In an exhibition hall in Jaffa this week there is a child's balance bike. It belonged to Ariel Bibas. Near it are a soldier's beret, a paramedic's stethoscope and a news photographer's camera. The beret was Roni Eshel's. The stethoscope was Amit Mann's. The exhibition is called "The Space Left Behind," and it opens with an Israeli flag that was burned and torn in the fighting on October 7, 2023.
Three years after Hamas terrorists crossed the Gaza border, murdered some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, this is where Israel finds itself: surrounded by the objects, with the people gone, and still without an agreed account of how it happened.
The anniversary program was set to begin at 6:29 a.m., the minute the attack started, with a nationwide moment of silence. By 7 a.m. bereaved families planned to be standing outside the homes of ministers who were in government that morning. Convoys were to set out from the north, the center and the south. A second minute of silence was called for noon, in hospitals, offices and restaurants. "This day must not become just another date on the calendar," the October 7 Council, which represents bereaved families and former hostages, said in announcing the plans.
Some things have ended. A U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, and the last 20 living hostages came home days later. In January, soldiers recovered the body of Ran Gvili, a police officer killed fighting on October 7, from a cemetery in northern Gaza. He had been held for 843 days. Defense Minister Israel Katz called it "a painful moment of closure." Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it more simply: "There are no more hostages in Gaza."
But closure has turned out to be a narrow thing. The war that began that morning has not formally ended. Israeli forces remain inside Gaza along what is known as the Yellow Line, holding close to 70 percent of the territory as of this summer. In late July, President Donald Trump announced an agreement for Hamas to disarm completely. Israel's position has been that it will not pull back until the Strip is demilitarized. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir told troops earlier this year that the army was "prepared to move from defense to offense." This week, JFeed reported that soldiers destroyed a mile-long tunnel in northern Gaza.
Nor has the killing of Israelis stopped. On September 20, hours before Yom Kippur, Netanel Shukrun drove with his eldest son, Yoav, to a spring near Neve Tzuf to immerse before the fast. A Hamas terrorist from the town of Biddu opened fire on their car. Shukrun, a father of six from Alei Zahav who worked as an information systems analyst, shouted a warning before he was hit. Yoav, 16, ran and survived. "Thank you for shouting to me when the terrorist came in," he said at his father's funeral.
Shukrun's brother told i24NEWS that their grandfather, Rabbi Yaakov Shukrun, was murdered outside his synagogue in Algeria some 70 years ago. The army went into the Sukkot holiday on high alert.
In the south, the picture is better than many expected. The Tekuma Directorate, the government body rebuilding the Gaza border region, reported this summer that 92 percent of evacuated residents had returned and that 5,000 newcomers had joined them, bringing the population to 65,000. The exceptions are the places hit hardest. About 2,600 residents of Holit, Kfar Aza, Be'eri and Nir Oz have been living in temporary communities, according to Calcalist. In Be'eri, one resident in ten was murdered. In Nir Oz, a quarter of the kibbutz was killed or kidnapped, and its people are not expected to start going home until the end of 2027.
Then there is the question that hangs over all of it. Israel has not established a state commission of inquiry into October 7. The government decided last November to set up an inquiry committee in a format of its own. Bereaved families and opposition leaders rejected that, and petitions demanding a full state commission reached the High Court in April.
Eyal Eshel, whose daughter's beret is now behind glass in Jaffa, said when Israel marked 1,000 days in July that the families would keep counting "until a state commission of inquiry is established."
