Yet three years later, October 7 cannot be remembered without confronting what followed.
Israel’s military response devastated much of the Gaza Strip. By October 7, 2026, Gaza health authorities were reporting more than 74,000 Palestinians killed, while a huge proportion of the population remained displaced and living in extremely difficult conditions. Reconstruction has barely begun.
There were negotiations, hostage releases, prisoner exchanges, renewed offensives and temporary pauses. A ceasefire eventually took effect on October 10, 2025 and led to the return of the remaining Israeli hostages and the remains of those who had died. But dozens of hostages never survived captivity, and many survivors continue to describe how profoundly the experience changed their lives. Nor did the ceasefire bring genuine peace. Israeli strikes and military operations have continued, Hamas has not disarmed and Israel still controls much of Gaza.
So what remains, three years later?
First, the people who are missing.
Israeli families will never recover those murdered on October 7. Survivors carry physical and psychological scars that anniversaries cannot erase. In Reim, Kfar Aza, Be’eri and elsewhere, memorial ceremonies held on October 7, 2026 demonstrate how deeply the attacks remain embedded in Israeli society.
And in Gaza there is another landscape of absence: dead relatives, injured children, orphans, scattered families and homes that no longer exist. More than 1.9 million Palestinians have been internally displaced during the conflict, many repeatedly, while around 60 percent of Gaza’s population has lost its home. Hundreds of thousands still live in displacement sites or unsafe buildings.
Perhaps three years later we should finally reject one of the most damaging ideas to emerge from this conflict: that compassion must choose a side.
Mourning the Israelis murdered on October 7 takes nothing away from the suffering of a Palestinian child buried beneath rubble. Being horrified by Gaza’s destruction does not erase what happened at Nova or inside Israeli communities. Recognising Israeli trauma does not require supporting every decision made by an Israeli government. Criticising the conduct of that government does not justify Hamas and must never become hatred of Jews.
These things should be obvious.
Too often, they have not been.
For three years the world has experienced this conflict through images, demonstrations, social media, political slogans and competing outrage. People have repeatedly been asked whether they are “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine”, as though millions of human lives could be reduced to two opposing football teams.
In that process, the people themselves disappear.
An Israeli father standing before a photograph of his murdered child is not a government.
A Palestinian mother holding her child amid the ruins is not Hamas.
Children do not inherit responsibility for the governments or armed groups under which they happen to be born. Civilians should never become the currency with which history settles its accounts.
Three years later, another uncomfortable question remains: what has all this violence actually achieved?
Hamas inflicted one of the deepest traumas in Israel’s history on October 7. Israel’s military response devastated Gaza. The October 2025 ceasefire ended large-scale hostilities but did not solve the Palestinian political question, Israel’s long-term security problem or Gaza’s future. Reconstruction remains minimal, more than 1.2 million people in Gaza still face acute hunger, and a durable political settlement remains elusive.
Human beings can continue counting the dead, missiles, retaliations and reasons for hatred. Anger can be passed from parents to children and vengeance from one generation to the next. The Middle East already knows where that road leads.
Or we can hold on to one almost painfully simple idea: the life of an Israeli civilian and the life of a Palestinian civilian do not need to compete for our compassion.
Marking the third anniversary, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said both that nothing could justify the atrocities of October 7 and that the suffering endured by Palestinians in Gaza must end. He called for the ceasefire to become permanent, for humanitarian assistance to enter at scale, for international law to be respected and ultimately for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace, security and dignity.
Three years later, words such as peace, coexistence and humanity can sound almost naive.
But what alternative is there?
October 7, 2023 must never be forgotten. The faces of those murdered that day must not disappear behind statistics and political arguments. But neither should the tens of thousands of Palestinians who died afterwards become an anonymous mass accepted as an inevitable consequence of history.
Remembering should never mean deciding whose tears matter more.
Three years after October 7, perhaps the only victory worth pursuing is a future in which Israeli and Palestinian children no longer have to inherit their parents’ dead.
