Rockets, air strikes disrupt Oct. 7 memorials as Middle East draws closer to all-out war

Moshe Mayzlesh’s Oct. 7 began the same way it did a year ago, with him dashing down the stairs into the shelter under his home in this religious community on the edge of Tel Aviv.

A year ago, Kfar Chabad was left unscathed by the mass launch of Hamas rockets that preceded the group’s invasion of southern Israel, an attack that left almost 1,200 people dead. On the anniversary of the attack, the war came to Kfar Chabad when a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip crashed into a warehouse a few dozen metres from Mr. Mayzlesh’s home, shattering a window above the shelter where he and his wife were taking cover with four children from the daycare she runs.

“Unfortunately, every day, until this ends, you have to expect something. They’ve never stopped trying to target us, trying to harm us,” said Mr. Mayzlesh, a 46-year-old information technology professional. “This is not a way to live.”

Hamas fired a total of five rockets Monday toward Tel Aviv in a show of defiance after a year of warfare that has destroyed much of the group’s fighting capability while reducing great swaths of the Gaza Strip to rubble. Two of the rockets got through Israel’s air defences, and a pair of women were lightly injured by shrapnel in Kfar Chabad.

The barrage was the heaviest from Hamas since Israel last month switched its military focus to Lebanon and Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas that began launching rockets at Israel on Oct. 8 of last year in what it said was an act of “solidarity” with Hamas.

“Israel during the last three weeks tried to convince the world that the Gaza issue was finished. These rockets tell the opposite,” said Wasif Iriqat, a military analyst based in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Abu Obeidah, a spokesman for Hamas, vowed Monday that the fighting would continue. “Our choice is to continue a long and painful battle of attrition with the enemy,” he said in a video statement marking the anniversary.

After the Tel Aviv attack, the Gaza-based al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights reported that the Israeli military issued an evacuation warning for Khan Younis, the city in southern Gaza where the rockets were fired from. A separate warning called for Gazans to evacuate the north of Gaza, as Israel looked set to once more escalate operations in the narrow coastal territory.

The Israeli military said afterward that it had struck the launch site in Khan Younis. “During the strike, secondary explosions were identified, indicating the presence of weapons,” it said in a statement.

On the northern front, Hezbollah launched 140 rockets over the course of Monday – most were either intercepted or fell in open areas of northern Israel – while Israel continued to pound southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut with air strikes as part of its campaign to push Hezbollah away from the border.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called an emergency meeting of his security cabinet after the launches from Gaza and Lebanon.

Later in the day, Yemen’s Houthi rebels also launched an attack on Israel, firing a long-range ballistic missile that was intercepted on its way to Tel Aviv. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are all backed by Iran, which itself launched a wave of missiles at Israel last week in what it said was retribution for attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.

The threat of a wider war looms large, as Israel has vowed to strike back at Iran in the days ahead.

In Israel, the question of how to remember Oct. 7 is a highly politicized one

A year of war in Gaza has left more than 41,800 people dead, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, including 12 who were reportedly killed in Monday’s attacks. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says more than 1.9 million people – 90 per cent of Gaza’s population – have been forced to leave their homes at least once over the past year, and more than 60 per cent of all buildings in the strip have been damaged in the fighting.

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, is seeking arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant – as well as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar – over alleged war crimes committed on and since Oct. 7, 2023.

Hamas took some 250 Israelis and foreigners hostage during the attack last year, 101 of whom are still missing in Gaza, according to a count by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. At least 35 of that number are believed to have died in captivity.

On Monday, relatives of the missing gathered – along with some of the hostages who were released or rescued over the past year – at Tel Aviv’s central HaYarkon Park to mark the anniversary and to call upon Mr. Netanyahu’s government to bring the remaining hostages home via a ceasefire agreement.

“Hamas has already been destroyed in Gaza. Who cares what they want? It doesn’t matter. We should be making a deal now to get the 101 hostages home now,” said Menachem Getz, the uncle of Omer Neutra, a 22-year-old Israeli-American who was serving as a tank commander in the Israeli army and taken hostage on Oct. 7. The family hasn’t received any proof of life since then.

The memorial ceremony, too, was rattled by sirens late Monday after the Houthis launched their ballistic missile from more than 2,000 kilometres away. Families of the Oct. 7 victims were forced to take cover until the red alert was lifted 10 minutes later, after the missile was shot down by Israel’s air defences.

Among those diving to the ground was Adi Zakuto, whose father, Avi, a 53-year-old supermarket manager in the city of Ofakim, was murdered in his home on Oct. 7. Adi, a 25-year-old medical student, said she had come to the Tel Aviv memorial “to feel the love, to be with other families that feel the same as we do.”

But a year later, the war continues to rage and expand. “This is unbelievable,” Adi said after dusting herself off. “I don’t know what to say.”