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The families of hostages held in Gaza hold a silent protest to mark one year since the October 7 attack by Hamas during which their loved ones were taken hostage, in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 7, 2024.
Hamas and Hezbollah launch rocket attacks on anniversary of Oct. 7 massacre
As Israel marked the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, Hamas and Hezbollah both launched rocket attacks on heavily populated areas of the country, wounding at least two Israeli women, and forcing evening memorials to be scaled down in size over security concerns. Eighty-five rockets were fired at the coastal city of Haifa, the heaviest barrage on the coastal city since the start of the war. The Israeli military also reportedly intercepted a missile launched from a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen.
In response, Israel launched an attack in south Gaza and conducted what it described as “extensive” strikes on alleged Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, including in densely populated neighborhoods of the capital, Beirut. Over 2,000 Lebanese have now died in Israeli airstrikes, some 10,000 have been wounded, and approximately 1.2 million people — one in every five Lebanese — have fled their homes.
Around the world, people marked the grim anniversary with vigils and protests. Many major American universities, including Harvard, Columbia, NYU, and UCLA – sites of protests in the spring – saw large gatherings both to commemorate the victims of Oct. 7 and to protest Israeli military action.
What now? A year on from the attacks, which set in motion a cataclysm across the Middle East, the biggest short-term question is still if, when, and how Israel may respond to last week’s barrage of hundreds of Iranian ballistic missiles, and whether that response will pitch the two countries into a wider war.
For a look at seven key storylines one year after the Oct. 7 attacks, see here.
Smoke rises from an explosion in Gaza, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, near the Israel-Gaza border, as seen from Israel, September 9, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Oct. 7 Edition
1,200: Hamas launched terror attacks inside Israel and killed 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023 – making it the deadliest day in Israel’s 76-year history. The kibbutz of Be’eri, near the Supernova music festival, suffered the highest death toll with 332 lives lost. The militants targeted the festival, 19 kibbutzim, and five cooperatives, among other targets.
251: Hamas militants took 251 people, including civilians and Israeli security personnel, hostage on Oct. 7, taking them into Gaza. As of Sept. 1, 2024, 101 hostages remained in Gaza, according to Israeli sources cited by the UN. Sixty-four are believed to be alive, while 33 are confirmed dead (four of the hostages were taken before Oct. 7).
41,870: The number of Gazans killed in the war between Israel and Hamas now stands at 41,870, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. The number has been disputed by groups that peg it as either higher, due to an inability to locate people under the rubble, or lower, due to the inflation of numbers. The GHM also does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. According to Israeli authorities, as of Sept. 1, the number of dead includes 17,000 Hamas terrorists.
1,664: Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, 1,664 Israelis have been killed, including 706 soldiers, according to a report by the Institute for National Security Studies.
1,900: At least 1,900 Lebanese, including civilians, medics, and Hezbollah terrorists, have been killed since Oct. 8, 2023, according to Lebanese officials, and several thousand have been wounded.
1.9 million: UNRWA says 1.9 million people have been displaced in Gaza due to the war instigated by Hamas. 143,000 people have been displaced in Israel due to Hezbollah rocket bombardment, according to an INSS report, including 60,000 evacuated from the border with Lebanon.
1.2 million: Just over 20% of Lebanon’s 5.4-million-strong population – a whopping 1.2 million people – have been driven from their homes by the recent Israeli offensive, according to Lebanese officials.
38: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s popularity has risen since Israel launched its offensive against Hezbollah. According to Israel’s Channel 12, Netanyahu is the preferred candidate for prime minister over the centrist opposition leader, Yair Lapid, at 38% to 27% support. The latest poll gives his Likud Party a possible 25 seats, but that would not be enough to form a government with its current coalition partners.
An Israeli infantry soldier inside a Jewish home in Kibbutz Be’eri that was destroyed by Hamas in their October 7, 2023 infiltration of southern Israeli communities. This community was attacked by Hamas infiltrators who killed some 100 people out of 1000 who lived in this community on October 7, 2023.
