On October 7, 2023, 3,000 Gazans poured into Israel, destroying everything in their path. The impact is still being felt to this day.
Border communities became ghost towns. Schools and businesses emptied as Israelis mobilized to serve their country. Even as Israelis said goodbye to their loved ones in those first terrible weeks, the rockets never stopped. A year in, Israel is still caught between hostilities and healing, mourning and moving on.
However, Israelis have found hundreds of ways to contend with their grief. Some have created art. Others have plastered every wall they can find with tribute stickers. Some attend protests each week, channeling their sorrow into activism. Many have focused inward, dedicating themselves to growing their families and connecting with loved ones.
In numerous ways, October 7 changed Israeli society forever.
Human beings like frameworks; anything that helps make order from chaos. And in times like these, chaos is everywhere.
Most people are vaguely familiar with the five stages of grief. It’s tempting to believe that grief is linear, that once you graduate from one stage, you’ll seamlessly move onto the next, leaving the shellshock of those first awful days far, far behind. But, of course, that’s not how grief works.
Israelis are still stuck between the stages, hopscotching between denial, anger, bargaining, and depression — and then back again. Most haven’t arrived, yet, at the final stage: acceptance. That’s the moment that you fully realize and come to terms that your loved one isn’t coming back, the moment that you learn to live with their absence. The grief doesn’t go away, but you grow around it.
But what happens when your country is still fighting, when your partner is on the front line for months, leaving you to manage everything else by yourself? What happens when your neighbors, kids, and friends go off to serve their country and never come back, when your loved ones are still in captivity? How do you grieve when you are still living the pain of that day?
Stage one: Denial
Every Israeli remembers where they were on October 7, 2023. Whether at home or abroad, everyone remembers the sense of disbelief. This can’t be happening; there must be a mistake.
Helen Saudiyan, whose daughter, Sahar, was an Iron Dome operator, spoke with Unpacked about the day of the attack. Sahar shot down thousands of rockets and saved an untold number of lives before Hamas reached her.
“I see the alerts on TV, and I see that the alerts are coming in at an unreasonable pace. I was sure there was some kind of malfunction in the system,” Saudiyan said.
Doron Salomon barricaded himself for hours in his safe room in Kfar Aza. Just a few hundred yards away, his son Yuval was fighting off the men who had broken into his home. But eventually, Yuval’s texts tapered off into silence, leaving Doron – the patriarch, the smiling grandpa who was always in control – without answers for anyone, least of all himself.
“I don’t understand what’s happening. I hear like jets in the air. It turns out they’re not jets; they’re actually paragliders. Then the rocket sirens start. Don’t leave your safe rooms; don’t open the door for anyone; they’re speaking Hebrew. There’s a terrorist infiltration. It’s not clear how many or why or how,” Salomon said.
That disbelief echoed across the diaspora. Holiday celebrations turned muted as Jews around the world struggled to process the nightmare videos on their feeds.
Again, grief isn’t linear, so while many Israelis pretend they’ve gotten used to the horrible new status quo, it still has the power to shock. It could be forgotten for a minute or two that the soldiers are still fighting in Gaza, that a smiling baby boy turned one in captivity, that hundreds of thousands were still displaced from their homes. But then the memory of that day floods back in. With it comes all the shock, horror, and disbelief of those first few weeks. The sense that at any moment, everyone will wake up and find themselves back in the world we used to know: The world in which parents can hug their kids whenever they want, in which the Nova music festival was just a really fun party, and not a national nightmare where 360 people lost their lives, and another 40 were kidnapped to Gaza.
All of Israel is still struggling to figure out how: How a music festival, which was billed as a “celebration of unity and love,” turned into a massacre, how an army base could be overrun, how a sleepy community could be conquered, its homes set on fire, its people marched barefoot into hell. How could any of this happen?
Stage two: Anger
In December 2023, Unpacked released a video about the heartbreaking yet beautiful solidarity that Israelis showed one another after the worst day in their history. To be honest, we did that because we needed it: we were exhausted, in pain, and we needed something to celebrate. Despite the horror and the spiraling casualties and the all-consuming grief, those early months did sometimes serve up tiny, glittering moments of joy.
It helped to see the 15,000 volunteers who showed up every single day to serve their country. It helped to see fellow citizens, of all stripes, lining up for hours just to donate blood. It was heartening to see Israelis signing up in droves to host the displaced, visit mourning families, rescue pets whose owners were gone, and provide free therapy. One elderly man even spent his days ironing uniform after uniform for IDF soldiers. There was no task too small for a public that wanted to help in any way possible. Plenty of people are still volunteering, taking care of perfect strangers simply because they’re fellow Israelis.
But a year in, millions are grappling with their anger. We’re enraged that more than 100 of us have not yet come home. We’re livid that so many of us are still on the front lines, that October 7 happened at all.
But Israelis have found a way to channel that anger.
Yifat Calderon’s cousin, Ofer, and his two children were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz that day. Other relatives, including a grandmother and her granddaughter, did not survive.
“The two children came back after 52 days, and Ofer is still there, almost a year after the 7th of October. It’s even terrible that we’re here, that we’re standing here, and they’re not here with us. It’s a shame,” Calderon said. (Ofer was later released in the second ceasefire in February 2025)
Shame is a good word for it. Yifat, and so many others like her, believe that Israel’s leaders should be ashamed. She says the hostages should have come home already — all of them.
It’s not just the families of the stolen who are angry. It’s also the families of those who were cut down that day.
Roni Eshel was 19 years old when Hamas stormed her army base in the south of Israel on the morning of October 7. She was one of the first to identify that something was wrong. At 6:29 a.m., she transmitted a message to every base in the area: “Four people broke through the fence. Do you confirm? Two men are through the fence. They are armed. Do you confirm?”
