An Israeli soldier covers his face as he visits the site where revellers were killed and kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack by Hamas militants at the Nova music festival, near the Kibbutz Reim, southern Israel, on October 6, 2025.
| Photo Credit: AP
Israelis prepared to mourn the dead on Tuesday (October 7, 2025) as the nation marks two years since Hamas’s October 7 attack plunged the region into a devastating war, while Israel and Hamas hold indirect talks in Egypt.
The main memorial ceremony is being organised by bereaved families, not the government, reflecting deep divisions over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, which many blame for the failure to secure a ceasefire that would free the remaining hostages held by the militant group.
In the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed tens of thousands of people and razed entire towns and cities, those who can are fleeing another Israeli invasion of Gaza City while others are sheltering in place. Many are unable to make the arduous and costly journey south.
Worst attack in Israel’s history
It’s been two years since thousands of Hamas-led militants poured into southern Israel after a surprise barrage of rockets. They stormed army bases, farming communities and an outdoor music festival, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, including women, children and older adults.
They abducted 251 others, most of whom have since been released in ceasefires or other deals. Forty-eight remain inside Gaza, around 20 of them believed by Israel to be alive. Hamas has said it will release them only in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal. Netanyahu has vowed to continue the war until all of the captives are returned and Hamas has been disarmed.
The attack set in motion a cascade of events that led Israel into combat with Iran and its allies across the region, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which suffered major losses. The United States joined Israel in attacking Iran’s military and nuclear program in a 12-day war in June.
Israel has killed several top militants as well as Iranian generals and nuclear scientists, and it has vastly depleted the military capabilities of its enemies while seizing control over most of Gaza as well as parts of Lebanon and Syria.
But the failure to return the hostages has left the country deeply divided, with weekly mass protests against Mr. Netanyahu. Israel is more isolated internationally than it has been in decades.
Memorial at the scene of a massacre
Nearly 400 Israelis were killed and dozens abducted from the Nova music festival in the border community of Reim. Over the last two years, it has emerged as a memorial site, with portraits of the kidnapped and fallen affixed to Israeli flags. Bereaved families plan to erect a sukkah — a festive, temporary shelter — there in honor of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which coincides with the anniversary.
There was no official ceremony at the Nova site due to the Jewish holiday.
In Pictures: Israel-Hamas war — a year on
October 7, 2023: Hamas militants stormed across the border from Gaza into Israel in what would become the deadliest attack in the country’s history. At the end of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, the militants launched their assault by land, air, and sea.
Militants abducted 251 hostages on October 7, 97 of whom are still captive in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military has said are dead.
Soon after the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced “We are at war.” He declared a mass army mobilization. “Not an ‘operation,’ not a ‘round,’ but at war.”
Israel battered Gaza on October 8 after suffering its bloodiest attack in decades, when Hamas fighters rampaged through Israeli towns killing 600 and abducting dozens more, as the spiralling violence threatened a major new war in West Asia.
Israeli air strikes hit housing blocks, tunnels, a mosque, and the homes of Hamas officials in Gaza, killing more than 370 people, including 20 children, as Mr. Netanyahu vowed “mighty vengeance for this black day”.
October 27, 2023: Internet and phone services collapsed in the Gaza Strip under intensified bombardment, largely cutting off its 2.3 million people from the outside world and each other, as Israel’s military “expanded” its ground operations in the besieged territory. The military’s announcement signalled it was moving closer to an all-out invasion of Gaza, where it has vowed to crush the ruling Hamas group after its bloody incursion in southern Israel three weeks ago. This screen grab taken from handout footage released by the Israeli army on October 26, 2023, shows a “targeted raid” in northern Gaza with tanks and infantry.
November 2023: Israeli forces struck near several hospitals in Gaza City as the military pushed deeper into dense urban neighborhoods in its battle with Hamas militants, prompting increasing numbers of civilians to flee toward the south of the besieged territory.
Israel accused Hamas fighters of hiding in hospitals and using the Shifa Hospital complex as its main command center, which the militant group and hospital staff deny, saying Israel is creating a pretext to strike it. In this photo from November 6, 2023, a man walks between the bodies wrapped in shrouds of those killed in Israeli bombardment in Deir Balah in the central Gaza Strip, at the Shuhada Al-Aqsa hospital in the same city.
November 24, 2023: After 48 days of gunfire and bombardment that claimed thousands of lives, a four-day truce in the Israel-Hamas war began. Palestinian prisoners (wearing grey jumpers) cheer after being released from the Israeli Ofer military facility in Baytunia in the occupied West Bank in exchange for hostages freed by Hamas in Gaza, on November 24, 2023.
February 29, 2024: Israeli forces in war-torn Gaza opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians at an aid distribution point on February 29, killing at least 104 people and wounding over 700 according to Palestinian health officials. A witness told AFP that the violence unfolded when thousands of people desperate for food rushed towards aid trucks at the city’s western Nabulsi roundabout. This image grab from a handout video released by the Israeli Army shows what the Army says are Gazans around aid trucks in Gaza City.
March 2024: The U.N. warned that Israel’s severe restrictions on aid into war-ravaged Gaza coupled with its military offensive could amount to using starvation as a “weapon of war”, which would be a “war crime”. The devastating war since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel has left roughly half of Gazans — around 1.1 million people — experiencing “catastrophic” hunger, the assessment said. In this photo from October 2023, Palestinian children receive food at a UN-run school in Rafah, on the southern Gaza Strip.
March 2, 2024: U.S. military C-130 cargo planes dropped food in pallets over Gaza.
The airdrop was the first of many announced by President Joe Biden on. The aid was be coordinated with Jordan, which has also conducted airdrops to deliver food to Gaza.
