October 7th in Israel: “We just had to know”

A dark, shiny stone next to a bus stop. There is an image incorporated into it: a smiling family. Below it are names and dates, different birthdays, the same date of death: October 7th, 2023. The stone is on the edge of a highway that leads to the Nova site. Here, at this point, on the morning of October 7, 2023, Bar Zohar, a young woman who had recently danced at the Nova festival, was killed in the Hamas attack on Israel.

Today, three months later, her parents, Kati and Meir Zohar, are standing on the festival grounds. Around their necks they wear identical silver chains with a pendant adorned with the face of their deceased daughter. They tell. When the first rockets flew on the morning of October 7th, her daughter called and asked to pick her up. The family, from a small town a little further north, is already sitting in the shelter itself. Her parents tell her to get in the car and get away quickly.

Bar Zohar and some friends manage it. At first. Shortly before Kibbutz Be'eri, a police officer stops them. He told them there were probably terrorists there and sent them back to the Nova Festival. On the way they meet two cars in which Hamas terrorists are sitting. Bar gets shot. She manages to get into another car, drive back to the festival site with her friends and alert the police.

Bar does not survive and later succumbs to her wounds. Her father Meir Zohar becomes one of the founders of the memorial in the parking lot in Re'im where the Nova festival was attacked. Even during normal times, several thousand people visit the site every day. This Wednesday even more: Some people walk through the rows of memorial stealers, others hug each other. The ultra-Orthodox organization Chabad stands at the entrance and offers to put tefillin, the regional straps, on young men's arms.

On October 7, 2026, three years after the Hamas attack, at 6:29 a.m. - the minute the attack began - commemorations began in Israel. The state's official event took place on Monday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid a wreath at Mount Herzl Cemetery in Jerusalem. Not everyone agrees with this gesture.

Netanyahu is heavily criticized, especially by the families of the hostages and those killed on October 7th. To date, unlike heads of the military and intelligence services, he has not accepted responsibility for the failures before and on October 7th. The head of government is still blocking an independent investigative commission. It is particularly difficult for the families of the victims to bear that there has still not been a detailed investigation into what went wrong and where and how this attack could have happened.

Netanyahu's blocking of an independent investigation is no coincidence. Four weeks ago, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz revealed that Netanyahu was said to have been warned by the President of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed, shortly before October 7th. Ha'aretz refers to three senior foreign sources who remained anonymous. According to them, bin Zayed said in a telephone conversation with Netanyahu that Hamas leader Yahia Sinwar was planning a major operation that would not only lead to bloodshed, but would destabilize the entire region.

Shortly after the Ha'aretz revelation, it became known that Netanyahu had also received a warning from the Egyptian intelligence chief. Netanyahu denies all of this. Instead, he traveled to the Emirates a week ago, according to media reports, to persuade bin Zayed to deny the report.

Yellow posters hang on the side of the road out of Tel Aviv, heading south along the coast. Netanyahu's face can be seen on it, "guilty" is written next to it, and the date "October 7th." And: “We will not forget, we will not forgive.” The big question is: How will developments since October 7th three years ago affect the elections? Israelis will go to the polls on October 27th. For most Israelis – no matter which side they are on – it is a choice of fate.

For Netanyahu, not only his political future is at stake, but also the question of whether he can continue to feel secure in the security of his immunity in the face of the corruption trial underway against him. For his extreme right-wing coalition partners, especially the religious Zionists around the Minister for National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the question is whether they can continue to shape the country according to their standards, whether they can continue to pursue their messianic plans for a Greater Israel, pump money into settlement construction, and whether they can continue to shape the country more and more religiously. Settler violence has increased dramatically in recent years after October 7th.

The government critics, in turn, hope for change and a trace of stability. After the horror of October 7th, the wars on so many fronts and the erosion of democracy by the current government that continues.

The polls predict a neck-and-neck race between the two camps. Despite all the uncertainty given the ambiguous forecasts, one thing is certain: without the participation of the Arab parties, the former military chief and challenger to Netanyahu, Gadi Eisenkot, will not be able to form a majority. In such a case, the negotiation process will be anything but easy, as the pressure on Eisenkot not to cooperate with the Arab parties is great. But the opposition will agree on one thing: they have announced that they will immediately set up an independent commission if they win the election.

Kati Zohar, Bar's mother, still stands on the Nova site. She works at Kibbutz Be'eri. “Whenever I drive there, I think of my daughter,” she says: “And that it’s the last road she ever drove on.” The family itself filled some of the gaps in the information about this terrible day. They researched their daughter's last hours themselves. “It's traumatic to have to look at these pictures again and again,” says Zohar finally: “But we just had to know.”