People in Israel were bracing on Sunday to mark the first anniversary of the deadly Hamas-led assault on southern Israel, entering a heavily charged week that promises to be filled with mourning as well as fighting.
The Oct. 7 attack prompted Israel to launch the devastating war against Hamas in Gaza, a conflict that in the year since has spread to additional fronts and drawn in allies of the Iranian-backed militant group. With the security situation precarious, rapidly changing restrictions on public gatherings in Israel have added a pall of uncertainty to the anguish around planned memorials for victims of the assault that threw the Middle East into turmoil.
Israel is simultaneously engaged in ground and air offensives against Hezbollah in Lebanon and, once again, Hamas in northern Gaza, five months after its troops left the area. It also is considering a retaliatory strike against Iran, which backs both groups, after Tehran launched about 180 missiles at Israel last week — escalations that threaten to spiral into war between the two powers and engulf the region.
The intensifying fighting and rising tensions have already resulted in the scaling back of a major event planned for Monday, a memorial gathering in a Tel Aviv park organized by families of Oct. 7 victims and of hostages who remain in Gaza. When online registration for the event opened last month, the 40,000 available slots were snapped up within hours.
But with Israel’s Home Front Command restricting outdoor gatherings to 2,000 people in the center of the country, the organizers announced that the event would take place without a mass audience and instead would be live streamed, with only invited members of the bereaved families and hostage families physically present.
And after the Israeli military said it had intercepted two surface-to-surface missiles fired from Lebanon on Sunday morning, some Israelis were questioning the wisdom of allowing any sizable public gatherings. The missiles set off sirens in Israeli towns up to 50 miles south of the Lebanese border and showed that Hezbollah could still pose a significant threat despite Israel’s recent blows to its leadership and arsenal.
Given the chaos and the war that followed the Oct. 7 assault, Israel has not yet held a national day of mourning for the 1,200 people who were killed in the cross-border attacks, most of them civilians, according to the Israeli authorities. In Gaza, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent fighting, many of them civilians, according to local health officials.
Many Israelis are approaching the anniversary with a mix of dread, fear, and anger at the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has refused to take personal responsibility for the military and policy failures that contributed to the disaster of Oct. 7.
Yariv Mozer, an Israeli filmmaker who directed a new documentary, “We Will Dance Again,” that reconstructs the Oct. 7 attack from the perspectives of attendees of the Nova music festival, said the suspense surrounding Israel’s anticipated attack on Iran was hampering the ability to mourn.
“If Netanyahu decides to attack Iran tomorrow, or the day after, that doesn’t give this country, or we as a people, the moment for grief,” Mr. Mozer said, adding that many Israelis still had a lot of questions about what happened to them on Oct. 7, and harbored a lot of blame toward the government.
The government’s agenda and the escalating fighting, he said, were serving as a distraction from collective mourning, “leading us into different places.”
In the Hebrew calendar, days traditionally begin at sunset the evening before. Though the anniversary is being marked this year according to the Gregorian calendar, special television programming and memorial events in Israel will begin on Sunday evening.
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