‘This is what the war has done’: How October 7 forever changed Israel and Gaza

PART ONE
On the ground in Kiryat Gat, Israel

For the past year, it’s almost become a daily ritual for Jonathan Dekel-Chen. He’s only able to get out of bed once he convinces himself:

There are important things that need to be done for the hostages or for my family.

It’s become his single-minded focus. His son Sagui Dekel-Chen, a husband and father to three daughters, is currently among the 101 hostages still held in captivity as Israel continues to pursue its goal of destroying Hamas throughout Gaza.

“Life has become very small,” says Mr. Dekel-Chen, a leading scholar of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Eighty percent of my waking hours are just focused on working and advocating for the hostages, and the other 20% is focused on my kids and grandkids. Nothing else exists.”

It’s mid-September in Kiryat Gat, a small, working-class city that skirts the Negev Desert in southern Israel. The late summer air is thick with humidity and sadness as Mr. Dekel-Chen prepares to attend a scheduled protest. He’s put on a black T-shirt emblazoned with white and red Hebrew words: “Bring them home. Now.”

The slogan has become an ever-present part of a burgeoning protest movement throughout Israel. There have been protests every week in Kiryat Gat as people demand the Israeli government reach a deal to free the remaining hostages and cease the devastating and ongoing ground operation against Hamas in Gaza.

The protest is especially packed this day. There’s a feeling of rage among many in attendance. Officials announced that week that Israeli soldiers recovered the bodies of six young hostages in a cramped, underground tunnel in Gaza. They had been executed by Hamas before the soldiers converged. Can there be any hope to bring the others home?

Hope. That’s the daily reminder. That’s what exists for Mr. Dekel-Chen now.

There are important things that need to be done for the hostages or for my family.

He was born and raised in Connecticut before he emigrated to Israel alone as a young man in 1981. He built a new life, settling in Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small farming collective in the northwestern Negev. It was known for its asparagus – and was just 14 miles from the Gaza border.

He became a well-known scholar living in Nir Oz while teaching in Jerusalem. He and his wife, Neomit, who later divorced, raised four children in this small desert kibbutz, where a number of longtime peace activists also resided. The Dekel-Chen clan expanded to include grandchildren, and the family made a home in a place they treasured as a “paradise” – even if it did endure increasing rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza over the years.

On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, when Mr. Dekel-Chen was away, it was his son Sagui who first spotted Hamas fighters breaking into Nir Oz. He quickly alerted fellow residents and rushed home to his then-pregnant wife, Avital, and their two little girls.

Once he secured them in their safe room, he joined up with a security team of neighbors. They had been trained to keep the community of 400 residents secure in an emergency for a maximum of 15 minutes. By then, according to their training, the Israeli army was supposed to rush there to defend them.

It took seven hours for defense forces to arrive that day. When they did, soldiers found Hamas fighters had murdered 46 residents. They also found that 79 others were taken as hostages, including a 9-month-old, an 85-year-old, and the younger Mr. Dekel-Chen. Hostages taken from Nir Oz made up about a third of the total number abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7.

Mr. Dekel-Chen’s ex-wife, Neomit, was also taken. An Israeli helicopter, however, attacked the truck taking her toward Gaza. She was wounded, but she was able to escape. Their daughter-in-law, Avital, and their granddaughters were also able to remain hidden and survive the attack.

“It’s not just that our loved ones were killed or taken hostage – and all of the fears that involves, which are enormous, unthinkable, unspeakable,” says Mr. Dekel-Chen.

“We have our entire extended family of hostages, all of them deeply intertwined in my life for 10, 20, 30, 40 years,” he continues. “Home and property. Gone. Way of life. Gone. An entire community shattered and absolutely no certainty about the future.”

The surviving Nir Oz community members are now scattered in high-rise buildings in Kiryat Gat. They expect to be here for the next three years.

Mr. Dekel-Chen does still have one escape, however: teaching. “Six hours a week during the school year, when I’m in class talking about Russia in the 19th century or migration patterns in the 20th century, I don’t have to think about this living hell that we inhabit now.”

