Three years after Oct. 7: Israelis reckon with trauma, loss and ongoing fear

Three years have passed since the morning of October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a coordinated assault across southern Israel that would reshape the country's sense of safety. In the hours that followed, more than 1,200 Israelis were killed. Among them were dozens of Americans who had been in the country—some living there, others visiting for work or family. Another 250 people were taken hostage, pulled across the border into Gaza, their fates unknown to families who would spend years waiting for answers that, for many, never came.

Wednesday marked the third anniversary of that day. In Tel Aviv and across Israel, the weight of those three years sits visibly on the landscape and in the faces of those who lived through it. The immediate shock has long since faded, but what has replaced it is something more persistent: a kind of ambient dread that has become woven into daily life. People who were in the south on October 7, who heard the sirens or saw the smoke or lost someone they loved, carry that day with them still.

For survivors, the passage of time has not brought closure so much as a different kind of reckoning. The trauma is no longer acute—it does not arrive as a sudden rupture each morning—but it has become chronic. Those who were taken hostage and later released speak of a fractured sense of time, of months that feel both impossibly long and somehow compressed into a single moment. Those who lost family members describe a world that has reorganized itself around absence. The ordinary rhythms of life—going to work, seeing friends, planning for the future—continue, but they happen against a backdrop of something irretrievable.

The fear that grips many Israelis is not abstract. It is rooted in the specific knowledge that the country's security, which many had believed to be robust, proved permeable. Families who lived near the Gaza border or in communities that were directly attacked have had to decide whether to stay or leave, whether to rebuild or relocate. Some have chosen to remain, driven by a combination of stubbornness, attachment to place, and a refusal to be displaced by violence. Others have left, unable to shake the feeling that it could happen again.

Three years on, the hostage crisis remains unresolved for many families. Some of the 250 people taken on October 7 were released in exchanges or rescued by Israeli forces. Others remain in Gaza, their status unclear. The families of those still missing have become a visible presence in Israeli public life—they hold vigils, they speak to media, they push the government to continue negotiations. Their grief is compounded by uncertainty, by the knowledge that their loved ones may still be alive somewhere, or may not be, and that they may never know for certain.

The broader Israeli society has also been shaped by the attack and its aftermath. The war that followed has displaced tens of thousands of people from communities in the north and south. The economy has been strained by the mobilization of reserves and the ongoing military operations. Schools have had to reckon with how to teach children who lived through the attack, who lost classmates or whose parents were killed. Mental health services have been overwhelmed with people seeking help for trauma, anxiety, and depression.

Yet there is also a kind of resilience visible in how Israelis have moved forward. Businesses have reopened. Cultural events have resumed. People have returned to work and school and the ordinary business of living. But this resilience is not the same as recovery. It is more like learning to function while carrying a weight that does not get lighter. The fear remains—not paralyzing, but present. The loss remains—not consuming every moment, but never entirely absent.

As the third anniversary arrived, Israelis were forced once again to confront what October 7 meant and what it continues to mean. For some, it was a day of remembrance and grief. For others, it was a day of anger or determination. For many, it was simply another day in a life that has been permanently altered by violence and loss, a life in which the future feels less certain than it once did.