Vigils held to mark a year since October 7
Vigils have taken place across much of the world today to mark the one year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel, as violence engulfs the Middle East and Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza strip continues a year on.
This afternoon, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer paid tribute to the 1,200 people who lost their lives after Hamas gunmen stormed the border fortifications and went on a killing rampage at several sites in southern Israel. He told parliament that it marked "the bloodiest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust", adding “for so many, the pain and horror of that day is as acute today as it was a year ago”.
Starmer said that it was also “a day of grief for the wider region”, telling MPs: “The human toll among innocent civilians in Gaza is truly devastating. It is a living nightmare, and it must end”.
In Israel, mourning relatives gathered this afternoon around homemade memorials at the site of the Nova music festival, where an estimated 365 people were shot dead during Hamas’s attack.
Meanwhile, a group of families of Israeli hostages still being held captive by Hamas inside Gaza marched to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem to demand he sign a deal to bring the remaining 101 hostages home. “A whole year in which time has stopped. I’m still on the same day,” said Shai Wenkert, whose 22-year-old son Omer was abducted from the Nova festival.
In addition to marking one year since the deadliest day for Israel in its history, tomorrow will mark a year of acute suffering for Palestinian civilians living in the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s bombing campaign and ground offensive launched by Netanyahu in the aftermath of October 7 - with the stated aim of “eliminating Hamas” - has killed almost 42,000 Palestinians over the last year, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Of the identified dead, about 56 percent are estimated to be women and children, according to a Reuters analysis. Roughly 9 in 10 inhabitants of the densely populated strip have been displaced with nowhere safe to go and, according to the UN back in June, “Ten children per day are losing one or both of their legs in the war in Gaza”.
In late April, it was estimated that Israel had dropped at least 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza since October, surpassing the combined weight of bombs dropped on London, Dresden and Hamburg in all of the Second World War.
Benjamin Netanyahu's main political rival, Benny Gantz, has urged the PM to withdraw the military from the Gaza Strip in exchange for securing the release of Israeli hostages still held there. But Netanyahu has rejected all ceasefire proposals to date and vowed to keep fighting until he has achieved his goal of “total victory” in Gaza.
A year on from October 7, a two-state solution - that calls for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital, alongside the Israeli state - in addition to security guarantees is still talked of by many international governments as the only viable path to peace.
But, with a ceasefire yet to be negotiated in Gaza, Israel expanding its military operations in Lebanon, and with Hezbollah and Hamas both marking the anniversary of October 7 by launching fresh rocket attacks at Israel today - the path to ending the suffering and achieving peace appears further off than ever.
Caitlin Allen
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FIVE THINGS
Curated by the Reaction Team - Olivia Gearson
1. Searching for hope in the wake of October 7. Lisa Goldman in New Lines
2. Putin’s ‘Merchant of Death’ is back in the arms business, Benoit Faucon et al. in The Wall Street Journal
3. Conservatives for Deepfakes? Jacques Berlinerblau discusses AI in politics in Compact
4. October 7 supercharged anti-semitism in the United States, writes Dara Horn in The Atlantic
5. Not drowning but waving: the strange optimism of the Conservative conference, writes Emily Lawford in Prospect