As a parent of a hostage, he has met with U.S. officials, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, advocating for the priority of bringing the hostages home.

Like most hostage families and a significant number of Israelis, he believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has abandoned the hostages. He believes the government Mr. Netanyahu leads is “a radical messianic coalition” that prefers to torpedo diplomatic efforts and to prolong the war as a means of staying in power.

“It’s very difficult to find any joy in anything,” says Mr. Dekel-Chen. “It’s a totality of loss.”

The large protest in Kiryat Gat, it turned out, unfolded the same night 750,000 other Israelis took to the streets across the country to call for efforts to bring the hostages home.

At many protests, people talked about a basic covenant in Israel that seemed to have been shattered. Israelis were supposed to always look after one another, to “leave no one behind.”

Afterward, friends approach the reserved historian of the Jewish people, a man who typically eschews emotional displays, preferring analysis over feelings.

They shake Mr. Dekel-Chen’s hand, offering implicit solidarity with his single-minded focus:

There are important things that need to be done for the hostages or for my family.

He nods, mutely. Then he adds, “I want my boy home.”

One year after October 7: An altered Middle East – and world

In the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020, nations such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco normalized relations with Israel, seeking the economic benefits of peace. Saudi Arabia, one of the most influential Muslim countries in the world, was considering doing the same.

The Palestinian cause had been moved down the list of regional, if not global, priorities. In Israel the issue receded into the background. Security barriers physically sealed off the West Bank. An ostensibly impregnable set of border defenses in the south kept Hamas at bay, interrupted by more limited, although still painful, Israeli military operations. The idea of a two-state solution was, if not dead, dormant and out of mind, even for Israelis who supported it.

Then Hamas fighters broke through the sophisticated barriers. They massacred 1,200 people, most of them civilians in domestic places, including a music festival. They took some 250 more as hostages, including infants and older people.

Israel has responded overwhelmingly, laying waste to most of Gaza in a campaign that has killed over 40,000 people, according to Hamas health services, a significant number of them children. Hundreds of thousands have been left without homes and basic necessities.

On Oct. 7, the momentum toward stability came to a sudden halt. And as history moves in the opposite direction, the plight of the Palestinian people is once again a global concern.

PART TWO
On the ground in Deir al-Balah, Gaza

One year ago, AbdulKarim Monir Al Ghorra, known by friends and family as “Abood,” had “dreams as vast as the sky above the Gaza Strip,” he says.

He was going to be a doctor, he was sure. Science and engineering were his best subjects, and in his 11th grade exams at the highly competitive Al Azhary Secondary School in Gaza City, he scored 99% on all his finals.

Part of his success as a student had to do with his discipline. He adopted a strict regimen of waking up before dawn and studying mathematics and physics for two hours before school. To minimize distractions, Abood deactivated his social media accounts, including his most-used: Facebook and Instagram.

When the war erupted in October 2023, Abood continued studying as bombs echoed around their home in Gaza City. When the Israeli military ordered his family to evacuate, they had to leave. “I asked my mother to take my books, but she reassured me, ‘It won’t be long. Don’t worry,’” he says.

His mother, Manal Al Ghorra, adds, “We hoped the war would end in October, then November, then December. We wanted to believe that by June, students would be able to resume their studies and take their exams.” Abood was getting ready to take the Tawjihi – the final senior year exams that would dictate his university admission and the field he qualified to study.

Dreams, especially those as vast as the sky above the Gaza Strip, can be fragile. This war has shattered everything he knew. At least five of his classmates have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City. Another lost his legs. “We used to teach each other, spend breaks together, and enjoy spare time,” he says about his classmates.

Now, instead of doing his prewar ritual of waking up early to study, Abood wakes up early to wait in line where aid organizations distribute precious water, hoping to secure a few gallons for his family. He then searches for wood scraps in the empty lot surrounding their tent to use as cooking fuel.

A catastrophe in Gaza: “The trauma is ongoing”

For 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza and tens of thousands more in the West Bank, Oct. 7 is more than the date of an attack, a war, or a catastrophe – it is a dividing line between two lives.

