A Year After Oct. 7, Israel’s War in Gaza Has Become a Regional Inferno

A year after Hamas led the Oct. 7 attacks from Gaza, stunning Israelis with unprecedented carnage, Israel has gone from disbelief in its own security failures to expanding an unprecedented war on all fronts with no end in sight.

Israel’s troops are pushing a ground invasion into southern Lebanon as its warplanes bomb across the country and an expanding direct confrontation with Iran spirals. A thick fog of war has descended across the region as Israel’s devastating campaign continues in the starved, rubbled, and besieged Gaza Strip while its military exports the Gaza war to West Bank refugee camps and its settlers force Palestinian villagers from their homes. 

For Israelis, nearly two decades of relative quiet and a booming economy ended last Oct. 7, when Palestinian fighters from Gaza, under orders from Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, killed more than 1,200 civilians and soldiers and took 251 hostages in the worst massacre Israel has ever experienced. For years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu steered the country with the promise that Israel’s military, intelligence, and technological advantage ensured quiet as a replacement for peace. As he finished the walls that sealed in occupied Palestinians, allowing Israelis to freely expand in East Jerusalem and the West Bank while sieging and fighting low-cost wars in Gaza, Tel Aviv became one of the world’s most expensive cities, while Palestinians were put out of sight and mind.

That ended as thousands of fighters from Gaza burst through fences, walls, and firewalls that cut off the coastal enclave from the world for 16 years. The gruesome killings of ravers at the Nova music festival, residents of southern Israel trapped in their homes, and soldiers surprised and overwhelmed in their bases, transformed the country in a day. Unable to ignore Palestinians any longer, Israel began bombing them into silence. 

For Palestinians, there was no quiet before Oct. 7, 2023. Life in Gaza had already felt impossible; its residents were trapped, suffering under Israel’s limited allowance of goods, and relying on infrastructure so damaged by years of Israeli bombings that seawater came through the taps while rivers of open sewage flowed into the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinian communities in the West Bank faced regular army raids as their land was taken by Israeli settlers. Palestinians’ hope for a capital in Jerusalem was met with more settlers evicting East Jerusalemites from their homes and the American recognition — made under former President Donald Trump — that the entire divided and occupied city is Israel’s capital alone. 

The Oct. 7 attacks however, unleashed a relentless, unrestricted retaliation that has killed more than 41,500 Palestinians in Gaza so far, devastating Palestinian society as a whole and triggering the worst existential crisis since the Nakba, or “Catastrophe,” the 1948 mass dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians from lands that became Israel. The mounting carnage would not have been possible without billions of dollars of U.S. military support and diplomatic cover. 

On Oct. 6 last year, Oren Ziv was in the northern West Bank Palestinian town of Huwara, documenting Israeli settlers as they rampaged in what had become a regular bid to intimidate Palestinians residents into fleeing their homes. The next day, the correspondent for the joint Israeli-Palestinian English publication +972 Magazine, and its Hebrew sister publication Local Call, was face-down on the street outside Sderot, less than a mile from Gaza. Gunfire erupted from the town as Israeli security forces and Palestinian gunmen battled for control around the police station.

“Civilians were targeted in their homes while sleeping, in the shelters and safe rooms,” says the long-haired photographer and writer. Sitting in a Tel Aviv café, Ziv is clearly still disturbed by what he saw, the people killed and body parts strewn about, during his investigation of the attacks in five southern Israeli communities. “Families, children, women, elderly people,” he says, describing the dead.

At the same time, Ziv saw complete confusion in the security forces. “People were saying to me, ‘What is the justification of the Jewish state if it can’t protect the Jewish people?” 

Regardless of politics, he says that these atrocities touched every Jewish Israeli. “Of course, it was going to explode one day,” says Ziv, 38, about the system of segregation, military rule, and blockade he’s covered most of his life. “Did I think it would explode in that kind of brutality? No.” Since those attacks, Ziv has watched Israel’s leaders use the collective trauma and calls for vengeance to further a spiraling war. “I think [Israel’s] message is that we don’t have any limits anymore.”

BESIEGED, BOMBARDED, DISPLACED, and living with his family in a tent on the beach in southern Gaza, the war — which has seen Israel charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice — has destroyed Mohammed Rajab’s life. Working as fixer for foreign journalists during past conflicts in Gaza, Rajab, 41, was on the front lines in 2014 as Israeli bombardment and invasion forced Palestinians to flee their neighborhoods. In this war, everyone he knows is on the run, as the worst scenes from past wars have become ubiquitous for the 2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza.

On Oct. 6, Rajab was at the beach in Gaza City, eating ice cream with his kids and taking advantage of one of the few distractions from the locked-in strip, where an entire generation has grown up unable to leave one of the most densely populated places on earth. The next day, as news of the attacks in Israel reached him, bombs were already falling on the strip. Within a week, Rajab and his family would join a million other Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza with their families as Israel leveled their towns, cities, and refugee camps.

