Live Updates: Memorials Commemorate Anniversary of Hamas-Led Attack on Israel

The anniversary caps 12 months of profound loss and trauma for both Israelis and Palestinians, amid a war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza that has become the deadliest in a century of conflict between Arabs and Jews — and the longest since the fighting that set the boundaries of the Israeli state in 1949.

More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s devastating counterattack, roughly 100 Israelis remain captive in Gaza — including dozens who are believed to have died — and there is no end to the war in sight. Negotiations for a truce are at an impasse and the war has since expanded into a regional conflict among Israel and Hamas’s allies, leading to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and direct confrontations with Iran.

Around the world, the war has spurred unusually sustained anger at Israel, eroded its allies’ patience and made the country more isolated. Revulsion at Hamas’s atrocities last Oct. 7 gave way to horror at Israel’s military response, leading to accusations of genocide at the world’s top court, unrest on American campuses and growing discomfort over Israeli government policy from some Democratic lawmakers as well as some American Jews.

Among Israelis, the trauma of last October has given fresh momentum to the argument that there is no peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After an initial burst of unity, Israeli society has also become deeply polarized over whether the government should focus on defeating Hamas or agree to a compromise that would free the remaining hostages at the expense of allowing the Iranian-backed militant group to survive.

Those disputes were set to overshadow the anniversary events on Monday, with some relatives and supporters of the hostages expected to hold their own ceremonies, distinct from the government’s commemorations.

Family members of some hostages say that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has prioritized his own political survival above the lives of the captives. His far-right coalition partners have threatened to collapse the government if Mr. Netanyahu agrees to a deal that would free the abductees in exchange for ending the war. Mr. Netanyahu says he is acting with the country’s interests at heart.

At a memorial ceremony in Nir Oz, one of the Israeli communities most devastated by last year’s Hamas-led assault, survivors gathered on Monday morning in the kibbutz’s cemetery. “We’re excelling at eliminating our enemies but failing to save our loved ones,” said Carmit Palty Katzir, whose brother, Elad, was abducted to Gaza. His body was later retrieved by Israeli forces.

It has been a year since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks impelled Israel to launch a retaliatory offensive in Gaza. For Mr. Abu Kheir — and, indeed, for Palestinians across the enclave — every day since, he said, has teemed with “sadness, depression and fury.”

The war has killed over 41,000 people, according to Gazan health officials, and devastated entire neighborhoods and cities, leaving hundreds of thousands without a home and fueling a humanitarian catastrophe.

More than 2 million people lived in the strip before the conflict. No one has been unaffected.

“We were so happy before this war,” said Maisaa al-Naffar, 20, of Khan Younis, breaking into tears as she recalled her first few weeks as a newlywed before the war began. She added: “I am not the person I used to be.”

Nine months pregnant, she is sheltering in a tent in southern Gaza.

“I miss my old life. I miss the days when we used to have fun or laugh at even the smallest things. I miss my life when we had enough healthy food and snacks,” Ms. al-Naffar said. “Today, everything has become a hell, full of dust and darkness.”

Throughout the enclave, similar stories abound. For Mr. Abu Kheir, the image from the war that lingers is that of a naked, lifeless woman lying in the street, blown out of a house that had been bombarded, he said. The conflict has killed two of his best friends, and displaced him and his family, he said. It also destroyed the apartment in he was building, in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

The war, he said, has “destroyed my dreams.”

Jehad Abu Hatab, a 35-year-old father of four originally from Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, said the most difficult part of the last year has been the constant displacement. His youngest son, Siraj, was born just two weeks into the war. Repeated evacuation orders have driven them from one place to another to another — seven times in all, he said, with no hope of returning home soon.

“This year has turned us into bodies without souls,” Mr. Abu Hatab said. “We just tasted all different types of suffering and hardship.”