In some ways, Oct. 7 is a beginning – the start of hardships none had before imagined possible and that continue to upend, interrupt, and disrupt lives across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank today.

These are the daily challenges not easily captured in the 40,000 dead, 90,000 wounded, thousands missing, and more than 80,000 housing units destroyed, according to a United Nations report.

Even should the war end today, Palestinians say they have no idea what life, and which loved ones, they will still have.

“Anyone who called Gaza home on Oct. 6 will never go back to what was there then,” says Yara Asi, assistant professor of global health at the University of Central Florida, and a researcher of trauma among Palestinians.

“Some people’s bodies have been irreparably damaged; some families have been separated; some have lost large swaths of their families,” says Dr. Asi, author of “How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to Our Health.”

“Even if the violence stopped today, people will still be living in camps, living with amputated limbs. We don’t have the language to describe this ongoing chronic trauma. There is no post-trauma. The trauma is ongoing.”

“I have lost everything”: Life in Gaza’s city of makeshift tents

Not too far from the tent where Abood and his mother are sheltering, Iqbal Abu Qumsan is trying to sell vegetables in a small Deir al-Balah market.

Most of her customers don’t have the money even for a small bag of potatoes, tomatoes, and an onion. So she writes their names and amount owed in a ledger, even though she knows many will never be able to pay.

Ms. Abu Qumsan lives in her own makeshift tarp tent with four of her seven children. They have little access to water and no electricity in this sweltering seaside town in central Gaza once known for its date palms, from which it derives its name.

This is the fifth time she and her remaining family have been displaced since Oct. 7. It’s sometimes hard to remember her life before that date one year ago, she says.

In 1989, she married Jamal Abu Qumsan, who became a local police officer. They built a life together at the Jabalia refugee camp, an enormous residential area established by the United Nations in 1948 to provide a place for Palestinians forced from their homes after the declaration of the state of Israel – a moment Palestinians call Nakba, meaning “catastrophe.”

Over the decades, the Jabalia camp evolved into a city of nearly 100,000 residents in the early 2000s. As the couple raised their seven children, who eventually began to have children of their own, they purchased what Ms. Abu Qumsan calls her “dream home” – a three-story building in which the extended clan could live together.

“I wanted to grow old while I have my children around me,” she says. “My husband and I always wanted a house to accommodate everyone.”

After they purchased their home, Ms. Abu Qumsan became a busy matriarch tending after her clan. She had a familiar, and ancient, domestic routine: She went to the market. She cooked. She looked after her children and grandchildren, who lived in the apartments above her.

After Oct. 7, this life she knew so well for decades ended. Her “dream home.” Gone. Her neighborhood. Reduced to rubble. Her husband. Killed.

He had stayed behind in the Jabalia camp after the family was forced to flee in December. Determined to stay with the house, he was killed after an Israeli missile strike destroyed their three-story house – as well as most of the 75-year-old camp originally built for Palestinian refugees.

“I sometimes want to talk to him, ask him what to do, where to go,” she says inside her tent. “But I can’t.” She averts her gaze and discreetly rubs her eyes inside her tent so her daughters do not see her tears. “I had a family to help, a home, a husband who supported us,” she says. “I have lost everything.”

The rest of her family is now scattered across the Gaza Strip – separated by evacuations, Israeli military checkpoints, and the ravages of war.

Still, the matriarch of the Abu Qumsan clan hasn’t stopped working tirelessly for her family.

After she was displaced from her home in Jabalia, she decided to salvage pans and start a business in the city of Rafah. She supported the children with her by selling cheese, corned beef, and za’atar pastries, charging a handful of shekels each – an amount equivalent to $1.

As the war dragged on, ingredients became scarce and prohibitively expensive, however. And when Israel began its offensive into Rafah in May, she was forced to flee with her children, again. She had to abandon everything she had worked hard to build, again.

“I left the trays I bought. I left every ingredient I bought when I started baking,” Ms. Abu Qumsan says.