Since the war began on Oct 7, Israel barred entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies, except for a trickle of aid entering the south from Egypt at the Rafah crossing and Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing.
April 2, 2024: An Israeli airstrike kills six international aid workers with the World Central Kitchen charity and their Palestinian driver, hours after it brought a new shipload of food into northern Gaza.
Footage showed the bodies of the dead at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah. Several of them wore protective gear with the charity’s logo. In this photo, a man displays the blood-stained British, Polish, and Australian passports.
April 13, 2024: Iran launched multiple drones toward Israel, marking the first time Iran had ever launched a full-scale military assault on Israel, despite decades of enmity dating back to the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iran had been threatening to attack Israel since an airstrike last week killed two Iranian generals in Syria. Israel has not commented on that attack, but Iran accused it of being behind it.
This photo shows an anti-missile system operates after Iran launched drones and missiles towards Israel, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel.
May 7, 2024: An Israeli tank brigade seized control on of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt as Israel moved forward with an offensive in the southern city.
Israeli tanks moved into the southern part of the city overnight, while warplanes bombed areas near the crucial Rafah border crossing, killing at least 23 Palestinians and injuring several others. The invasion, described by the U.S. as a “limited operation,” unfolded a day after the Israeli military ordered over a million people sheltering in Rafah to evacuate parts of the southern Gaza Strip city and relocate to an “expanded humanitarian zone” near Khan Younis, in preparation for an assault to “eradicate” Hamas.
Photo shows Israeli military vehicles operate in the Gazan side of the Rafah Crossing.
July 27, 2024: A rocket attack on a soccer field in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights killed 12 children and wounded several others, hours after an Israeli airstrike on south Lebanon killed three members of the militant Hezbollah group.
The strike, the deadliest attack on an Israeli target since the fighting between the two foes erupted in October 2023, raised fears of of a broader conflagration in the region. This photo shows mourners from the Druze minority surround the bodies of some of the 12 children and teens killed in a rocket strike at a soccer field, during their funeral, in the village of Majdal Shams, in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.
July 31, 2024: The political leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in an Israeli strike in Iran, where he had been attending the inauguration of the country’s new president.
Haniyeh was elected head of the Hamas political bureau in 2017 to succeed Khaled Meshaal, but was already a well-known figure having become Palestinian prime minister in 2006.
This photo shows Iranians follow a truck, center, carrying the coffins of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and his bodyguard, during their funeral ceremony at Enqelab-e-Eslami (Islamic Revolution) Sq. in Tehran, Iran, on August 1, 2024.
August 28, 2024: Israel pressed on with a large-scale military operation in the occupied West Bank. Hamas said 10 of its fighters were killed in various locations, and the Palestinian Health Ministry reported an 11th casualty, without saying whether he was a fighter or a civilian.
An Israeli vehicle operates on the road during an Israeli raid in Nour Shams camp in Tulkarm, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on August 29, 2024.
September 18, 2024: In a sophisticated, remote attack, pagers used by hundreds of members of Hezbollah exploded almost simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria killing at least nine people — including an 8-year-old girl — and wounding thousands more.
A Lebanese army bomb disposal specialist wearing a protective gear prepares, with his comrade, to detonate a walkie-talkie that was found at the parking of the American University Hospital, in Beirut, Lebanon.
September 27, 2024: A wave of air raids hit Beirut’s southern suburbs early on as Israel stepped up attacks on Hezbollah, after a massive strike on the Iran-backed movement’s command centre that ended up killing the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Photo shows smoke rising above Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 27, 2024.
October 1, 2024: Iran fired a salvo of ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s campaign against Tehran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.
Iran has vowed to retaliate following attacks that killed the top leadership of its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon. The firing of missiles came after Israel said its troops had launched ground raids into Lebanon, though it described the forays as limited.
People are seen visiting the site of the remains of an Iranian missile in the Negev desert near Arad in the aftermath of an Iranian missile attack on Israel.
A combination picture shows Palestinian woman Inas Abu Maamar, 36, embracing the body of her 5-year-old niece Saly, who was killed in an Israeli strike, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on October 17, 2023 (L). Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem won the prestigious 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award for this image. In the second image Inas visits a damaged cemetery where Saly was buried, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on September 11, 2024.
1/3
The main memorial ceremony will be held in Tel Aviv and include musical performances and speeches. It’s being organized by Yonatan Shamriz, whose brother, Alon, was among three hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli forces after they escaped captivity early in the war.
Israel and Hamas discuss Trump peace plan
Israel and Hamas met on Monday in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to discuss a new peace plan put forward by US President Donald Trump. The talks were to continue Tuesday.
The war has already killed over 67,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, part of the Hamas-run government, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants. It says women and children make up around half the dead, and many independent experts say its figures are the most reliable estimate of wartime casualties.
Israel’s offensive has displaced around 90% of Gaza’s population of some 2 million, often multiple times, and restrictions on humanitarian aid have contributed to a severe hunger crisis, with experts saying Gaza City is experiencing famine.
Experts and major rights groups have accused Israel of genocide, and the International Criminal Court is seeking the arrest of Netanyahu and his former defense minister for using starvation as a method of war.
Israel vehemently denies the allegations, saying it is waging a lawful war of self-defense and taking extraordinary measures to avoid harming civilians. It blames Hamas for the death and destruction in Gaza because the militants are deeply embedded in populated areas.
Hamas portrayed the October 7 attack as a response to decades of Israeli land seizures, settlement construction and military occupation. But the attack has exacted a catastrophic toll on the Palestinians, whose dream of an independent state appears more distant than ever.
Published – October 07, 2025 09:24 am IST