“What’s happening in Lebanon now is the same as that week in October,” says Rajab, referring to the estimated million Lebanese who have fled the south under escalating Israeli attack.

Taking refuge with his family in a United Nations building in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis, he moved his family into his car in the courtyard as thousands of people arrived and the squalor and crowding became unbearable. Outside the compound, Israeli bombs turned the surrounding neighborhoods into slabs of concrete and twisted rebar. It was here that he would find out that his Gaza City home had been blown up amid Israel’s invasion. 

Working for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Rajab spent his days in overcrowded hospitals starved of basic supplies by a tightening Israeli siege. Israeli forces systematically attacked the medical centers, claiming they were being used by Hamas, and wounded patients died slowly. As the war dragged on and Israel’s invasion pressed south, leaving towns and cities in ruin as they were conquered, tens of thousands of Palestinians from all walks of life were killed by some of the most advanced weapons of the 21st century. Mass graves, where bodies were marked with signs of execution, were unearthed, while civilians fleeing their homes under the white flag of surrender were shot in the streets.

Because he was working for MSF, Rajab and his family were some of the few eventually able to find a shared house by the beach in the Israeli-declared safe zone of Al Mawasi, and escape the spread of sickness and disease in the U.N. shelters. However, the safe zone was never safe — another MSF house about 200 meters away was attacked by Israel in February while Rajab was on his way home from work. Struggling to survive and provide aid, Rajab watched as countless friends and family members were killed in Israeli attacks or starved as famine took hold. “I was getting messages from relatives who stayed in northern Gaza asking us if we could send vegetables or any food,” says Rajab. “They were eating hay!”

The further Israel pressed into Gaza, the worse things got for Rajab and his family. Trying desperately to get his family out of Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt, any hope of escape was dashed as Israel seized the border crossing as part of its invasion of Rafah in May. As hundreds of thousands of people who had taken sanctuary in the city now fled north toward Al Mawasi, MSF evicted its staff from its homes on the beach, citing safety concerns and landlords raising rents astronomically on the few standing houses left.

Since then, Rajab, who now works for UNICEF, and his family have lived like the rest of Gaza’s Palestinians who have been constantly displaced throughout the war. As Israel’s invasion takes the form of a direct reoccupation, Rajab and his family are now living in a crowded tent on the beach, with no proper sanitation and exposed to the elements, as Israel continues to strike the area from the air and sea. “It’s like a never-ending nightmare,” he says.

AS MISERY AND DEATH drag on in Gaza, Sderot and southern Israel have returned to life. Residents who fled and evacuated have returned. The streets are busy and shopping-mall parking lots are full. The city is at the end of the rail line on Israel’s southern Mediterranean coast. While the trains came to an abrupt halt along the Gaza border in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, now the platforms on the edge of an ongoing war are filled with local commuters and soldiers going to and from bases that surround the occupied enclave. 

On the morning of Oct. 7, 26-year-old Bar Dadon was hiding desperately in her safe room while Hamas gunmen stormed through the town, killing indiscriminately. She had grown used to the occasional rocket fire, which had escalated during five previous wars since 2008, but this attack was something she never thought possible. “We were afraid they would come to our home because we saw on the internet what they were doing in the kibbutzim,” she says. “It was very scary.”

The next day, she fled the working-class Israeli town with her family, while Israeli security forces and Palestinian militants battled for control. Dadon evacuated along with tens of thousands of others, and she was relocated to a hotel in the Red Sea city of Eilat until March. Now back at home and working in a local café, Dadon feels safe again, despite the war next door. Though she no longer worries about attacks from Hamas, Dadon believes Israel needs to maintain a military presence on the ground in Gaza rather than return to its remote approach to occupation. She says she is primarily concerned with getting a deal that frees the hostages still in Gaza, as well as rockets fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon. “I don’t think we should have a cease-fire if we need to leave Gaza.”

Soldiers from Israel’s Nahal brigade, which has been fighting in Gaza, pile onto the two-floor suburban train, as it heads north from Sderot, through Gaza border towns and southern Israeli cities toward Tel Aviv, and onto Haifa and northern Israel. While Israel has been moving its forces north toward its war in Lebanon, in what defense minister Yoav Gallant calls shifting the war’s “center of gravity,” these soldiers are heading home on leave.

Outside the window, the flat and dusty scenery of southern Israel a year into the war gives no indication of having ever been a front line, while Gaza remains a blur in the distance. Heading north, however, Tel Aviv’s sense of detached tranquility intensifies as the train pulls into HaHagana station. 