Now in the tent city in Deir al-Balah, her fifth refuge since Oct. 7, she uses some of the money she earned in her previous shelters to purchase vegetables from traders in the large market downtown. She then resells them in an area near her tent. Her ledger of those unable to pay is growing.

Ms. Abu Qumsan says she is waiting for a day of hope. Right now, all she can do is try to help the children still with her survive.

“I long to be reunited with my children in north Gaza. It has been months since I last saw them, and every day apart feels like an eternity,” she says. “I do not want to lose them like I lost their father. I just want to hold them close to me again.”

The young displaced high school student Abood, meanwhile, says he will not abandon his desire to attend medical school, no matter how many years it takes. There’s a future, and the high achiever is determined to be a part of it.

“Before, my dream was to become a doctor to help people,” Abood says from his tent in another part of Deir al-Balah. “After seeing how doctors were needed in this war, I still very much want to become one.”

PART THREE
On the ground in Qarawat Bani Hassan, West Bank

On Dec. 3, 2023, Noor Assi was a student in the ninth grade, spending much of his afternoon playing soccer with cousins and friends on the streets of his village, Qarawat Bani Hassan, in the western part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

That day, a group of far-right Israeli settlers suddenly attacked the village of about 5,000 Palestinians. It was less than two months after the Hamas-led attack on Israel. The settlers swept down upon Qarawat Bani Hassan, burning cars, setting homes ablaze, and shooting residents.

Hours after the attack, the body of Noor’s father, Ahmed Assi, was discovered in an olive grove on the outskirts of the village. He had been shot to death.

Nearly 700 people have been killed by Israelis in the occupied West Bank in 2024, the deadliest year for Palestinians living there since the U.N. began recording in 2005. Attacks by far-right Israeli settlers, often accompanied by the Israeli military, have so far displaced 14 Palestinian communities and have uprooted about 3,000 people.

As the people of Gaza experience massive destruction, waves of deadly settler violence and Israeli military crackdowns on suspected militants have created a besieged, wartime atmosphere in the West Bank.

The 15-year-old, who wanted to become an architect, immediately dropped out of school to work as a carpenter to support his mother and siblings.

“I am responsible for them now,” Noor says. His hands move swiftly in one of the village’s shops, putting the finishing touches to a white wooden dresser. He wraps it in plastic and prepares it for delivery. “I’m trying my best to fill this need, to be like my father,” he says.

“The bullet that took my father’s life changed my life,” Noor says. “I feel like I have aged 10 or maybe 15 years in one day. This is what the war has done to me and the youths of Gaza alike.”

Often feeling overwhelmed, he talks to his deceased father at night when he is alone in his room. “I imagine him sitting with me, and I share everything with him. This helps me feel connected to him and act upon his advice,” Noor says.

His cousin Ibrahim Assi, the mayor of Qarawat Bani Hassan, echoes what many other Palestinians and Israelis often say: “The West Bank is a living nightmare at the moment, without safety or security, because of this settler government’s violence.”

One year after October 7: The altered geopolitics of the Middle East

Before Oct. 7, even Palestinian leaders seemed to accept that the idea of an independent Palestine was not going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

The United States, which favors a two-state solution, had in many ways begun to disengage from the Middle East, rebalancing its priorities and resources more toward China and the Asia-Pacific.

But the destruction of the Gaza Strip and the suffering of its people has now upended the geopolitics of the Middle East and beyond. A two-state solution once again seems essential to any geopolitical discussion about the future of the Palestinian territories.

And the urgency of the conflict after Oct. 7 now demands U.S. attention like never before. Its influence will be crucial among discussions of some kind of “Arab Marshall Plan” that would focus on the reconstruction of homes, hospitals, and critical infrastructure.

But rebuilding Gaza will require more than bricks and mortar. It will require a reimagining of its political and social order – a task that no amount of foreign aid alone can accomplish.

Adding to the diplomatic complexity is the growing relationship between Iran and Russia. The two countries were already drawing closer together as Iran began to provide attack drones for Russia in its war against Ukraine. But Iran has long been the backbone of support for Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and still carries enormous influence in the region.

