Israel Marks Third Anniversary of Oct. 7 Attacks

Israeli President Isaac Herzog addressed the solemn third anniversary memorial Wednesday of the Nova music festival massacre at Kibbutz Re’im. In total, 378 people were gunned down at the rave, including 344 civilians and 34 security personnel. The killing field memorial site incorporates a eucalyptus and sycamore forest maintained by the Jewish National Fund.

Speaking to the media before the memorial event began, Herzog said, “Here at the Nova Musical Festival, thousands of young people came to sing and to dance, to celebrate life. People of 36 nationalities, from all over the world and from Israel. They were horrifically butchered, killed, tortured, raped, and abducted into Gaza,” Herzog said.

Continuing the theme in his address to the 3,000 people gathered near the Gaza border fence, Israel’s 11th president declared, “We are here to tell their stories, and to remember, and reflect, and reminisce, and say to the world: we will dance again, we will live again.”

“We are a nation in agony, but we are showing immense resilience. This whole region, which was attacked barbarically on Oct. 7, is now rebuilding. We are a nation like all nations. We have the inherent right to defend ourselves and fight terror. But we yearn for peace, and we want our neighbors to live in peace as well,” he said.

The president said that a path toward that goal exists through the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2301, which he said calls for Hamas to be disarmed. “This should be the international goal, as well as combating the empire of evil from Tehran,” Herzog said.

Concluding his remarks, Herzog thanked those around the world who had expressed solidarity with Israel and shared in the grief of the victims’ families.

“Let the memory of those who were killed be a blessing to all of us,” he said.

In the background of Herzog’s carefully calibrated words was the implicit promise to wipe out all 6,000 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists with blood on their hands or who were involved with the kidnapping of Israeli hostages. There will be no getting away with murder.

At the time of this writing, more than two-thirds have been neutralized. Lethal drones equipped with facial recognition software endlessly circle the Gaza Strip searching for targets. Almost daily, news of another fatal strike is reported. The most recent hit was Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, the commander of al-Qassam Brigades, who was the highest-ranking remaining Hamas military chief in the coastal enclave. Known as the “Ghost of the Gaza Strip” due to his extreme operational secrecy, al-Haddad’s assassination demonstrated there is nowhere for the perpetrators of war crimes to hide.

Next will come to war crimes trial of some 400 Gazans taken prisoner on Oct. 7. If convicted, they face the gallows. MK Simcha Rothman – chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee – updated a panel of lawmakers and representatives from the Defense Ministry, Israel Prison Service, and the State Attorney’s Office about preparations for the trial expected to take place next year or in 2028.

In May, the Knesset enacted legislation to prosecute terrorists involved in deadly attacks and to impose the death penalty. In June, the government approved a budget of more than NIS 1 billion to carry out the military tribunals. Construction began that month on the courthouse being purpose-built at Atarot in northern Jerusalem – a decommissioned Mandate-era airport.

Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann is likely to lose his status as the only person executed by the State of Israel.

What do people in the Gaza Strip say about Oct. 7?

Writing in Al-Manassa News on Wednesday, Tamer Abu Arab wrote: “We know that Oct. 7 led to a massive war, and that Israel responded with a devastating war on Gaza. We know the scale of the killing, destruction and displacement, that the region entered a chain of confrontations that did not stop at Gaza’s borders, and that the Palestinian cause itself paid an enormous price. All of this makes it easy to look at the morning of Oct. 7 and say: It was a catastrophic mistake.

“But the historical question does not end at the outcome. If you want to understand an event, you have to return to the moment when the outcome was still unknown. You have to put yourself, if only for a moment, inside that room. What did the decision-makers know? What did they believe, and what did they fear? What alternatives did they have? What made them think the option they chose was worth all the risk?

“Perhaps that is the greatest tragedy of Oct. 7. It is not simply that a single decision opened the gates of hell. It is that the decision was made in a world in which no one yet knew where it would lead. We know the outcome now, and that makes our responsibility in judging the past greater, not smaller. The task is not to show how wise we were after the catastrophe, but to understand what was possible before it happened.

“What is required is to understand how everyone failed to prevent the moment when catastrophe became possible, and to ask: What could have been done before the explosion became the only option?

“That question matters more than winning an argument about Oct. 7. History does not need more judgments made with the benefit of hindsight. It needs us to understand what could have been done before the catastrophe, and how a different outcome might have been possible.”