While the secular metropolis was subdued and eerily quiet at the start of the war, it now feels closer to New York than Ramallah. Bars and restaurants are bustling, and while escapism is on offer, so are the protests for a hostage deal and cease-fire as well as intense opposition to Israel’s religious nationalist government. However, that’s starting to change with new state-of-emergency restrictions and public attention shifting to the conflict in Lebanon. 

Prime Minister Netanyahu has bucked international calls for a cease-fire, refusing any hostage deal that would end the war; in August, Hamas reportedly refused a proposed hostage deal that did not include a permanent cease-fire. Instead, Israel has continued with a war that has not met the official goals of destroying Hamas or freeing the Israeli captives taken to Gaza. This failure has reignited mass anti-government protests that had divided Israeli society before the war. 

As Israel has shifted its focus to Lebanon and returning the 60,000 Israelis displaced from the north by Hezbollah’s rocket attacks, however, Israelis have enthusiastically supported expanding the war.

LEAVING CENTRAL ISRAEL, the signs of expanding war return. Winding along the coast, armed apache helicopters sit in open fields while the cars fill up with soldiers heading to northern bases. Haifa, Israel’s third largest city, feels deserted mid-day during the work week. Stores are closed, streets are nearly empty, and classes are canceled, as Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike sit in the few open cafés and air raid sirens sound. 

For Palestinian citizens of Israel in the mixed port city, like Palestinian citizens across the country, the year of war is defined by the dual fear of being treated like an enemy within and of being hit by incoming attacks. In the wake of Oct. 7, Palestinian-Israelis have been attacked in the streets by nationalist Israelis.

“This entire year has been very much about persecution and oppression,” says Reem Hazzan, 40, over coffee in Palestinian café in Haifa. The Haifa secretary for Hadash, a left-wing party in Israel’s parliament that stands for Arab-Jewish unity, has been detained by police and had their party offices temporarily closed for trying to screen a new Mohammad Bakri film about an Israeli raid in Jenin last year, before the war. 

The film is supposed to be his sequel to Jenin, Jenin, Barki’s documentary that sparked widespread Israeli outrage because of its harsh look at Israel’s raising of the northern West Bank refugee camp during its 2002 invasion at the height of the second Intifada. “People cannot speak their mind,” Hazzan says. Despite an extensive prison system long known for torture, Israel has both worsened Palestinian prison conditions since the war and opened black site prisons for occupied Palestinians where abuse and starvation are rife and rape has been documented on camera. 

Highlighting the long-time institutionalized disparity between the rights of Israeli Jewish and Palestinian citizens, Hazzan says that since the war started, Palestinians can’t express who they are or how they feel about the war out of fear of being punished for disloyalty. “Since last year, you cannot be in solidarity with yourself,” the activist says about Palestinian-Israleis sympathizing with Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. “[Not] with any [Palestinian] woman, child or underprivileged human who has been suffering from this war.” 

BEYOND THE LAST TRAIN STOP, a few north of Haifa, Israel’s north has become desolate, overgrown, and filled with soldiers, amid a year of cross-border shelling that has now spiraled into an all-out war across Lebanon’s frontier. 

Standing in uniform in his kibbutz on Israel’s border with Lebanon, 41-year-old Nitzan Zehavi believes a ground invasion in Lebanon is the only way to stop Hezbollah. Under regular rocket fire from the surrounding Lebanese hills, the residents of Kfar Giladi have been gone nearly a year, while a unit of reservists from the kibbutz remain. Usually commuting to the Tel Aviv area where he works in Israel’s flourishing high-tech industry, Zehavi has temporarily traded his work in a startup for fatigues, sending his family south while he stays home, guarding Israel’s northern border. Disregarding Hezbollah’s position that their attacks, which started on Oct. 8, are to pressure Israel into a Gaza cease-fire, he sees the conflict in Gaza as separate from Israel’s conflict in Lebanon. 

“It’s not a reality we can accept from our government [and] I don’t care what the international community expects,” says Zehavi about his community’s displacement, looking up at Lebanon’s hills. “I have one specific [concern], to make sure my wife and boys can live here.” A paratrooper in Israel’s disastrous 2006 invasion of Lebanon, now he only sees military solutions, but he is also not sure military means will be successful. 

Israelis’ fear that Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia movement allied with Iran, can cause far greater damage to Israel than Hamas dissipated in the wake of a devastating series of attacks on the group in September. 

The wave of attacks — which involved first detonating pagers rigged with explosives that Hezbollah fighters were using, and then detonating walkie talkies the next day — Israeli intelligence not only compromised “The Party of God,” but killed hundreds and wounded thousands of its members, alongside Lebanese civilians. Sending panic through Lebanon, the attacks were followed by a bombing campaign in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah is popular, and around the country, killing hundreds of civilians, senior Hezbollah leaders, and Hassan Nasrallah, who had been the face of the organization that forced an end to Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000.

