Axios….
The Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks unleashed a year of unthinkable violence in Israel, Gaza and across the Middle East.
- The arrival of a full-blown regional war now threatens the lives of millions more people.
The big picture: One year after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the bloodshed continues with no end in sight. Israel could soon be fighting the longest war in its 76-year history.
- The Hamas surprise attack on Oct. 7, which killed 1,200 Israelis and led to the kidnapping of 250 more, was the worst security failure in Israel’s history.
- Israel’s retaliation led to the bloodiest war in Gaza’s history — and the deadliest year for Palestinians since the Nakba in 1948, with more than 41,000 people killed.
Today, the fighting has spilled over from Gaza to Lebanon and at least six different fronts — upending the lives of tens of millions of people and triggering the region’s biggest crisis since the Arab Spring in 2010.
What to watch: In the U.S., which continues to be Israel’s most important ally and biggest supplier of arms, both Vice President Harris and former President Trump want the regional conflict to be over by Jan. 20.
- But whoever wins the Nov. 5 election is likely to inherit an expanding war in the Middle East.
- Whether it’s Trump or Harris, the next president will have to make decisions on this issue on day one — and potentially even during the transition….
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The bottom line: The Hamas attack brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the center of global attention, after years of being cast aside.
- But it also resulted in the biggest catastrophe for the Palestinian people since 1948, as Israel’s response in Gaza has led to death and destruction of biblical dimensions.
- With no realistic “day-after” plan for Gaza, including reconstruction, the condition of two million Palestinians in Gaza — most of them displaced — is likely to deteriorate even further.
- Today, Netanyahu is entrenched, the violence is spreading and the goal of an independent Palestinian state appears more elusive than ever….
The Daily picture NY Times
At least 2,083 people have now been killed in Lebanon and nearly 10,000 wounded since the war began last October, according to Lebanon’s ministry of health, most of those over the last three weeks.
Israel also called on residents of large parts of northern Gaza to evacuate. It says that Hamas’s main fighting units in the enclave have largely been destroyed, but it has continued its operations, seeking to eradicate any threat posed by the group and prevent it from reconstituting its forces.
Here’s what else to know:
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Oct. 7 anniversary: Israelis are gathering to commemorate those killed and abducted a year ago, as Palestinians in Gaza continue to endure a war that has killed tens of thousands of people.
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Read our live coverage of the anniversary of the attack.
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U.N. peacekeepers: The Israeli military established new positionsbeside a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon during its invasion of the country’s southern region last week, according to two U.N. spokesmen and satellite imagery obtained by The New York Times. The U.N. said the Israeli move was putting its peacekeepers in the crossfire.
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Gaza evacuations: The Israeli military appeared to label the vast majority of northern Gaza an evacuation zone on Sunday, hours after launching a major raid there targeting Hamas. The announcement suggested that Israel planned to step up pressure on residents of northern Gaza to relocate….
AP piece for this morning….
Israelis held somber ceremonies Monday to mark a year since the deadliest attack in the country’s history, a Hamas-led raid that shattered its sense of security and has since spiraled into wars on two fronts with no end in sight.
Hamas marked the anniversary of its Oct. 7, 2023, attack by firing a barrage of rockets at Tel Aviv, underscoring its resilience after a year of war and devastation in Gaza. Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which began firing rockets at Israel on Oct. 8 in support of its ally Hamas, fired new barrages despite its recent losses.
In Lebanon, an Israeli strike killed at least 10 firefighters, the latest in a series of strikes that have killed dozens of first responders, according to Lebanon ’s Health Ministry. In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian health officials said Israeli troops shot and killed a 12-year-old Palestinian boy in a refugee camp, where the military said it opened fire on Palestinians throwing stones at its forces….
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Israelis flocked to ceremonies, cemeteries and memorial sites around the country, remembering the hundreds of victims, the dozens of hostages still in captivity and soldiers killed in battle. Commemorations were also planned across Europe and elsewhere.
Before dawn, hundreds of families of those killed at the Nova music festival, joined by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, gathered at the site where at least 364 revelers were killed and many others taken hostage. As the sun rose, organizers played the same trance track that was abruptly halted when the barrage of rockets began.
At 6:29 a.m. — the exact minute Hamas launched its attack — the crowd observed a moment of silence. A woman’s piercing wail broke the quiet and booms echoed from the fighting in Gaza, just a few kilometers (miles) away.
“When we are here, we are near our loved ones,” said Sigal Bar-On, whose niece, Yuval Bar-On, 25, and her fiancé Moshe Shuva, 34, were killed in the attack two months before they were to be married.
“We can’t understand how a year has passed,” said Shimon Busika, whose 25-year-old son Yarden was killed at the festival….
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