7 October Anniversary: Remembering The 378 Killed

For the first anniversary with no hostages left in Gaza, families gathered on a desert dance floor where 378 were killed — while near-daily strikes, a UK rift and a feared new exodus define the third year.

Three years after the deadliest day in Israel’s history, the place where the largest single massacre took place is a strip of desert scrub where a dance floor used to be. Since sunrise on Wednesday, bereaved families, survivors and former hostages gathered at the Nova music festival site to remember the 378 people killed there — mostly young Israelis — each represented by a photograph and a short story. It is the first anniversary with no hostages remaining in Gaza. It is not, by any measurable standard, the first anniversary in peace.

What happened on 7 October 2023

Shortly after sunrise, a barrage of thousands of rockets preceded an estimated 6,000 Hamas-led militants breaching the border at dozens of points — by car, motorbike and paraglider. Military bases were assailed and kibbutzim stormed, homes burned and civilians killed; in Nir Oz, 41 people died and 76 of the community’s roughly 400 residents were taken. At the trance festival in the Negev, air-raid alarms sounded at about 06:30 local time, and militants gunned down people fleeing by car and on foot and hid in shelters along the highway. Survivors described hiding for hours or playing dead. Police reinforcements reached the site around 12:30; the army about two hours later. In total, about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage — the single deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. Of 44 kidnapped from Nova, 25 returned alive.

The ceasefire that has not settled anything

Hamas and Israel accepted US President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan last October, which required suspension of “all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment.” A BBC correspondent at the Nova site heard loud thuds apparently from Israeli demolitions or shelling across the border, hours into the commemorations. Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health says more than 1,460 people have been killed in Israeli strikes since the ceasefire began — a figure Israel disputes in characterisation, saying it operates “in a precise manner to remove threats and protect its troops and Israeli civilians, in accordance with the agreement.” The Israeli military says five troops have been killed in combat and one contractor in an operational accident since the truce. Most of Gaza lies in ruins, nearly the whole population is displaced, and the UN warns of dire humanitarian conditions.

The first anniversary with no captives — and its unresolved politics

That no hostages remain in Gaza is the one decisive change since last year, and it belongs to the families who campaigned for years and to a deal nobody expected to hold. Inside Israel, though, the anniversary has become electoral. With an election imminent, anti-government groups including the October Council and the Kumu Movement blocked a main Tel Aviv highway, dyed the Dizengoff Square fountain red, and displayed banners reading “a complete failure” and “guilty” beside an image of Benjamin Netanyahu. In the small cemetery at Kfar Aza, former defence minister Yoav Gallant sat with residents while the names of the dead were read aloud, one by one. Senior defence and security officials have resigned or been dismissed. Three years after Israel’s worst-ever security failure, there has been no independent state inquiry. On a Tel Aviv beach, an unattributed installation of 1,200 human figures stood beneath Hebrew letters spelling “Total Failure.”

Britain: vigils, tribute and a diplomatic chill

A vigil organised by the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council is due outside Downing Street at 17:00 BST, with speeches, prayers, music, a reading of the names of British victims and a moment of silence. Derbyshire Jewish Community holds an online memorial at 19:00 BST, after a Movement for Progressive Judaism service on Sunday. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said a “disturbing rise in antisemitic behaviour in the UK” has been observed since the attacks: “I want Britain’s Jewish community to hear this from me directly. We stand with you… An attack on Jewish people in Britain is an attack on all of us.” The Israeli Embassy in London paid tribute to the British-Israeli dead but said the atmosphere for British Jews “continues to worsen,” citing post-attack celebrations, “marches of hate,” and intimidation in schools, universities and online — and expressed “deep sadness” that the British government’s position on Israel has shifted so far from the solidarity of the first days.

Emily Damari’s warning

Damari, a former British-Israeli hostage held in Gaza for 471 days after gunmen took her from her home, shooting her in the hand and leg, said in a video message: “Fifteen British citizens were killed that day, and another British hostage later died in captivity… It was not an accident; it was a planned terrorist attack. And yet, even today, there are people who deny what happened, distort it, or simply choose to look away.” She said Jewish communities worldwide had carried the pain of three years, and in Britain had “often felt afraid simply because they are Jewish,” and asked people to “continue to stand against antisemitism and terrorism.”

Gaza: the question has narrowed

For many Palestinians, the argument about how the war ends has been displaced by a bleaker one. Mohammed Emad al-Din, a 38-year-old barber in Gaza City, has been displaced five times since 7 October; his home is destroyed and his shop partly damaged. “I don’t believe Israel caused all this destruction for nothing,” he said. “They have turned Gaza into a place that is almost impossible to live in, and I fear that we will eventually end up outside the place where we were born.” That fear, expressed across Gaza and to this correspondent by Hamas, Palestinian Authority and opposition figures alike, is now close to the only point of consensus among a deeply divided leadership: the threat of large-scale displacement is believed to be real, and they believe they lack the military or political means to stop it.

Hamas’s position

Hamas issued a statement praising 7 October as a “historic milestone” in its “ongoing struggle project,” calling it “a natural response” to “bitter suffering” imposed by Israel, and rejecting as “a blatant falsification of reality” the notion that the conflict began on that date. It insists the confrontation “is not over yet” and accuses Israel of genocide — an accusation Israel denies. The Al-Qassam Brigades separately circulated a stylised image of a paraglider crossing a breached section of fence.

A global commemoration, and a local one

World leaders marked the day: Germany’s Friedrich Merz called the attack “a profound rupture” and pledged to confront antisemitism “with even greater resolve”; Emmanuel Macron said France “does not forget the names and faces” of the killed; the European Commission’s Ursula von der Leyen said the EU “remains ready to help turn today’s fragile ceasefire into a durable peace, based on a two-state solution”; Sweden’s Ulf Kristersson called it “downright appalling” that Jews have lived with growing antisemitism since the attack. In Sydney, hundreds gathered at Bondi at dawn, observing silence at 06:29 local time — the exact moment of the assault. Israel’s ambassador there, Hillel Newman, said “there is a direct line between the shooting at Nova and the shooting at Bondi”: 15 people were killed in an antisemitic attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi on 14 December 2025.

Analysis: three years, three unfinished accounts

Each side is now marking a different anniversary. For Jewish communities, the third year is defined by a grievance that has curdled into a political one — the demand for an inquiry no government has yet delivered, and a diaspora that reports being made to feel unsafe for surviving. For Gazans, the anniversary measures loss of territory, of homes and of prospects, with the ceasefire functioning as a reduction in violence rather than a termination of war. For Hamas, the commemoration is a claim of strategic success on its own terms. The uncomfortable common ground is that none of these three accounts is reconcilable with the others, and the ceasefire is a mechanism that freezes that standoff rather than resolving it. The measure to watch is not rhetoric but the number of people who cannot rebuild — and the number of Palestinians who conclude that remaining in Gaza is no longer a practical possibility.