Oren Graziani could not sleep last night, as he was too busy debating if he should attend his son’s memorial in the morning. Dawn broke and his wife and daughter announced they were going to spend the day at the resort city of Eilat; they wanted to avoid their grief for a day. Graziani decided to go alone.
“I felt in my heart that I must come here. Today feels different. October 7 – it broke the entire family apart,” said Graziani, a 53-year old real estate agent, as he wet a cloth and wiped sand from a picture of his 21-year-old son, Maor Graziani, who was killed at the Nova music festival.
Graziani was not alone in his mourning. He was joined by hundreds of Israelis who came to pay their respects to Maor and the other 1,200 people killed and 251 taken hostage on 7 October 2023.
Tuesday marked two years since Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel, marauding through a music festival and Israeli kibbutzim along the border with Gaza.
The attack was the most brutal in Israel’s history, shattering the country’s sense of safety and prompting Israel to launch a still ongoing war on Gaza that has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians and left it accused by a UN commission of inquiry of conducting genocide in Gaza.
The thud of artillery and the whomp of a minigun being fired by a gunship in Gaza just a few miles away provoked no reaction from people attending memorials. In Gaza, no respite was given from the bombing so that its residents could memorialise their own dead. At least 10 Palestinians were killed since dawn on Tuesday.
The lingering trauma of the 7 October attack in Israel was plain to see on Tuesday. At the Nova music festival memorial site, where nearly 400 were brutally killed, pictures of those lost were affixed permanently with red metal flowers underneath.
“I talked to Maor a minute before he died. The last thing he told me was not to be afraid, that it was OK,” Graziani said. He did not hear from his son again, but held out hope that he was merely missing, not dead.
Three days later he was sent a video on Telegram that showed his son’s car being sprayed by bullets while fleeing to a nearby kibbutz – the army called him shortly after to inform him of Maor’s death.
Other families who had lost loved ones stood silently and watched as services were held to commemorate the attack. A survivor recounted to a stunned group of American evangelists, who had flown in to commemorate the anniversary, how she was able to flee the scene with the help of Israeli military officers.
“I wanted to witness it for myself. It’s such a horrible thing that happened and unfortunately the world and the media is forgetting what happened here,” Hannah Epstein, a 37-year-old TV agent who flew in from Nashville, Tennessee, said while wiping away tears.
Other Israelis came out of a sense of solidarity with other victims and to make sure that “this never happens again in the future”, said Hezi Kedem, a 64-year-old owner of a jewellery factory, while he walked among the remembrances.
At nearby Be’eri, a kibbutz where 130 people were killed in the attack, most who lived there have still not returned two years on.
“Some people will never come back, but I hope that at least 70% will come back. I really want to believe that the army learned from this massacre,” said Miri Ghadmessika, a 47-year-old resident of Be’eri, as she walked through charred remains of her parents’ house. All the doors were off the hinges and broken roof tiles littered the entrance, seemingly unchanged since the day of the attack.
New houses were being built for people from the kibbutz at a site nearby, the frames of the homes already erected. The state wanted to knock down all the damaged homes of the commune in order to make way for new houses, but Miri and a few other residents objected, wanting to keep at least four homes as a memory of what happened that day.
Miri has her own memories of the attack, and recounts how militants tried to kill her and her children four separate times, setting her home on fire. Miraculously, her family survived with minor injuries.
The charred houses and pictures of the fallen were not the only reminders that Israel had changed. Pistols tucked in waistbands – an increasingly common site after gun permits were widely distributed following 7 October – was a reminder of the sense of broken safety. Attitudes towards Palestinians have hardened too.
“Before October 7, politically I was with the side that said in Gaza and Iran there are mothers and children too, these people want peace. But now, when I see a Palestinian I’m afraid he will kill me, so I want to kill him first,” said Dalia Shaked, a 60-year-old lawyer, as she visited a shelter turned memorial outside Be’ri.
In Gaza, despair reigned. “A second year passes while we remain trapped in the spiral of this war. It is an indescribable sensation, a mix of helplessness, exhaustion and the accumulated fatigue of each day in these harsh conditions,” said Abdul Rahman Abu Eid, a 19-year-old from southern Gaza.
Abu Eid has been displaced five times during the war and lost three of his cousins, his home, land and all of his possessions. His story is not unique – most Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced several times and have lost many in their family.
There is famine in parts of Gaza according to the world’s leading authority on starvation. Most aid agencies blame the famine on the aid blockade Israel has put in place on the strip – Israel denies the claim.
Alongside the UN commission of inquiry, human rights organisations including two leading Israel-based groups have accused Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza. Israel denies this, saying it has only acted in self-defence.
Many hope a light at the end of the tunnel is visible, as Hamas and Israel engage in indirect peace talks in Egypt in what Donald Trump has hailed as a “real chance” for peace. The US president ordered Israel on Friday to stop bombing Gaza, an order Israel has largely ignored.
Nonetheless, the renewed momentum behind peace talks has given Abu Eid a modicum of hope that the war that has robbed him of his youth will soon end.
“Since it began, the war has completely turned my life upside down. The war has affected every part of my life, physically, mentally, health-wise,” said Abu Eid.
In Israel, some took the time off on Tuesday to go visit the Ashdod lookout, from where Gaza is visible. Families lined up behind a telescope, which for 5 shekels gave a view of the mostly destroyed Gaza skyline.
On Tuesday afternoon, the tourists came just in time to watch an Israeli jet carry out an airstrike on Gaza. A smoke plume rose slowly in the distance.
“Look, they just blew up a tunnel. They are such hard workers, not taking a rest,” a father told his children.
