Grief and pain amid the echoes of Israel's 'war of resurrection'

Crowds gathered at the site of the Nova festival and across Israel to mourn victims of the 7 October Hamas attack, even as new fears grew of a spiralling regional conflict

- Andrew Roth RE’IM

One year ago, nearly 400 young Israelis were massacred at the site of the Nova music festival during the 7 October Hamas attack. As mourners gathered at the site of the festival to commemorate the victims on Monday, their sobs and prayers were punctuated by the sound of artillery and machine guns being fired by soldiers into nearby Gaza.

Perhaps no single scene across Israel more expressly exhibited the violence meted out against hundreds of civilians by Hamas, and the subsequent ferocity of the Israeli response against that organisation and millions of people inside of Gaza that has killed more than 41,500 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Just days before relatives gathered here, Israel sent tanks back across the border into northern Gaza for the first time in months and distributed leaflets telling the remaining population, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, to evacuate to the south of Gaza to avoid being caught up in a "new phase of the war." And on Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in near-messianic terms about a war that he has justified by pointing to the 1,200 victims of the Hamas attack and declared them a justification for an ever-expanding conflict that Israel is fighting on "seven fronts" across the Middle East.