Seven key consequences of the Oct. 7 attack
A year ago today, Hamas militants shot and paraglided their way out of the Gaza Strip and went on a rampage through southern Israel, murdering more than 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages.
The attack set off a geopolitical earthquake in a region that a top US official had described, just a week earlier, as “quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
The noise ever since has been deafening.
Israel responded by unleashing a ferocious air and ground campaign in Gaza that sought to destroy Hamas and liberate the hostages. About half of them have been freed, the majority of those in a prisoner swap deal. Ninety-seven hostages are still in Gaza.
Israeli forces have weakened Hamas as a fighting force in a campaign that has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to local, Hamas-run health authorities. The dead include thousands of children. Close to two million Gazans, or nearly 90% of the pre-war population, have been displaced from their homes, and Israel has faced accusations of war crimes, including genocide, in international courts.
Meanwhile, months of cross-border clashes with Iran-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon have recently escalated – Israel last week assassinated the group’s leader and launched an invasion of Lebanon.
Tensions between Israel and Iran are reaching a crescendo as well. Iran recently fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel, which has vowed to respond, potentially by striking Iranian oil facilities, in a move that could rock oil markets and the global economy.
We take a brief look at how the past year has shaped prospects for seven key players in this story:
1. The Palestinians. Their plight is most certainly back on the global agenda after years of being overlooked as Israel moved toward normalizing its relations with more Arab powers – especially Saudi Arabia – in deals that paid only lip service to eventual Palestinian statehood. Global sympathy for the Palestinian cause has risen, particularly among young people in the West. But Gaza has suffered immense destruction, and the occupation of the West Bank has only deepened over the past year. Support for a Palestinian state among Israelis, already waning in recent years, has plummeted, while the forces most hostile to that outcome in Israel are on a roll these days.
2. Benjamin Netanyahu. Before Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli prime minister was on the ropes, facing corruption trials and mass protests over his judicial reforms. Then, the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust occurred on his watch, cratering his support further. For months, he seemed to be on borrowed time, an unloved leader kept in power only by Israelis’ reluctance to change horses in mid-war. He faced criticism at home over failure to secure the release of more hostages, but also from far-right ministers who wanted to see even harsher reprisals in Gaza. Shifting the focus to defeating longtime foe Hezbollah, a policy 90% of Israelis support, has paid dividends: He is rising in the polls again. Just how far an emboldened Netanyahu is willing to go now is a big question in a region on fire.
3. Hamas. The terror group has lost thousands of its fighters and two of its most senior officials over the past year. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar may still be alive, likely confined to a tunnel beneath the rubble of Gaza. Still, he miscalculated if he thought that global pressure would force Israel to negotiate a cease-fire, or that Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel from the North would cause Netanyahu to ease up on Gaza in the South. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the idea of Hamas, as an ideology of armed resistance against Israel, has been defeated, especially after the destruction that the IDF has visited upon the Palestinians over the past year. Over the next year, it will be crucial to see if the remainder of Hamas can shape any aspect of a post-war Gaza and whether it reconstitutes itself in any way.
4. Iran. Did Iran miscalculate too? Surely in the days after Oct. 7, Tehran didn’t expect that a year later Israel would be going on an offensive like this, smashing Iran’s No. 1 proxy in the region (Hezbollah) and mulling a major strike on Iran itself. That puts Iran in a tricky spot. As the leader of the “axis of resistance” against Israel, it has to keep resisting via its proxies. But with those proxies getting rolled up by Israel now, “Iran is exposed,” says Cliff Kupchan, head of research at Eurasia Group. “Iran misjudged power dynamics and sentiment in Israel. The IDF killed Nasrallah and severely degraded Hezbollah. Iran’s forward deterrence is gone.” That, he says, means Iran is likely to lean more heavily into its nuclear program now. That program, of course, is something Netanyahu is famously eager to try to destroy.
