"The pain will never leave': Israel marks one year since Hamas attack

Nation remembers the victims of brutal assault on 7 October

- Andrew Roth

One year ago, nearly 400 young Israelis were massacred at the site of the Nova music festival during the 7 October Hamas attack. As mourners gathered at the site of the festival to commemorate the victims yesterday, their low sobs and murmured prayers were punctuated by the sound of artillery and machine guns being fired by soldiers into nearby Gaza.

Perhaps no single scene across Israel more expressly exhibited the horrific violence meted out against hundreds of civilians by Hamas, and the subsequent ferocity of the Israeli response against that organisation and millions of people inside of Gaza.

Just days before relatives gathered here, Israel sent tanks back across the border into northern Gaza for the first time in months and distributed leaflets telling the remaining population, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, to evacuate to the south of the territory to avoid being caught up in a "new phase of the war".

And yesterday, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in near-messianic terms about a war that he has justified by pointing to the 1,200 victims of the Hamas attack and declared them a rationale for an ever-expanding conflict that Israel is fighting on "seven fronts" across the Middle East.

"This is the war of our existence -the 'war of resurrection'," he told his cabinet in a speech. "This is what I would like to officially call the war." In Re'im, relatives gathered around the homemade memorials to the estimated 365 people killed at the festival on that day in 2023, while attack helicopters whirred overhead and occasionally let loose bursts of automatic gunfire toward Gaza, only three miles away from the festival site in southern Israel.

Police had before the ceremony warned attenders that if they heard a siren, they had just seconds to drop to the ground before a rocket from Hamas could hit.