Like other Israeli civilians, Geffen Yamin and Eyar Liv Halabi, project managers at Tel Aviv startups, rushed to fill gaps in the government’s initially paralyzed response when thousands of gunmen from Gaza poured over the border on Oct. 7.
The military struggled to mobilize. Reserve soldiers called up on emergency orders that day had no way to get to their stations, because public transportation was suspended for the Sabbath and a Jewish holiday. So Ms. Yamin, 28, and Ms. Halabi, 22, began networking via WhatsApp groups to find volunteer drivers.
Now, a year later, they are among many Israelis still seeking answers about why the government had appeared so absent, a breakdown that shattered a widely held belief that it would always be there to protect them.
Up and down the country, Israelis say they feel abandoned by the state after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, with about 1,200 people slaughtered in the Hamas-led assault. There is much talk of a yawning disconnect between the people and the government.
“We saw that things weren’t functioning,” Ms. Halabi testified recently before an unofficial civilian commission examining the failures. It was created at the request of bereaved families, as the government has so far rejected calls to open a formal and independent investigation.
Over the 12 months that have followed, the military — whose reputation was damaged by its inability to foresee the attack and by its slow rescue attempts — has been largely rehabilitated by its audacious strikes against Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon and a ground invasion into the country.
But many Israelis, while deeply divided along ideological, ethnic and religious-secular lines after a year of war, largely agree on one thing: their low faith in the country’s political leaders.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads the most right-wing and religiously conservative government in Israel’s history, is widely perceived as having put political survival above the national interest in prosecuting a protracted war. The grinding counteroffensive has left more than 41,000 Gazans dead, according to local health officials. More than 350 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza and Lebanon, and thousands more wounded.
About 100 of the roughly 250 hostages Hamas dragged back to Gaza remain there, some dead and some alive. Critics have accused Mr. Netanyahu of hampering efforts to reach a cease-fire deal that would bring their release. Mr. Netanyahu has put the blame on Hamas.
Israelis say there can be no healing while the hostages remain in Gaza. Many say the failure to bring them home has ruptured the contract of mutual responsibility, a pillar of the Zionist movement that says Jews have a shared obligation to support and care for each other.
Mr. Netanyahu has refused to accept responsibility for the breakdowns of Oct. 7, including the immense intelligence failures that preceded the Hamas-led invasion, saying the tough questions must wait until after the war.
Into the vacuum has stepped the Civil Commission of Inquiry, the unofficial panel that Ms. Yamin and Ms. Halabi testified before, which started work in July. Those who support its efforts fear that evidence could otherwise be lost as the government puts off examining what went wrong.
“They haven’t done a reset yet,” Ms. Halabi said. “I was, and still am, afraid for future of the country.”
Such worries extend beyond the government’s response to Oct. 7. The country has shrunk within its borders: About 70,000 evacuees from Israel’s northern and southern frontiers are living in temporary accommodations. And there are concerns about a quiet brain drain. Emigration tripled in 2023 compared with 2021, according to government data. A smaller proportion of Israeli expatriates returned last year. Medical professionals are delaying their return from stints abroad.
Still, Israelis seem far from giving up on their country. Many say they find hope in the people’s resilience in the face of the state’s breakdown.
After Ms. Yamin and Ms. Halabi’s efforts on Oct. 7 to find drivers for soldiers, they expanded their initiative into a civilian “war room” that filled bigger gaps. Over the next few months, their operation helped deliver 200 tons of military equipment, 2,500 liters of water to an army base running dry — and even a severed finger in a cooler.
Deepening Fractures
The war has both brought Israelis closer together and pulled them farther apart.
After Oct. 7, a new Israeli spirit emerged that crossed social and political fault lines in support of a nation in crisis. The image of Israel’s younger generation was remade by its members’ willingness to sacrifice for their country.
But society is still etched with divisions that have flared over some of the most sensitive touch points of a year of upheaval.
The hostage issue, the most emotional of all, has become politicized. Right-wing counterprotesters recently threw eggs at the father of a hostage, a young army spotter, as he protested outside a meeting of Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party.
Against the backdrop of acrimony, Israel did not manage to come together for a unified memorial event to mark the one-year anniversary.
Miri Regev, a typically abrasive government minister, was appointed to organize a state ceremony that was prerecorded, apparently to avoid possible disruptions. Dozens of bereaved families and relatives of hostages asked that their loved ones’ names and images not be used in the official commemoration.
So the families and their supporters initiated a crowd-funded Oct. 7 commemoration in Tel Aviv’s main park. When online registration for the event opened, all 40,000 slots were snapped up within hours. Ultimately, because of security restrictions as fighting escalates in the region, it was held on Monday evening with only 2,000 in attendance, mostly from the bereaved families.
