Mourning Oct. 7, the day that forever changed the lives of Israelis and Palestinians

Be’eri, Israel

A year after she was shot at close range by Hamas fighters, and then trapped by the blaze that reached into her supposed safe room, Vivian Silver’s home stands as a charred memorial to the brutality of Oct. 7.

The only marker of where the kitchen used to be is by the scorched hull of a dishwasher in the centre of a room, the floor of which is covered by smashed crockery. In the backyard of the 74-year-old Winnipeg-born peace activist, a BMX bicycle used by her grandchildren lies amidst the rubble.

A blue poster hangs on the front wall of the bungalow. “In this house lived Vivian Silver, who was brutally murdered in the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7.” A similar poster names the couple, Noah and Mayana Hershkovitz, who were killed in the house next door. Another mourning banner hangs on another burned-out house across the street.

“It was a pogrom,” says Nitzan Peled, a 57-year-old mother of three – a close friend of Ms. Silver and the sister-in-law of Mayana Hershkovitz – who can see the three homes from her own yard. Ms. Peled survived only because the Hamas fighters who entered her home fired armour-piercing rounds through the door of her safe room, missing her as she cowered in the corner, then left without trying the unlocked door.

“I keep asking myself why they’re counting the dead, but they’re not counting me,” Ms. Peled says.

Two months ago, Ms. Peled and one of her daughters moved back to Be’eri, four kilometres from Gaza. They’re among roughly 200 former residents who have returned to a community that was home to six times that many people before the massacre that killed 102 residents and saw 30 others taken hostage. Eleven of them are still missing, eight of whom are believed to have died, leaving the kibbutz hoping beyond hope for the return of the other three.

The Globe and Mail spoke to Israelis and Palestinians about how Oct. 7, known here as Black Saturday, changed Israel, the Middle East, and their own lives forever. The maelstrom of killing that left almost 1,200 Israelis and foreigners dead – and which saw Hamas take some 250 hostages back to Gaza – led inevitably to more violence and death. In the aftermath, Israel launched a war on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, a conflict that has killed more than 41,600 Palestinians, and damaged more than 60 per cent of buildings in the territory, even as roughly half of the hostages remain unaccounted for.

The conduct of that war has led to accusations of war crimes against the leaders of Israel and Hamas. But neither international law nor the international community’s calls for a ceasefire has stopped the war in Gaza, nor prevented it from spreading to Lebanon, which Israel invaded last week to combat Hamas’s ally, Hezbollah. Following Tuesday’s mass missile attack on Israel by Iran, which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah, fears are higher than ever of a region-wide war that could engulf the Middle East.

The streets of Be’eri stand as silent testimony to how all this began. Some of the homes, such as Ms. Silver’s, remain abandoned and burnt out. Others, including Pessi Cohen’s place near the entrance to the kibbutz – where Ms. Cohen and 11 other people were killed when the home they were being held in was destroyed by Israeli tank fire during the battle with Hamas – have been bulldozed to make way for rebuilding.

As she walked this week through Be’eri’s nearly deserted streets, Ms. Peled didn’t even look up at the sound of fighter jets overhead. Nor did she register the regular booms of outgoing artillery fire directed at Gaza. “I’m back here physically, but I won’t really be back until we have all the hostages back,” Ms. Peled says. Until then, she says, “It’s as if we’re still living in Oct. 7.”

Ramallah, West Bank

The whirlwind of violence that began on Oct. 7 moved next, inevitably, to Gaza, the narrow coastal strip that Hamas has ruled since 2006. It was Gaza – home to two million of the world’s poorest people – that fighters from Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups launched their attack from, and Gaza that they triumphantly brought their hostages back to.

In Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, Marwa Shaheen reacted to the news of the Hamas attack on Israel by sending her husband out to bring their six children home from their schools and universities. The 41-year-old – who worked with Women Wage Peace, the non-governmental organization founded by Ms. Silver – had learned from experience that whenever Hamas struck Israel, Israel struck back much harder.

But Ms. Shaheen, who had lived through three previous, more limited, Israel-Hamas wars, couldn’t imagine the response this time. Israel began hitting Gaza with air strikes and artillery almost immediately, and preparing for an eventual ground invasion aimed at destroying Hamas and rescuing the hostages.

Ms. Shaheen knew there were Hamas members living near her home in Nuseirat, and within 48 hours, she decided with her husband that the family should flee. “Two days after we left Nuseirat, our neighbour’s house was completely destroyed,” she says in a phone interview conducted from Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank (for the past year, Israel has not allowed international journalists to independently enter Gaza). “If we had remained, we would have become martyrs.”

Ms. Shaheen and her family would flee six more times – piling into taxis with whatever they could carry, and driving towards relatives in whatever area seemed safest at the moment – before they arrived in December in Rafah, a city that soon became the epicentre of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis as hundreds of thousands of people crowded against the walled Egyptian border. The family spent six weeks living in tents, surviving on scant humanitarian aid, before Ms. Shaheen decided she would rather die in her own home.

“I lost 20 kilograms in January alone. I couldn’t bear it,” she says. When they returned to Nuseirat, they found the windows of their home had been blown out by the force of explosions, and everything else had been stolen, including their furniture. “I vowed that I will accept whatever happens to us now, but I will not be displaced again.”

Conditions remain grim. Prices for some foodstuffs and other basic goods are anywhere between three and 15 times higher than they were before the war – stretching the partial salary her husband, a teacher, still receives from the Palestinian Authority – and the family has lived without electricity since the start of the war.

Some items have been missing altogether for months on end. Ms. Shaheen recently shaved her head because she was unable to wash her hair because of the lack of shampoo.

