Official commemorations for October 7 were postponed, with the traumatic date falling on the first day of Sukkot — when Jews celebrate their protection from God while wandering for 40 years in the desert — with most services and businesses closed on the religious holiday.
But the lack of government remembrance felt appropriate for many of the affected border communities and families, as they also feel abandoned by their leaders since that fateful first day of war.
The majority of Israelis, 63 per cent, say their trust in the government has fallen since the start of the war, according to the latest poll by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, which has been tracking public opinion.
A growing section of the public — 64 per cent, up from 49 per cent in January this year — believe that Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, should end the two-year war.
It is a sentiment that the war-torn kibbutzim felt in the earliest days of the conflict, when Israeli leaders failed to visit and survey the damage or pay respect to the dead and missing; and a feeling that has been echoed around Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square every Saturday night since the attacks, when the families of hostages have demonstrated for a ceasefire that could bring loved ones home.
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“We have suffered enough. We deserve a different reality,” wrote Eli Sharabi, who spent 491 days in Hamas captivity, only to be told on his release that his wife and children had been burnt alive on October 7, 2023, their bodies found in an entangled embrace in the safe room of their home. “We want to heal.”
Hamas-led militants killed nearly 1,200 Israelis that day and took 251 hostages. Of those, 48 still remain in Gaza, 20 of whom are believed to be alive.
On Tuesday a crowd of bereaved relatives and friends lit candles and observed a minute’s silence at the site of the Nova music festival, where the attackers killed more than 370 people and seized dozens of the hostages. Another ceremony was held in Hostages Square, while a state-organised commemoration is planned for October 16 after the public holidays.
Orit Baron, 57, whose daughter Yuval was killed at the Nova festival with her fiancé Moshe Shuva, said that October 7 was a black day for her family.
“Now it’s two years. And I’m here to be with her, because this is the last time that she was alive,” she said, adding she felt “that right now she’s with me here”.
Just over half (51 per cent) of Israelis fear that attacks resembling those of October 7 could happen again on the Gaza border.
Yet according to the same poll, 18 per cent of Israelis say their trust in the military has increased since the massacres two years ago, when the army failed in its mission to protect civilians or even its own soldiers, particularly the unarmed women spotters on the border who were the first to identify the mass incursion, but whose warnings were ignored.
Just under half of those polled, 48 per cent, say their faith in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has stayed steady since before the attacks. But the finding that 31 per cent say their trust has been eroded may be evidence of divisions between wider Israeli society and the institutions that have sustained the country since its founding in 1948.
Fatigued by two years of lengthy tours of duty, it is the military’s part-time reservists and their families who have shouldered much of the burden of fighting the war for Israel. They are also frustrated by the refusal to conscript a large minority of the Jewish population, the ultra-Orthodox.
According to the Israel Democracy Institute, which conducted the survey of 802 Hebrew speakers and 150 Arabic speakers last month, the overwhelming majority — 72 per cent — are dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the war, although that reduces to 40 per cent who are dissatisfied with the IDF’s handling of the conflict.
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Israel has been left more isolated diplomatically, culturally and economically by the Gaza war, which spread across the region.
World opinion has shifted in reaction to the death toll in Gaza and the images of starving and dust-covered children. The UN has declared a famine, which Israel denies. Netanyahu is wanted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court and his government accused of genocide, just as Hamas is accused of crimes against humanity during the October 7 attack, which both sides deny.
António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, repeated his calls for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages “unconditionally and immediately” on the anniversary of the attacks that started the war. “Stop making civilians pay with their lives and their futures,” he said.
For Israelis, too, the main issue is the return of the hostages. The Hamas-run authorities’ toll of 67,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza is rarely mentioned by protesters, newsreaders or pollsters alike.
Yet the war has brought the country’s internal political divisions to the fore and divided a nation into supporters of Netanyau’s coalition government — and its policies on annexation, occupation and devolution of judicial power — and those who stand against it.
Among coalition voters, for example, 85 per cent support the IDF occupying Gaza City, the focus of the most recent offensive, while only 24 per cent of opposition voters do.
The INSS survey also suggests that less than half (44.5 per cent) of Israelis believe that the goals of the war — eradicating Hamas, as well as freeing the hostages — can be achieved fully or to a great extent, compared with 50 per cent who think otherwise.
With negotiators in Egypt to try to enact the peace plan put forward by President Trump, both Israelis and Palestinians are thinking about what happens after a permanent ceasefire.
While a Palestinian state is now recognised by Britain, France and most of the world, in surveys conducted in Israel and the West Bank there is a steady moderate half of the population who support a two-state solution. There is also about a quarter of each population, on the fringe, who believe there should be just one state from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.