Hanoch Daum, a writer and satirist who served as a host, said the event aimed to embrace all Israelis. A self-described religious settler-lite who lives in the occupied West Bank and is equally at home on the stages of Tel Aviv, he embodies the new ethos of bridging societal divides.
“On Oct. 7, we stood against an enemy that did not distinguish between us,” he said. “They killed all of us — left, right, Jews, even Arabs and Thais,” he added, referring to foreign agricultural workers.
The official state ceremony was filmed in near secrecy in Ofakim, a southern desert city where about 50 people were killed in the Oct. 7 assault, and where 86 percent of the electorate voted for Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition.
But even in Ofakim, some residents said they had no interest in any ceremony with the town still in mourning.
That sorrow is all-enveloping: Few Israeli households have been untouched by the Oct. 7 maelstrom and its aftermath. The more than 380 partygoers killed at an outdoor music festival were from diverse backgrounds and from all over the country. Most Israeli 18-year-olds are drafted into military service, and many continue serving until middle age in the reserve forces.
The return of reality TV has offered one of the few outlets for escapism. When Israel’s leading commercial channel gingerly offered some entertainment in late November with a new season of a popular singing contest, one hopeful, Shaul Greenglick, 26, auditioned in uniform.
He soon dropped out to fulfill his duties as a reserve soldier. Weeks later he was killed in Gaza.
Duty Bound
Tens of thousands of reservists and soldiers who were abroad on Oct. 7 scrambled to get on flights home in a display of deep loyalty to their comrades from all stripes of Israeli society. Many describe this as the most just war of all.
Lt. Omri, 23, an officer and a team commander in a paratroopers reconnaissance unit, who could be identified only by his first name under army rules, was on a week’s break in Europe with his family on Oct. 7. He took four flights to get back to Israel and gather his soldiers. By early November, they were on the ground in Gaza.
On his 91st day there, a booby-trapped house he had been searching for weapons collapsed on him. His comrades, who escaped with lighter injuries, found him buried up to his neck in rubble, his face badly burned, with two pillars on his chest. “At first they took me for dead,” he said.
Months later, at the rehabilitation wing of Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, he said he was generally not a fan of wars. He had lost his left leg. His right leg was held together with metal pins, and the shattered left side of his face had been reconstructed with titanium plates. But asked if his injuries were worth it, he did not hesitate to say he would do it all again.
Mr. Daum, the satirist, said that while entertaining troops, he heard from reservists who had left behind families and whose businesses were on the verge of collapse. He and his wife, Efrat, set up a website to promote them and match them with potential clients.
Last week, Mr. Daum was helping match soldiers with volunteer drivers, as Ms. Halabi and Ms. Yamin did a year before. Public transportation was again suspended for the Jewish New Year, just as soldiers called up to fight in Lebanon needed to get to army assembly points.
Even the preservation of memory has become a largely privatized affair. Ron Yehudai, 24, was killed along with eight other partygoers while hiding among trash bags in a garbage container at the site of the music festival. When his parents visited the site a month later, the dumpster was gone.
Yoram Yehudai, 61, Ron’s father, doggedly tracked it down, tormented by the thought of it doing the rounds as a garbage receptacle. He eventually bought it from the contractor for about $8,000. An artist, Amir Chodorov, volunteered to turn it into a memorial installation. In August, it was returned to the festival site.
“It is the only authentic artifact there,” Mr. Yehudai said.
In Kfar Aza, a liberal bastion that was among the pastoral border communities worst hit in the Oct. 7 assault, rows of houses stand destroyed and deserted. More than 60 residents were killed there that day. Five are still being held captive in Gaza. Only a few families have returned.
Arie Tzuk, 66, a lawyer and retired police officer, and his wife, Ilana, 61, who works in Holocaust education, weren’t home on Oct. 7. Their house suffered only minor damage. After nine months in a Tel Aviv hotel, these self-described “refugees with a credit card” got sick of “living on a bed,” as they put it.
They received some state compensation for renovations, added a new solarium and moved back home in July. They live alone on their street, which ends at Kfar Aza’s perimeter fence. The gray buildings of Gaza rise up in dusty silhouette across the fields.
“We have to be here,” Ms. Tzuk said. “We don’t judge anyone. We don’t even ask our children what their plans are.”
The events of the past year are likely to shape the country’s future for generations to come, but many Israelis say it is too early to know how. They say it will take time for new leadership to emerge.
As a child of Holocaust survivors, Mr. Tzuk was thinking in historical terms.
“As a people, we rose from the Holocaust,” he said. “We are here. We have an army. The society is stronger than its leadership.”
The post For Many Israelis, Oct. 7 Never Ended appeared first on New York Times.