Bloodshed and paralysis: How the Oct 7 attack has changed Mid-East a year on

A showdown between Israel and Iran looms as two wars devastate Gaza and Lebanon.

- Jonathan Eyal

When armed men from Hamas, the radical Palestinian organisation in Gaza, crossed into Israel in the early morning hours of Oct 7, 2023, with the purpose of murdering or kidnapping any Israeli soldier or civilian in their path, they set in motion a brutal and bloody war. Still, nobody thought in its early days that the conflict would last so long or take the unexpected turns that it did.

Yet by the end of this week, the Gaza war will reach the grim milestone of one year, with no indication whatsoever that the bloodshed is about to end. It is a war which both Israel and Hamas are losing, while everyone else seems powerless to stop it. Yet, it is also a war that keeps on reshaping the Middle East in even more ominous directions.

For Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and for Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas' military forces, the Oct 7 attacks, which they planned almost single-handedly, had exact objectives.

They wanted to inflict maximum pain on Israel. They also aimed to derail Israel's normalisation of diplomatic relations with Arab states, a process which threatened to relegate Palestine to a mere sideshow. The Oct 7 attack was also meant to showcase Hamas as the only radical organisation able to fight Israel, in distinction to the more moderate Fatah movement of the Palestinian Authority.

Although audacious in concept and meticulous in planning, the two Hamas leaders were probably surprised by the sheer scale of the blow they inflicted. Over 1,200 Israelis were murdered, and a further 250 dragged over - dead or alive - into Gaza. The mowing down by Hamas gunmen of teenagers dancing at an open-air music festival and the unspeakably horrible slaughter of civilians, including children and older people, shocked the world.