Maisaa Naim, from Khan Younis, said Israeli airstrikes killed two brothers-in-law, a nephew and a niece, as well as her father. He died, she said, because the hospital was so overwhelmed with injured people that he could not receive medical attention. A mother of an 8-year-old boy, Ms. Naim, 28, said she was anxious “every single moment” of the day.

“I am in a panic of losing any more beloved family members,” she said. “It is a nightmare that we never even had in our worst and most pessimistic thoughts and nights.”

Late the night before, an Israeli military spokesman had called and asked if I wanted to join two American TV crews on a tour, with a military escort, of a subterranean compound in Gaza where roughly 20 hostages had been held at various times — some, according to the military, in cells with barred doors.

By dawn, we were squashed into an armored vehicle making our way through a scene of destruction before descending into the silence of Hamas’s netherworld of tunnels.

We walked in single file, by flashlight, until we arrived at a stifling, tiled chamber with a dirty sink. That led to bare cells, each with a mattress, toilet and basic shower.

I tried to imagine being held captive there by gunmen, not knowing when, how or even if the ordeal might end. After two hours in the tunnels, we re-emerged into daylight, returned to the border and stepped back into a more familiar world.

That visit in January was a rare, if brief, window into a little of what hostages abducted to Gaza during the Hamas-led attacks last Oct. 7 were going through. Of the 250 taken captive that day, about 100 are still in Gaza, at least a third of whom are presumed no longer to be alive.

Last month, it became clearer that the compound we’d seen was relative luxury.

In early September, the Israeli military revealed the brutal conditions in which it said six hostages had been kept, probably for weeks, before their captors killed them days earlier. Soldiers discovered the bodies in a tunnel barely five feet, six inches tall, and 30 to 40 inches wide. An improvised bucket served as a toilet, the military said. The soldiers found multiple sacks of bottles filled with orange-tinted urine.

One of those six, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, an American Israeli dual citizen, had become one of the best known hostages, largely because of his parents, Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, who waged an unflagging advocacy campaign they called “Bring Hersh Home.”

He was from our environs of south Jerusalem. He moved in the same circles as my sons, frequented the same pub and was a die-hard fan of the same local soccer club.

After fleeing the Nova music festival under rocket fire during the Oct. 7 attack, he was snatched from a crowded roadside bomb shelter, dazed, his arm blown off below the elbow during the gunmen’s assault on the tiny bunker.

When I met Ms. Goldberg in the family’s apartment about two weeks later to begin documenting his abduction, she didn’t know if he had made it into Gaza alive. “How long till sepsis sets in?” she wondered aloud. Even then, in raw torment, she spoke with a spirit that would make her one of the most prominent advocates for the hostages.

“We are aware there are good people in Gaza, also in a terrible situation,” she told me. “It’s not them versus us.”

Her son’s devoted friends, artists among them, began to paint the city with images of him — posters, banners and graffiti calling for his return. The first mural appeared in my local supermarket parking lot. After Hamas released a video of him in captivity in April, new graffiti appeared: “Hersh is Alive!”

About a month ago, he was buried in his beloved city, but nobody has had the heart to take down the art. New murals have appeared, along with T-shirts, bearing the messages “May his memory be a revolution” and “Forever Hersh.”

A large “Bring Hersh Home” billboard dominates a small intersection a block from my home. Someone wrote below his smiling portrait in thick, black marker: Sorry.

The organizers, family members of those killed, had planned to sound a siren for a minute, but the security authorities asked them not to, as they feared the crowd would confuse it for a warning of incoming rocket fire.

Instead, at 6.29 a.m., after hearing the track that the crowd was dancing to a year ago when the assault began, the hundreds who had gathered stood for a minute of silence to mark the moment. It was broken by a bereaved mother’s piercing cries.

Among those mourning their loved ones were Michael and Lisa Marlowe, from England, whose son, Jake Aaron Marlowe, 26, had moved to Israel and was working as part of an unarmed security team at the festival when he was killed.

He’d been shot nine times, his father said. When asked what he does in life, Mr. Marlowe replied, “I grieve constantly now.”