Her 18-year-old daughter Malak, unable to find the medicine needed to treat her schizophrenia, has repeatedly attempted self-harm.

Ms. Shaheen laments Oct. 7 as the day her life began to crumble.

“Of course, we wish it had never happened,” she said this week, holding the phone closer to her window so The Globe could hear the tank fire outside her home.

“I am a victim of Oct. 7. My children are victims of Oct. 7.”

Haifa, Israel

Some 180 kilometres north of Be’eri and Gaza, Adir Gal was awakened by his parents on Oct. 7 at their home in Ya’ara, a tiny moshav less than five kilometres from Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. “War has started,” they told him.

The first air-raid sirens screamed over Ya’ara the next day, as Hezbollah began launching rockets and drones into northern Israel in what the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said was an act of “solidarity” with Hamas. As the third siren of Oct. 8 wailed, the 26-year-old Mr. Gal packed up his computer and some clothes and headed south with his parents for the relative safety of central Israel.

Since then, Mr. Gal and his parents haven’t gone back. For much of the past year, they’ve been living in government paid-for hotel rooms in the port city of Haifa, three of some 60,000 Israelis – and an even larger number of Lebanese – who were forced from their homes by the tit-for-tat fighting across the northern border.

That low-level conflict exploded into an open war in recent weeks as Israel launched what it calls a “limited” ground operation of southern Lebanon, aimed at driving Hezbollah away from Israel’s northern border, an offensive that began in earnest with the Sept. 27 assassination of Mr. Nasrallah.

Yet another spark from Oct. 7, lighting yet another fire in the region. This week, the flames spread even further as Iran launched 181 ballistic missiles at Israel in what it said was retaliation for the killings of Mr. Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

As an internally displaced person, Mr. Gal says he feels empathy with the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have been driven from their homes by the Israeli invasion. But he sees no other way that he and the other Israeli evacuees can feel safe going back to their homes. He scoffs at the idea of a negotiated solution.

“What we’re doing, unfortunately, we have to do it with blood, because that’s the language that the other side understands,” he says, sitting in the lobby of the hotel that has been his home in exile. “After what’s happened, I don’t think that there’s any more room for talking.”

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer, says the biggest change she noticed in Israel in the wake of Oct. 7 has been a dehumanization of Palestinians and Arabs. Ms. Buttu, who was born and educated in Toronto, previously lived in Gaza and now calls Haifa home.

The deaths of more than 40,000 Palestinians are treated as less important than the Israeli lives lost on Oct. 7. “That’s what’s been the most disturbing to me. On TikTok, in the news, Palestinian lives don’t matter.”

She personally knew five Gazan journalists who have been killed by Israeli fire, in some cases along with their families. Nearly all the other Gazans she knows have been forced to flee their homes.

A regular commentator in international media, Ms. Buttu has made it her mission to try and explain the context in which Oct. 7 took place. It was Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that gave birth to Hamas, she says, and Israel’s 18-year blockade of Gaza following Hamas’s rise to power that made the group ever more popular.

“We’ve been told over and over again that nothing that Israel did up to Oct. 7 justifies Oct. 7,” she says. “And then, at the same time, we’re also told that what happened on Oct. 7 justifies everything that has happened since Oct. 7.”

Her arguments, in the eyes of some of her neighbours, were seen as supporting terrorism. Someone doxxed her – publishing her photograph, address and phone number on a Hebrew-language Telegram channel that identifies perceived enemies of Israel.

Now Ms. Buttu rarely ventures more than a few blocks from her home or office, for fear that she could become another victim of the endless Black Saturday.

Tel Aviv

Vivian Silver was supposed to have her grandchildren with her on the day she was killed.

Her son, Yonatan Zeigen, says it was a last-minute decision to spend the weekend at their home in Tel Aviv rather than make the hour-plus drive to Be’eri.

Instead of being in Be’eri with his wife and three young children when Hamas fighters stormed in, Mr. Zeigen was awakened at 6:30 a.m. by the sound of air-raid sirens. A few hours later, he was exchanging terrifying WhatsApp messages with his mother through her final moments.

For more than a month afterwards, Mr. Zeigen didn’t know if his mother was dead or alive. Her body wasn’t initially found in Be’eri, so the Israeli government listed Ms. Silver among the hostages taken by Hamas to Gaza. It was only on Nov. 13 that archaeologists identified Ms. Silver’s remains.

In the aftermath, Mr. Zeigen – who always supported Israel’s peace camp, but doubted his ability as an individual to make a difference – picked up his mother’s torch and redoubled his involvement with groups that promote Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. The only way to end Israel’s constant state of war, he believes, is to offer Palestinians a fair peace.

Leaning into the pro-peace movement, Mr. Zeigen says, was a natural reaction to seeing his mother’s life’s work cut short. While many of the survivors of Oct. 7 have come to the same conclusion as Mr. Gal – that it’s no longer possible for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side – Mr. Zeigen has found solace in optimism.

“Some people tell me I’m naive, that you can’t reason with Hezbollah, that you can’t reason with Hamas, that you have to use force in order to bring them into submission,” he says in an interview at his Tel Aviv apartment.

But through his grief, Mr. Zeigen has committed himself to trying to find out if there’s another way. He recently returned from a trip to New York where he spoke alongside Palestinians who had lost loved ones in the conflict that Mr. Zeigen says began long before Oct. 7, and which has its roots in Israel’s decades-old occupation of Palestinian land.

“Oct. 7 was, for me, a very strong before-and-after moment. I realized that I can’t do anything else, that I owe it to myself and to my mother and to my kids and to our society to be invested in change, into making this place sustainable. Because it wasn’t,” he says. “I’m not talking about getting back to Oct. 6. It wasn’t sustainable on Oct. 6. I’m talking about creating something new.”