TEL AVIV — Israel is commemorating a grim anniversary: two full years since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed nearly 1,200 people and resulted in 251 people being taken hostage.
The war that Israel unleashed in Gaza nearly immediately thereafter has plunged the Palestinians living there into staggering levels of destruction and death.
More than 67,000 people have died in the war, nearly a third of them children, according to Gaza's ministry of health. Rescue workers say more bodies lie buried beneath rubble, and that the death toll is higher than reported because they cannot retrieve people while Israeli bombardment continues.
"When the war ends and the search and accurate counting begin, the entire world will be shocked by the scale of the tragedy that has befallen Gaza," Mahmoud Basal, Gaza's civil defense spokesman, said.
The Gaza Strip itself has been nearly leveled, with the United Nations estimating 78% of structures having been damaged or destroyed, leaving a monumental task of rebuilding for whoever will govern the enclave next.
Its residents suffer from famine, as Israeli military border controls continue to limit the food and aid that enters.
But two years on, the anniversary is also lit by hope, as the leaders of Israel and Hamas are pushed by Arab countries and the U.S. toward a potential end to the war.
Less than a complete victory
This is not where the leaders of either Hamas or Israel wanted to end up.
An Islamist militant group in the Gaza Strip, Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., EU and many other Western countries. Hamas' top leadership has been assassinated, its fighting capacity severely curbed in Gaza. The group has lost much support from Arab countries. The American ceasefire plan being negotiated this week could allow Israel's military to remain inside the Gaza Strip, and Israel has been calling for Hamas to be entirely demilitarized.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cast the war in Gaza — despite initial intelligence failures leading up to the Oct. 7 attack — as part of a string of security victories against Israel's regional enemies, especially nuclear-armed Iran and the Lebanese proxy group it funds, Hezbollah.
"Together we pushed back the plans of annihilation from our enemies. From Gaza to Rafah, from Beirut to Damascus, from Yemen to Tehran, together we achieved great gains," Netanyahu said in a televised speech last week.
While the continuation of the war has slowed a corruption case against Netanyahu, the war has also taxed the economy, stretched its exhausted fighting forces, sharply divided Israeli society and left its global standing severely tarnished by accusations of genocide, which the Israeli government strenuously denies.
"Our government doesn't give a damn and doesn't really do its job and has managed to put sticks into the wheels of every attempt to get an agreement," said Gabriela Goldschmidt, who has attended weekly demonstrations in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu's government for the last two years.
And two years on, Israeli society is haunted by a counterfactual: Could it have saved the lives of more hostages?
"If Netanyahu had accepted Lapid's proposal over a year ago, perhaps more than 40 hostages, who were murdered or killed in captivity, would be alive today," Vladimir Beliak, an Israeli parliament member, wrote this week, referring to a previous plan backed by Israel's opposition leader Yair Lapid and Arab countries.
Gaza in ruins
In Gaza, where deadly Israeli shelling continued last weekend despite Hamas' acceptance of the first phase of the U.S. peace plan, Palestinians are marking the end of a second year of constant death and hunger.
"We pray that all this destruction leads to something good. I swear to God," said Mohammad Naher Nassar, 31, who has remained in Gaza City despite Israeli orders to the city's population last week to leave immediately or be considered a militant or Hamas sympathizer.
He and the nearly 2 million people in Gaza are holding out for long-term respite from forced displacement, frequent airstrikes that have sometimes annihilated entire families and armed sniper drones that have targeted civilians.
"Daily life — it used to be about university, the gym, sports. Suddenly it became about finding a place to sit, water, displacement, your son, your nephew… looking for where your father went , where your brother, where he went," said Ahmed Abu Saif, 22.
Even after a potential ceasefire, the task of rebuilding will be daunting and could take decades.
"I am waiting for the displaced to return as soon as possible — today before tomorrow so that life can return — celebrations, kids ululating and laughing in the streets — so that the old days come back, God willing, like before the war," says Nassar.
Their hopes are tempered by the knowledge that significant daylight remains between how Israel and Hamas envision their future presence in Gaza, and that a previous ceasefire this year ended after just three months.
"It is like we have been bottled up so tightly … and now we can take a breath," said Iman Abu Aklayn, 48, a mother of four children in Gaza City. But just a small breath, she says, "as we are still living a nightmare."
Memories run deep
At Kibbutz Nir Oz in the western Negev Desert, residents also say they have not moved on.
The tiny agricultural community was one of the hardest hit during the Hamas-led attack two years ago. About one quarter of the tight-knit community was killed or abducted. Nine of their members remain captive in Gaza, and many surviving members have been too traumatized to return to their homes.
Tzvika Tesler, the chairman of the kibbutz, says his community is now debating whether to tear down the charred and bullet-ridden husks of homes that were attacked or to preserve them like monuments.
"The kibbutz has yet to make a decision," he said. Likely, they would pursue both options: "There will be a very organized process; the kibbutz is becoming both a living community and a remembering one."
In the kibbutz's cemetery, rows of new, gleaming headstones each bear the same date of death: Oct. 7, 2023. Standing among the graves during a commemoration event this week, Sagui Dekel-Chen described the struggle to understand living when many of his neighbors were killed. Hamas kidnapped him from Kibbutz Nir Oz and held him captive in Gaza for a year and four months before releasing him in February 2025.
"Why doesn't the sorrow come only on special occasions? Why doesn't it stay here, in the cemetery? Why is it with me all the time, everywhere?" asked Dekel-Chen, his voice choked by tears. "I'm above all this, but not past all this."
As he and others spoke, there came the occasional Israeli artillery boom from Gaza, less than two miles away: a reminder that the war continues, and so does the pain, for both Israelis and for Palestinians.
Itay Stern contributed reporting from Nir Oz, Israel, and Anas Baba contributed reporting from Gaza City, Gaza Strip.
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