Mr. and Ms. Marlowe tended to their son’s makeshift memorial in the clearing — his portrait attached to one of a thicket of metal poles, each devoted to an individual victim. They placed painted stones among the red ceramic poppies at the base of the pole.

They said Jake had called them last Oct. 7, at 6:30 a.m. Israel time, or 4:30 a.m. in London. He told them that rockets were flying over but that he would be OK, he loved them and would be in touch, Ms. Marlowe said, adding, “We never heard from him again.”

On Sunday, the Israeli military announced that it had again surrounded Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, in one of its first major ground operations in the enclave in weeks. The once densely populated city’s remaining residents reported fierce bombardments and gunfire.

For both Israelis and Gazans, it was all too depressingly familiar. The war has settled into a devastating pattern: Israeli ground forces advance and attack Hamas targets. Neighborhoods are flattened and civilians flee. Israeli troops pull back. Then, months or even weeks later, the soldiers return to the same areas to fight because the Israeli military says Hamas fighters have regrouped there.

Israeli forces have now fought in and around Jabaliya at least three times over the past year. The last battle, in May, forced tens of thousands of residents to leave, fearing for their lives. Some people returned a few weeks later to find much of it in ruin.

“My wife and I are strong people, we can handle it,” said Anas al-Tayeb, a bank manager who joined a crowd of people fleeing Jabaliya on Sunday morning. “But I can’t stand seeing my children afraid.”

Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli brigadier general, said in an interview on Sunday that the Israeli military had won great tactical successes against Hamas. The group can no longer muster rocket barrages against Israeli cities and many of its commanders have been eliminated, according to General Brom.

But obliterating Hamas was not a realistic definition of victory, he said. Without a more achievable goal, Israeli soldiers could be stuck fighting in Gaza indefinitely, he said.

“There’s a kind of trap: we go into a given area and clear it of Hamas — but it’s impossible to do so entirely,” he added. “And then they’ll return to other areas, and we’ll have to go back as well to clear them again.”

Israel has been keeping up airstrikes and artillery fire across the Gaza Strip, but at a less ferocious pace than in the early months of the war. Hamas has been fighting on as collections of guerrillas, attempting to waylay Israeli soldiers in ambushes.

On the ground, Israeli infantrymen now spend much of their time patrolling two major axes — the Netzarim corridor, which bisects Gaza between the north and south, and the Philadelphi corridor, which runs along the territory’s southern border with Egypt.

Lior Soharin, a reserve soldier who recently spent several weeks fighting in Gaza, said his unit focused much of its time in Netzarim. This spring, when journalists from The New York Times traveled along the corridor, they saw how it served as a supply line for Israeli troops and a barrier to displaced people attempting to move back to northern Gaza.

Mr. Soharin’s unit occasionally conducted operations on the outskirts of Gaza City, but did not enter its central districts or stay for weeks at a time, he said.

“It’s not a ground maneuver anymore, where you find yourself in a new place every two to three days,” he said. “Instead there are raids to expand the corridor, destroy Hamas’s infrastructure and command centers, demolish tunnels.”

Mr. Soharin said he hopes for a political deal to free the remaining hostages, more than 60 of whom Israeli authorities believe are still alive, and the bodies of about 35 others. He said that a new Palestinian administration must be installed there to replace Hamas.

But he fully expects to be called up to serve another round of reserve duty — in Gaza or in Lebanon, for the unfolding Israeli invasion against Hezbollah.

“For now, that’s what it looks like,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like there’s an alternative.”

But Hamas is still capable of attacking Israel: On Monday, as memorials kicked off, Palestinian militants fired four rockets at southern Israel, setting off air-raid sirens, according to the Israeli military.

With dozens of hostages still being held in Gaza, along with the bodies of some 35 who Israeli authorites believe have died, some family members have accused Netanyahu of doing too little or undermining the chances for a hostage deal.

The minute of silence was broken by a bereaved mother’s piercing cries.