5. United States. The Biden administration has been largely unwavering in its rhetorical, military, and financial support for Israel, although it has also occasionally angered Israel and Israel supporters by pushing – ineffectively – for a cease-fire, or by raising concerns about the civilian death toll in Gaza. Partisan splits over Israel’s action in Gaza won’t be central to the upcoming presidential election – it will be decided by concerns about the economy, abortion access, and immigration. But the issue could affect the vote at the very margins, with some progressives and Arab-American voters in key swing states pledging not to vote at all in protest of the Biden administration’s support for Israel. The outcome of the election itself will matter on the ground: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both strong supporters of Israel, but Trump would give Netanyahu a much freer hand in dealings with the Palestinians, with Hezbollah, and with Iran.
6. Russia. It certainly hasn’t hurt Vladimir Putin to see so much of the world’s attention drawn away from his invasion of Ukraine. And to the extent that the US gets wound into an intractable conflict in the Middle East, so much the better from his perch, especially if regional jitters push up oil prices. But the Kremlin has to be careful. If Israel severely weakens Hezbollah, it could shake things loose in Syria, where the group’s fighters are a major ground force for Russia’s protégé, Bashar Assad. And if a wider Israel-Iran war erupts, Moscow could get drawn more deeply into a messy situation than it likes – after all, Putin’s already fighting a war of his own closer to home.
7. The Arab world. Popular opinion is strongly critical of Israel and the US. That has been a particular challenge for regimes in Egypt and Jordan, which have peace treaties with Israel and are close partners of the US. In Jordan, for example, even in a recent tightly controlled election, Islamist opposition parties that support Hamas surged in the polls. Saudi Arabia, arguably the preeminent Arab power now, is warily watching as Israel-Iran tensions escalate. Saudi Arabia and Iran are longtime rivals, but ties have been improving recently, and Riyadh has no interest in a wider war as it tries to move ahead with an ambitious domestic economic and social modernization drive. But Israel may yet have other ideas.FILE PHOTO: A woman walks past a Blue and White party election campaign banner depicting its leader, Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz, alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the March 23 ballot, in Tel Aviv, Israel March 14, 2021.
Israel rescues hostages, Gantz resigns
In a daytime raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on Saturday, Israeli special forces rescued four hostages abducted by Hamas at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7. The group included Noa Argamani, 26, one of the most widely recognized hostages, whose mother Liora is suffering from late-stage brain cancer.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 274 Palestinians were killed in the operation, which saw special forces come under “under heavy fire” and respond with aerial bombardment. One special forces officer was killed.
The Gazan civilian death toll has drawn worldwide condemnation, with EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell describing the operation as “a massacre, a bloodbath.” A day earlier, US President Joe Bidencongratulated Israel on the rescue of the hostages, but US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan later acknowledged that “innocent people were killed” during the operation.
The rescue came on the June 8 deadline set by war cabinet member Benny Gantz, who had threatened to resign unless Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set out a plan for a “day-after strategy” for Gaza. The rescue delayed Gantz’s announcement until Sunday night when, as expected, he quit the government and pulled the support of his centrist party.
Is a cease-fire more elusive than ever? Gantz’s resignation leaves Netanyahu more dependent on the backing of ultra-nationalist parties, who are staunchly opposed to a deal. Hardline National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir says he will now demand greater say over government decisions, including in the war cabinet — bad news for those hoping for a cease-fire. As for Hamas, its leader Ismail Haniyeh said of the hostage rescue, “If the occupation believes that it can impose its choices on us by force, then it is delusional.”
UNRWA funding cuts threaten Lebanon's Palestinian refugees
GZERO went inside the Shatila Camp in Beirut, one of Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camps, to better understand what the loss of UNRWA funding would mean for the people who call it home—the teachers, doctors, and local government workers who rely on UNRWA to provide basic services, like education, healthcare, and clean water to residents. The agency says it has enough funds to last through June, but it will need to make some tough choices after that.
