(JTA) — TEL AVIV – As the sun dipped over Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park and families of Hamas’ victims and hostages began trickling in for an Oct. 7 memorial, a siren blared, warning of a missile fired from Yemen that forced everyone to the ground, their hands shielding their heads.
It was a stark reminder that the war begun a year ago was far from over.
The event — organized as a counterpoint to the official state-led ceremony, which many of the grieving families boycotted — was supposed to be much larger. The 50,000 tickets allotted for the event were reserved within hours of their release, but due to wartime restrictions on large gatherings, attendance was limited to press and victims’ families.
The scaled-back audience — and a larger crowd viewing from all over the world by livestream — heard musical performances from a host of celebrities, political outrage from families who feel abandoned by Israel’s government and chilling testimony from Oct. 7 survivors.
Hamas's use of sexual violence
In a video broadcast at the event, Yuval Sharvit Trabelsi, who survived the Nova massacre but lost her husband Mor there, revealed for the first time that she witnessed rape while trying to evade Hamas terrorists.
“We saw murder, kidnappings, but the hardest of them all was rape,” she said. “I have never heard screams for help like the ones I heard from that woman.”
She went on to recount how she smeared herself with her husband’s blood so that the terrorists would think she was dead. In all, more than 360 people were killed at the Nova festival.
As on Oct. 7 last year, a Hamas-fired rocket had triggered sirens in Tel Aviv earlier in the day, a sign that the terror group still poses a danger after a yearlong campaign by the Israeli military to eliminate it. But Linda Trabelsi, Mor’s mother, said the threat of rockets didn’t deter her from attending the memorial service.
“Not coming wasn’t an option,” she told JTA. But she said the anniversary was not her hardest day.
“No, Oct. 7, 2023, was the hardest day,” she said. “And after that? Every day since.” But she noted that September had been especially difficult, as it included both Mor’s birthday and what would have been his first wedding anniversary.
Many families of victims and hostages blame the government for failing to prevent the Hamas attack, when thousands of terrorists stormed Israel’s southern border en masse, killing some 1,200 people, abducting more than 250 to Gaza and perpetrating the worst one-day attack in Israel’s history. And in the year since the attack, many hostage families say the government could have — and should have — done more to secure their freedom.
“Instead of standing here in multitudes as a united people of Israel, we wait for the next siren,” said co-organizer Yonatan Shamriz, the brother of Alon Shamriz, who was taken captive and later killed by Israeli soldiers in a case of mistaken identity.
“Instead of a state investigative commission being formed to investigate this colossal failure, we are left asking the questions ourselves, without getting any answers,” he said. “There is no personal example, no vision, no leadership, no accountability.”
Shamriz’s anger was reflected in the split-screen reality of the day: In contrast to the Tel Aviv event, the official state ceremony was prerecorded weeks ago and featured speeches by the leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom the hostage families blame for not rescuing their loved ones from the tunnels of Gaza.
There is broad Israeli support for an intensified effort to release the hostages. A survey released on Monday by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 62% of Israelis said freeing the captives should be the main goal of the war, and most said the war in Gaza should be ended, in part to avoid endangering the hostages’ lives.
But Netanyahu focused his speech on defeating Hamas, which he listed first among the war’s aims, and vowed to continue the fight.
“We mustn’t stop the war prematurely,” he said. “As long as the enemy threatens our existence and the peace of our country, we will continue to fight. As long as our hostages are still in Gaza, we will continue to fight. We will not forsake any of them. I will not give up. As long as our citizens have not returned to their homes safely, we will continue to fight.”
Doron Weiss, who attended the Tel Aviv memorial in honor of his nephew, captive soldier Matan Angrest, also voiced anger at Israel’s leadership. Last month, his sister, Anat Angrest, played a recently unearthed audio clip of her son speaking from Gaza — the first sign of life since his abduction.
“I’m finished with tears. We’ve been living this hell for a year. We know our leaders are not doing everything they can to release them, and it stings,” Weiss told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Several Jewish communal leaders also attended the Tel Aviv event, including William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America.
Daroff, who was leading a solidarity mission, focused his rebuke not on Netanyahu but on Israel’s allies in the wake of the attack.
“Our allies weren’t there standing with us at the end of the day. As Jews we can only really count on Jews,” he said. “When Israel bleeds, American Jews bleed and when Israel cries American Jews cry. That’s become a standard since Oct. 7.”
British-Israeli Gaby Young Shalev, whose brother Nathanel Young, a soldier, was killed in action on Oct. 7, said today was the “first day it really hit” her.
She described the months following her brother’s murder as a whirlwind of otherwise happy life events, including her parents’ aliyah, two of her siblings giving birth, and the arrival of her own twins.
“And even though we speak about Nat every day, talking about projects and ways we can commemorate him, it’s almost like a distraction from the truth,” she said. “Then, at these kinds of events, when people send messages and send their support, you kind of realize this is actually real. It makes you realize the extent of it, and the fact that there are thousands of other families going through the same thing is just even more tragic.”
She added, “Every time I see another fallen soldier’s name, it’s hard, knowing more families are going to go through the same cycle. Especially when they’ve served quietly in Gaza for months, only to fall after all that.”
Yigal Cohen took to the stage and recounted how his daughter, a surveillance soldier at the Nahal Oz base, was “murdered barefoot, in her pajamas.”
“The blood of our daughters cries out to us from the earth. We cannot be silent. We will not leave, we will not forget, and we will not grow weary,” he said.
At the conclusion of his speech, in a symbolic gesture calling for the release of the five surveillance soldiers still held captive in Gaza, he released five yellow balloons into the air.
A common refrain from Israelis — and especially hostage families — is that they are still living the hell of last Oct. 7. One year later, that anguish that was evident at the ceremony in Tel Aviv.
“Tal’s children, Neve and Yahel, keep asking: Where’s Dad? When will he come back? When Dad comes back, will he be very old?” said Nitza Korngold, mother of hostage Tal Shoham. “In which country are these the questions a 9-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl ask?”