Traditionally, Jews around the world usher in the new year, known as Rosh Hashana, by dipping apples in honey in the hope of sweet times ahead, but that celebration was muted among many Israelis who gathered for the holiday on Wednesday evening amid escalating conflicts along the country’s borders and beyond.
A day after a wave of missiles from Iran on Israel forced people into bomb shelters and safe rooms and set the Middle East further on edge, and just hours before the holiday began at sunset, Israelis learned that eight soldiers were killed on Wednesday in fighting with Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, a heavy daily toll.
Israel’s expanding war hung over the holiday, making many long for their old routines. “We just want a normal year,” said Sigalit Orr, a tech consultant who lives in Hod Hasharon, a densely populated Tel Aviv suburb where more than 100 homes were damaged by Iran’s missile attack on Tuesday.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a short, grim video message just before the holiday began, expressing his condolences to the families of the fallen Israeli soldiers, but also warning that the conflict was far from over. “We are in the middle of a tough war against Iran’s axis of evil, which seeks to destroy us,” he said. “This will not happen.”
On Tuesday night, Iran launched about 200 ballistic missiles at Israel in what it said was retaliation for assassinations of top leaders of its proxy groups, including those of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in July, widely attributed to Israel, and of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike near Beirut on Friday.
Addressing the nation, Mr. Netanyahu vowed that Israel would return about 70 living hostages still being held in Gaza nearly a year after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack that sparked a devastating war in the enclave. He also promised to return the more than 60,000 residents of northern Israel displaced from their homes after Hezbollah, in solidarity with Hamas, began firing rockets into Israel on Oct. 8, sparking what has become another war.
“We will ensure the eternal existence of Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu concluded.
The comments offered little solace to some.
“The feeling here is very bad. We can’t celebrate any holiday,” said Miri Gad Messika, a member of Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel, a community near Gaza that was hit hard by Hamas’s attack last year. .
“We can’t celebrate when our friends and family are being tortured in Hamas tunnels,” she said. About 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza, about a third of whom Israeli authorities have estimated are dead.
But Ms. Gad Messika, a mother of three whose family fled their home on the kibbutz on Oct. 7 by jumping out a second-story window as the house was being stormed, insisted that she still believed in humanity.
She said her youngest daughter, 10, had not been able to sleep in her bed alone since last October; her 15-year-old could not concentrate in school, though she had once been an excellent student; and her 16-year-old son still limped after breaking his leg in their escape. But she is hopeful that they and her community will recover.
“When trauma happens, there are two choices: Stay ill, or grow,” she said, adding, “I’m optimistic. I have to be. I want to wish everyone a better year.”
That sentiment was echoed by others in Israel, a small country where everyone has been touched by the year of escalating fighting.
Since Oct. 7, Israelis have been living in a “manic depressive state,” alternating between despair and normalcy, Ms. Orr said, with frequent reminders that the situation is grim. “You’re happy and then you hear about something horrible that happened to someone close to you,” she added.
Ms. Orr, who celebrated Rosh Hashana with her sister and children in a small, muted gathering, noted that this was not at all a typical holiday season for Israelis. Normally, she joked, half of Israelis would have traveled abroad at this time and the other half would be on the road inside the country, hiking, staying in hotels and celebrating.
This year, there are few flights abroad, and travel in Israel has become nearly impossible. “We’re just within our houses,” Ms. Orr said. “It’s not the usual country and mood.”
This assessment was reflected in a video statement from Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, on Wednesday. “On the eve of the holiday, the I.D.F. is operating and striking on all fronts,” he said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
“We are fighting and we know that this holiday is not complete without the hostages,” General Halevi added. He also said that he mourned fallen soldiers and “embraced” their families and those wounded “who are paying the costly price of the war.”
Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of an Israeli American hostage, Sagui Dekel-Chen, said he did not believe that a widening war with Israel fighting on all fronts would solve the country’s problems. He has been in the United States in recent weeks to push for the revival of cease-fire negotiations to end the fighting in Gaza, which has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, and to secure the release of hostages. That cease-fire effort faltered this summer and appears to have been abandoned entirely in recent weeks as Israel’s conflicts with Iran and its allied groups in the Middle East have broadened.
Mr. Dekel-Chen did not travel back to Israel to join his family for the holidays, saying there was no reason to celebrate this year.
“We find ourselves at this new year amid an escalating regional war that probably wouldn’t have happened without Oct. 7,” he said, adding that “both Hamas and Israel have to be forced to get to yes, and to do that, we need the world’s help so that this year won’t be as disastrous.”
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