“The reason UNRWA still exists after 75 years is because there is no political solution,” says Dorothee Klaus, URWA’s Lebanon director, “It is time to find a solution for Palestinian refugees to live in dignity like everybody else.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
Gaza protests highlight the need to build cooperation vs. confrontation, says Eboo Patel
It’s time for college students to rethink how they protest, says Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America, a nonprofit that works with hundreds of campuses to foster healthier dialogue. In a wide-ranging interview with Ian Bremmer for the latest episode of GZERO World, Patel criticizes the confrontational culture on campuses, urging a shift from romanticizing conflict to embracing cooperation. He challenges the dichotomy of oppressors and oppressed, advocating for a more nuanced approach to diversity that resembles a potluck of ideas.
“We absolutely need to change the default setting on campuses from confrontation is romanticized to cooperation is the norm."
College campuses are actually the perfect venues for this kind of dialogue, Patel says, and professors and administrators can leverage their intellectual backgrounds to foster the kinds of productive dialogue that students need more than ever. Everything else, like demanding the disbanding of campus police, Patel says, is nothing more than a distraction.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
- US inching away from Israel on Gaza war ›
- Israel-Hamas war: Who is responsible for Gaza's enormous civilian death toll? ›
- Chaos erupts overnight on US campuses. What’s next for student protesters? ›
- How campus protests could influence the US presidential election ›
- Campus protests spill over into US political sphere ›
Covering Columbia's campus protests as a student and GZERO reporter
The past few weeks of student protests, counter-protests, and police activity at Columbia have been the tensest moments the University has seen in over 50 years. What’s it like to be a student and graduating senior during this historic moment?
When GZERO writer Riley Callanan began her senior year at Barnard, the women’s college within Columbia, she never expected it would end this way: thousands of student protesters, an encampment and takeover of an administrative building, the attention of the national news media, armed police officers swarming campus, and, ultimately, a canceled graduation ceremony. Now, as she tells colleague Alex Kliment on GZERO World, instead of senior galas and grad parties, Columbia students are having intense debates over the Israel-Palestine conflict, antisemitism, and free speech.
Callanan has been documenting it all—from the early protests on the academic quad to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson delivering on her library steps. GZERO correspondent Alex Kliment sat down with Callahan to hear more about what it’s like to be a college senior in 2024, what she saw during the protests, and what happens after graduation.“We absolutely need to change the default setting on campuses from confrontation is romanticized to cooperation is the norm."
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
- With summer looming, where will student protesters turn next? ›
- From the inside out: Is Columbia’s campus crisis calming down? ›
- Chaos on Campus: Speaker Johnson's visit fans the flames at Columbia as protests go global ›
- Columbia & Yale protests: What campus protesters want ›
- Campus protests spill over into US political sphere ›
Campus protests over Gaza: Now what?
Something is happening here—on college campuses, that is. But what do we make of protests that turn violent, like what we saw at UCLA or even some of the Columbia conflicts? In a wide-ranging interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World, Eboo Patel, founder of the nonprofit Interfaith America, talks about his work on hundreds of college campuses to find common ground. His core message is simple: "Cooperation is better than division."
Patel advocates for a shift in focus from confrontation to cooperation on campuses, suggesting that universities should foster environments of civil discourse. He proposes initiatives like teach-ins and dialogues to explore constructive solutions to complex issues. "I think the problem here, the thing that universities could control, which I think that they have gotten wrong in many cases over the course of the past five years, is the default mode has been set to confrontation, not cooperation."
It's true that finding common ground can be easier said than done when tensions are high. But as Patel points out, the majority of college campuses have been able to debate the Israel-Gaza war without the kind of chaos or violence we've seen on certain campuses. "The media, for good reasons, covers planes that crash and not planes that land," Patel explains.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
- From the inside out: Is Columbia’s campus crisis calming down? ›
- Crisis at Columbia: Protests and arrests bring chaos to campus ›
- Chaos erupts overnight on US campuses. What’s next for student protesters? ›
- How campus protests could influence the US presidential election ›
- Campus protests spill over into US political sphere ›