At the same time, Israel’s overwhelming response to the Hamas attack has damaged its reputation around the world. The idea that Israel is deliberately killing Gaza civilians, even committing “genocide,” has stuck in many countries.

Israeli scholars have been blacklisted; college campuses have featured boisterous support for Gaza and hostility toward Israel; Arab governments, facing pressure from their publics, have had to distance themselves from Israel once again, reaffirming support for the Palestinian cause.

In the end, the future of the Palestinian people is not merely a question of who governs its borders or rebuilds its homes. It is a question of the deeper, unresolved conflicts of history, identity, and belonging that have animated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for over a century.

And Israelis, too, are weary of the ongoing destruction.

PART FOUR
On the ground in Jerusalem

The only way Noorit Felsenthal Berger says she can sleep these days is to eat a piece of chocolate and chase it with a sleeping pill.

She’s sitting cross-legged on a couch strewn with maroon- and gold-striped pillows in her residence in Jerusalem, feeling a strange sense of guilt about the life she built for her three sons.

Her youngest is a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, and he’s been serving in Gaza since the war began. Her middle son, a reservist, has also been deployed to the war zone. Her oldest, studying in the U.S., reports his encounters with antisemitism on his campus.

“I feel guilty that my sons have to go through this,” Ms. Felsenthal says. She feels guilty, too, “that as a mother I didn’t protect them, that I made the decision of bringing them up here, the fact that we educated them the way we did – to take responsibility, to be part of society.”

Compulsory military service is part of this sense of responsibility. It keeps young conscripts like her sons, now beholden to the friends they fight alongside, from not refusing such service.

Along with guilt, there’s a fear that hangs over her like a sword on a thread – “the constant terror of a knock on the door.”

She can lose her breath easily, as when she saw an ambulance and two army officers come to her usually quiet, narrow side street in Jerusalem. Seeing a pair of officers standing outside a home in Israel, especially during times of war, she says, is akin to seeing the angel of death.

“I fled as quickly as possible, hardly breathing, hoping they were not there for me,” Ms. Felsenthal recalls. “Later, I found out they had come to inform a family at the end of the street that they had lost their son.”

She’s a child psychologist, so she has some understanding of how people try to cope with the emotions of such situations, the maddening alternation between agony, then relief; agony, then relief.

After her youngest came home for a rare visit this spring, she drove him back to his base. She felt like Abraham on Mount Moriah, she says, doing her silent duty as did the patriarch when God asked him to sacrifice his son.

After Oct. 7, she fully supported the war in Gaza. It was justified, she believed, an act of Israeli self-defense in response to the massacres perpetrated by Hamas that day, and the hostages they abducted and took into Palestinian territory.

Today, however, that support has turned to opposition. Ms. Felsenthal has since joined an organization of fellow parents of soldiers. They’ve named themselves, “Parents of Combat Soldiers Shouting Out, ‘Enough!’”

There is no negotiated, political solution on the horizon, they believe. Israeli soldiers keep dying. Palestinian civilians are suffering and losing loved ones every day. So their advocacy is simple: a political deal to end the suffering on both sides and bring the hostages home.

Like many in Israel, the group believes the ongoing devastation has less to do with Israeli security considerations and more with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s far-right government using it to remain in power.

Her therapeutic work with children, too, including those who’ve lost parents in the war, has only drawn her deeper into the trauma of her country.

“There is more awareness today of the trauma soldiers are going through,” Ms. Felsenthal says. “I think there is a specific trauma of mothers and probably fathers also that we are less conscious of.”

As she speaks, her black Labrador puppy chases a ball. The family named her Gioia, Italian for “joy,” because of the happiness she’s brought during this fraught moment.

“This year has been a complete nightmare,” Ms. Felsenthal says. “The constant lonely feeling of not being understood, [it’s] like living in a different planet of rage, despair, and fear, and trying to carry on.”

Special correspondent Taylor Luck contributed to this report from Amman, Jordan.