What happened on October 7, 2023

What happened

Before dawn on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas fighters broke out of Gaza and into southern Israel. They came through breaches cut in the border fence, over the fence on paragliders, and by boat, hitting more than 20 Israeli communities near the Gaza border along with about a dozen Israeli military bases and posts. ¹ The day was Simchat Torah on the Jewish calendar, and Israelis in the border communities were mostly still asleep when the attack began.

At least 1,200 people were killed that day, most of them civilians. It was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. ¹ Among the communities hit were the kibbutzim Be'eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Netiv Haasara, and Alumim. ² The single deadliest site was the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re'im, where at least 364 people were killed. ² Of those killed across the day, at least 828 were civilians, including 36 children and 71 foreign nationals, and at least 367 were members of Israeli security forces. ²

Hamas took 251 people hostage into Gaza that day, including babies and the elderly, along with people of multiple nationalities. ¹ The attackers used systematic violence against civilians, including torture and sexual assault, documented in the days and months that followed. ¹

Israel responded with a military campaign it named Operation Iron Swords, with the stated goals of toppling Hamas's government in Gaza and destroying its military capability, while also working to bring the hostages home. ⁵ The war that followed ran for more than two years and reshaped the region around it. On Oct. 16, 2024, Israel killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. On Sept. 27, 2024, it killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and on Nov. 27, 2024, Israel and Hezbollah reached a ceasefire. ¹

The first hostage releases and exchanges came in stages over the following two years, not all at once. A ceasefire's first phase took effect on Jan. 19, 2025. ¹ The war did not fully end there. It took until Oct. 13, 2025, following a peace plan pushed by the Trump administration, for the last 20 living hostages to be released. ¹

Even then, the story was not over. Some hostages had died in captivity, and their bodies remained in Gaza. The last of them, police officer Ran Gvili, was returned to Israel on Jan. 26, 2026, after his remains were recovered in Gaza City. ³ He had been held 843 days. ³ The public countdown clock in Tel Aviv that had tracked the hostages' time in captivity stopped the next day at 844 days. ⁴

Why it still matters

Oct. 7 is the reference point for nearly everything that has happened in Israeli and Jewish life since. It set off the longest war in Israel's history, reordered Israeli politics, and reopened questions about how Israeli intelligence and the military missed the warning signs beforehand. It also became a flashpoint on college campuses and in public debate worldwide almost immediately, well before the war in Gaza had produced its own casualty figures for people to argue about.

For Jewish communities outside Israel, Oct. 7 changed the texture of daily conversation. Synagogues that had never run active-shooter drills started running them. Federations that had budgeted modestly for security spent differently. Hostage posters became a fixture of city streets, and then a flashpoint themselves when people tore them down. The 251 hostages were not an abstraction to most of the Jewish world; there were relatives, or relatives of friends, or names people had said in synagogue every week for two years.

The scale of the killing on a single day, and the length of time it took to bring everyone home, both matter to how the day is remembered. Two years and change is not a news cycle. It is a period long enough that some hostages were born, married, or bar mitzvahed in the years since 2023, without their families knowing whether they were alive.

The words you'll hear

Oct. 7 / October 7. Shorthand for the attack itself, used the way "9/11" is used, as a date that stands in for the whole event.

Hostages Square. The plaza outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where families and supporters held rallies and vigils through the two-plus years hostages were held. Tel Aviv formally renamed it in August 2026. ⁴

Iron Swords. The name of Israel's military operation launched in response to the attack. ⁵

The hostage deal. Shorthand for any of the several negotiated agreements, brokered at different points by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States, that produced releases in stages rather than all at once.

251. The number of people taken hostage on Oct. 7. It appears constantly in Israeli public life, on posters, dog tags, and in speeches, as shorthand for the day itself. ¹