Three Years On From 7 October, With All Hostages Home
Memorials are being held at the Nova festival site near Kibbutz Reim and at intersections and bomb shelters across southern Israel, three years after the Hamas-led attack that killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostage. It is the first anniversary with every hostage returned. A flag flew at half mast at Kibbutz Kfar Aza this morning.
Elkana Bohbot, 37, abducted from the Nova festival and released after 738 days, is marking the day in Israel for the first time. He says he was held fifty metres underground in a dark, damp tunnel, in a small cell with other hostages, fed very little, allowed to bathe only every few weeks, and forced into propaganda videos, one of them a staged call to his family. In August his wife Rivka gave birth to a daughter, Michele, fulfilling a promise he made to himself in the tunnels. Gaza’s health ministry, which does not separate civilians from combatants but says around half the dead were women and children, counts more than 74,000 killed; United Nations agencies and independent experts regard its figures as broadly reliable. Since the ceasefire took effect on 10 October last year the ministry counts 1,145 Palestinians killed, and seven Israeli soldiers have died in the same period. The politics sits underneath the grief. The government held its official service on 5 October, the Hebrew-calendar date, and the split commemorations track the argument over Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war and his reluctance to order an inquiry into the failures of the day itself. An Israeli election falls at the end of this month.