditional Jewish teaching rooted in the Mishnah, a foundational text of Jewish law.
The late Assaf Schlezinger, who was the head of the medical response team at the Nova music festival, and his wife, Galit. Photo courtesy of the family
At Kibbutz Be'eri, approximately 340 terrorists entered the community, according to an Israeli military inquiry. The assault and ensuing battle left 101 civilians and 31 security personnel dead, and 32 people were taken hostage.
The same inquiry found that the military had failed to protect the community, citing inadequate preparedness and a disorganized response in the first hours of the attack.
Among those killed was Mordechai Naveh, 76, a longtime kibbutz member.
“Mordechai ran the kibbutz’s carpentry shop,” his son, Dotan, said. “He made toys and other things for children—chairs, wooden horses, things like that.”
The late Mordechai Naveh. Courtesy of the family
Naveh’s partner, Yona, was killed after attackers set her home on fire.
At nearby Kibbutz Kfar Aza, 62 residents were killed, and 19 people were abducted, according to another military inquiry.
Among the victims were all five members of the Kutz family. Gunmen entered the reinforced safe room in their home and shot the parents, Aviv and Livnat, and their three children: Yiftach, 14, Yonatan, 16, and Rotem, 18.
Livnat’s sister described how the family’s efforts to honor her memory grew out of Livnat’s lifelong commitment to making things by hand.
“My sister spent many years working in crafts,” she said. “About a decade ago, she opened a place called Beit Melakha—‘The Workshop.’ She wanted children to experience traditional crafts that are disappearing from the world, to help them develop a sense of what they could accomplish.”
The late Livnat Kutz. Photo by Zohar Shafak
Before the attack, Livnat and other community members had created an installation in Kfar Aza: a pair of wings assembled from discarded toys and doll parts. After her death, the work became the inspiration for a wider memorial project, known in English as Wings of Hope, with similar installations created in Israel and abroad.
“Everyone takes the idea in a slightly different direction,” her sister said.
Finding a Way Back From Captivity
This is the first Oct. 7 anniversary with no hostages remaining in Gaza. All surviving captives have returned, and the remains of the last hostage were recovered in January.
Former hostages, including men held for more than two years, have turned to writing about their experiences. Their memoirs recount not only what was done to them, but what they held on to in order to survive.
Avinatan Or, who was abducted from the Nova festival and spent 738 days in captivity, recalls his father’s advice in his Hebrew-language memoir, “Through the Earth.”
“Always hold yourself accountable first, and only then look at what those around you are doing,” his father would tell him whenever he encountered something wrong in the world around him.
Or remembered those words as a mob in Gaza tried to kill him after his abduction. He carried the words with him during his long isolation in an iron cage, in a dark tunnel roughly 33 feet underground.
His father’s advice, he writes, helped him let go of his anger—at the relentless hunger, at the fate that had brought him there, and at his captors. He saw the captors as the enemy outside. Anger was the enemy within, draining his strength and poisoning him from the inside.
Maxim Herkin, also abducted from Nova, spent 738 days in captivity. In his Hebrew-language memoir, “Into the Light,” he describes being held for nearly two years in a tunnel roughly 100 feet underground.
Alongside accounts of systematic starvation, beatings, torture, and humiliation, Herkin writes that only in captivity did he fully grasp the meaning of the words “everything is in God’s hands.” Faith, he says, gave him and his fellow captives strength and comfort.
Captivity also changed his relationship with the most basic necessities. Food, he came to believe, was sacred. Not even a crumb should be thrown away. Each person should take only what they need and share the rest.
He and his fellow hostages established another rule: They could not all fall apart at once. When despair overwhelmed the group, someone had to speak with hope, out loud, “even if he was collapsing inside.”
“When you lift someone else up, it lifts you up, too,” he wrote.
Asked whether he wants revenge, Herkin compared it to a nuclear weapon: A person may imagine aiming it at an enemy, but the explosion happens within. Revenge consumes a person’s thoughts, strength, and life until they become its prisoner.
“Then what would be the difference between me and my captors?” he asks. “I believe God will settle the score with them, not me.”
Eli Sharabi, who spent 491 days in Hamas captivity, describes a different struggle in “Hostage,” which was published in English on Oct. 7, 2025. Throughout his captivity, he longed to return to his wife and daughters.
He did not know that his wife, Lianne, and both daughters, Noya and Yahel, had been killed in their home on Oct. 7. He learned of their deaths only after his release.
In captivity, Sharabi reminded himself that although he could not control the terrible things happening to him, he could still choose how to respond. He made two decisions: to survive, and to reach beyond his own suffering to become a father figure to the three younger hostages sharing a space of about 215 square feet with him.
“He who has a why can bear almost any how,” he would remind them.
“The most important thing is to think about others, about your family out there, beside themselves with worry,” he told them.
In the book’s final chapter, Sharabi visits the graves of his wife and daughters. He allows himself to break down completely, to weep and confront the full depth of his loss. Then he describes the effort to gather himself, rise from his grief, and return to life.
“This is rock bottom. I have seen it. I have touched it. Now, life,” he said.
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