Sami Nader, who heads the Lebanese think tank, The Levant Institute, is trying to get his family out of Beirut — and realizing the spreading regional war he’s feared for months could happen is now a reality. 

Iran has carried out direct large-scale aerial attacks on Israel, in retaliation for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in August and the killing of Nasrallah, while Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen have traded escalating strikes with Israel. However, it is Lebanon — no stranger to civil wars, invasion, or occupations — where more than 2000 people have been killed in recent weeks, and the regional war is its most deadly. 

“I don’t think Israel will stop, because they got into this to secure their border for at least the decade to come,” Nader says from his Beirut office, where he can hear Israeli air strikes in the city. He describes Israel and Hezbollah moving away from trying to achieve deterrence through what he calls a “balance of terror,” and toward what he calls a “balance of havoc,” where the ability to create mass chaos is a means to gain advantage. 

Netanyahu has built his political career, since the 1990s, on accusing Iran of being Israel’s greatest threat, and negating Palestinians as nothing more than an Iranian proxy force. Since presiding over Israel’s greatest security failure on Oct. 7, Netanyahu has turned his talking points into a regional military strategy.

And yet, it is in the fog of this regional war that Israel is pushing its most aggressive assault in decades across the West Bank. Since the war started, West Bank Palestinians have experienced the expansion of a 21st century Nakba. Isolated Palestinian communities are forced from their homes under constant settler attack. Refugee camps in the northern West Bank get colloquially renamed mini Gazas because of army invasions and aerial assaults that leave residents without front walls looking on roads that have been ripped up. More than 700 have been killed, and over 10,000 have been arrested. 

However, with more than half a million Israeli settlers in the West Bank and a U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority that works to quell and contain Palestinian resistance, there’s a different face to Israel’s expanding multi-front war. It is the kind of war where you can take public transit to the front line. 

THE SHARED TAXI RIDE from Ramallah to Jenin starts slowly. On day three of Israel’s August invasion of Jenin and its refugee camp, the yellow van takes over an hour to fill up. The wait isn’t surprising, but the number of young workers trying to get home to a war zone is. Winding between dusty hills, covered in olive trees and often topped with Israeli settlements (deemed illegal under international law), the roads are nearly empty as the taxi van clears checkpoints and avoids roads close to settlements guarded by soldiers and armed settler security. The young men inside play on their phones and ignore the tension outside their widows, disembarking in the rural stillness of Jenin’s nearby villages while drones hum overhead. The taxis typically drive to the center of the city, but this ride ends on the edge of Jenin’s downtown. 

The streets of a city that proclaims itself the capital of Palestinian resistance are deserted and the Israeli army is everywhere, ripping up roads. Gunfire and explosions constantly ring out from the refugee camp while drones and war planes fly overhead. Army jeeps block the main road to the camp that is home to the refugees from Haifa in 1948 and their descendants, and soldiers prevent journalists from accessing it or the hospital. As Israeli soldiers attack Palestinian fighters who see themselves as the only line of defense against Israeli dispossession, residents whose homes have been demolished by Israel flee the sealed off camp for the city with only the clothes on their back. 

In a village on the edge of Jenin, “Yasser,” an officer in the Palestinian Authority Security Forces who declines to give his name out of fear of reprisal, smokes cigarettes with his dad and brother, hoping the Israelis don’t come to town. He watches as helicopters circle over Jenin and gunfire from the camp echoes in the hills, but officially his job in these situations is to do nothing. Yasser is under orders to disappear when Israeli forces come into Palestinian cities. He feels ashamed when he puts on his uniform or tells people what he does for a living. “The PA is allowing a Nakba to happen and only wants money,” Yasser says about the security forces, which are under the command Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas but dependent on U.S. and European aid. 

Not paid his full salary for months, he says that because of European and U.S. pressure, his forces are expected to follow the Israeli invasions with their own arrest campaigns against Palestinian fighters. While they are not allowed to protect Palestinian villages from settler attacks or defend the cities against Israeli invasions, he says the forces are expected to risk their lives and abandon their dignity to clear IEDs laid by Palestinian fighters for Israeli troops. At the same time, he says the PA has no evacuation plan for him or his family if the Israelis were to raid his village. 

On the one hand, Yasser believes the presence of the PA security forces has so far held off the flattening of the West Bank, preventing widespread atrocities like those in Gaza. On the other hand, he understands why PA security forces have become a target for Palestinian fighters, and doesn’t believe the security forces — whose main job is to police and pacify Palestinians — would be able to stop Israeli soldiers and settlers from creating a mass expulsion. 

“I wouldn’t mind joining the resistance,” he says. “If it was an effective resistance.”