The deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Shoah. We remember the murdered, the young people at the festival, the families in the kibbutzim, and the long road home for the hostages.
Tap to light a candle in their memory
The deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Shoah. Communities of the Gaza envelope, and the young people dancing at the Nova festival, were attacked at dawn.
At 6:29 on the morning of Saturday, 7 October 2023 — Simchat Torah, a day of joy — some 3,000 Hamas terrorists tore through the Gaza border fence by land, sea and air. Over the hours that followed they overran more than twenty communities of the Gaza envelope and the Nova music festival, murdering families in their homes and young people as they ran.
About 1,200 people were murdered, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The dead included the elderly, children, babies, and survivors of the Shoah. 251 were dragged into Gaza as hostages, from infants to the very old. Bringing them home, the living and the bodies of the murdered, remains an open wound.
251 people were dragged into Gaza that morning, from a nine-month-old baby to the very old. For over two years, bringing them home was a nation's prayer.
They were taken from their beds and from a dance floor, carried across the border while crowds cheered. The youngest, Kfir Bibas, was nine months old; he, his brother Ariel and their mother Shiri were murdered in captivity and became the face of the ordeal.
Over 738 days they came home: a first deal in November 2023, daring rescues, and at last the peace plan of October 2025. In January 2026 the final hostage was recovered. They are all home now, the living and the fallen. A people that moves heaven and earth to recover even the bodies of its dead is not weak; it is bound by a vow: כל ישראל ערבים זה לזה, all of Israel is responsible for one another.
The hatred behind that day did not begin or end with it. Those we lost to hatred, through the years →
May their memory be a blessing.