Hamas attack: Israel remembers the massacre of October 7, 2023

Three years after the Hamas massacre in southern Israel, the country remembers the victims of the terrorist attack. President Izchak Herzog lit a candle in memory of the dead and injured at his residence in Jerusalem at 6:29 a.m. local time. The raid began around this time, killing around 1,200 people. “Three years since that terrible morning, three years of pain, loss and memory that will not be erased,” he wrote on the X platform.

In the morning, police officers also gathered at battle sites in the south of the country, including Sderot, to commemorate their fallen colleagues, as the police wrote on X. Mourners also came to the site of the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Reim to remember their relatives and friends who were killed. At the central commemoration ceremony in the evening, around 50,000 people are expected to gather in a park in Tel Aviv, as Israeli radio reported.

In the attack on October 7, 2023, 251 people were kidnapped as hostages in the Gaza Strip. According to Israeli information, around 6,000 terrorists from the Islamist Hamas and other extremist groups came to Israel at that time. In the war that followed the raid, more than 74,000 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip, according to the Hamas-controlled health authority.