“We still haven’t internalized the enormity of the catastrophe for all of us in the country, and now the shock of these recordings that just show the whole world and the entire nation the scope of the failure,” Roni’s father, Eyal, said. “Girls sat in a war room giving updates, and the whole country was in the deepest sleep because it was a holiday. Then you ask yourself, who were these girls reporting to? To themselves? Because in the end, they left us while they were alone.”
But you don’t need to be related to a bereaved family to be angry.
Hagit, one of the last stalwarts of the Israeli Left, has been protesting the government for years, but her rage has hardened in the months since October 7. When asked why she came to these protests specifically, she said, “Because [the government] should have brought them home the day they were abducted instead of starting a war. They could have used a measure of restraint, because it was clear that they wouldn’t return them.”
“Look, there was already a lead-up to this, in my opinion at least,” Hagit added. ”I know who’s leading this country. I see the actions happening here. It was rough. I think the whole idea of trust, values, and morality fell off. I don’t have a drop of trust in the people in charge. All they care about is their own political survival.”
Her rage is understandable. Who doesn’t look at the atrocities of October 7 and wanna scream? Some scream at the government, others at the deniers, and others at the trolls online who mock our pain. But some scream to God, to loved ones in Gaza, to loved ones who are gone, screaming at anyone who can give us an answer, who can get us a little bit closer to understanding why.
Stage 3: Bargaining
Most Israelis, regardless of their religion, believe in God. When your country has been in upheaval for a year, you end up holding a lot of negotiations with the Man Upstairs.
For some people, that bargaining worked. Some October 7 survivors have become significantly more religious since that horrible day. They believe that God saved them, and they’ve committed themselves to living a more observant life.
But that’s not the only kind of bargaining people do when they’re grieving. Sometimes, bargaining means going over each of our actions with a fine-tooth comb, looking for a reason. What if I had done something differently? What if I convinced them not to go to the festival? What if, what if, what if….
Bargaining can look a lot like driving yourself insane, enveloped by guilt and anxiety and self-punishment. On the other hand, it can look like taking action, even when you’re not sure it will do much. Sometimes, bargaining is just sheer stubbornness, the desire to change things because they have to change, because the alternative is too unbearable.
“Hope is a kind of life. I’m living because you have to live, and I’m holding on to something. It just cannot be that evil wins. It just can’t be,” Hagit said.
Much of what’s happening in Israeli society right now is a form of bargaining. It’s a contract made with the people who were lost. Israeli society didn’t manage to save them, so they’ll do everything they can to honor their memory, to make sure no one ever forgets.
Chaya Hexter, mother of Yakir, has lived in Israel for over 30 years.
“I knew when I made Aliyah and moved to Israel that my sons would have to serve in the army. But when I saw my son on October 7th in his uniform, and I’ve seen him in uniform many times, I knew that he had never been in battle before ever,” Chaya said.
“I’m still hearing stories from people all over the world who had met him, even for a short time, and the impact that he had on their lives, and he helped so many people. He was a good person. He wasn’t just a soldier. He had so many talents, and he was good at all of them. He was a leader, and then he turned into a hero.”
Yakir entered Gaza on November 4. Two months later, he and his best friend, David, were killed in an attack by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). The family’s grief was too immense to contain; it needed to go somewhere. Like so many other bereaved families, the Hexters began making stickers to commemorate their son.
“After numerous soldiers were killed, [there was] this campaign of making stickers in their memory and posting them all over the country. There’s a place to scan it so people can learn about who they were and what they did, so we don’t forget.”
You see these stickers everywhere in Israel, so many young, beautiful faces smiling from telephone poles, bus station walls, and car windshields. They say things like, “You are the sun in our lives,” or they have heartbreaking captions like, “In memory of the girl who always smiled.”
Yakir’s featured a quote of his: “Ayfoh hachiyuch?” “Where’s your smile?”
“When they left Gaza, they walked the entire length of Gaza from the ocean to the Israeli border,” Chaya said. “They walked out all throughout the night, hours and hours; I don’t even know how many hours. The sun started to rise, and Yakir turned to his commander and said, ‘Ron, where’s your smile?’ ‘Cause everyone was exhausted, they couldn’t take one more step. He just lifted the morale of everybody that he was with and then started to run the remaining few kilometers to the border. He ran all the way. Every soldier that was there told me, ‘We couldn’t even breathe, we couldn’t imagine putting our foot forward,’ and here he was running to the border.”
The tributes are everywhere. In the early months, activists set up empty Shabbat tables all over the world. There were 253 seats, each with a picture of a person who should be home with their family. There were teddy bears all over Tel Aviv, spray-painted red, their eyes and hands bound, each one symbolizing a child stolen from their bed. Now, the displays are simpler, consisting only of empty plastic chairs in every store, park, and synagogue.
No matter where you are in Israel, you cannot escape. The radio plays prerecorded messages from families to loved ones still held in Gaza, just in case they’re listening. The TV broadcasts the names of every casualty. There are books and documentaries, and soon even feature films.
Every event, from the Olympics to a kid’s gymnastics tournament to a graduation ceremony, features some kind of tribute. Students dedicate their school projects to understanding what happened that day. They want everyone to remember it could have been any of us, and they’re using every medium they can, from murals to sculpture to fashion. It’s art as activism.
It involves everyone in Israel. After all, it’s important because it acknowledges that grief takes many, many forms.
Stage 4: Depression
Depression is a shapeshifter. Some of its shapes are obvious to us. It’s easy to diagnose a person who can’t get out of bed, who reports feeling hopeless, apathetic, or like nothing feels good.
But depression can take other forms, too: Not eating or eating to excess, not sleeping or sleeping too much, not being able to work, or drowning yourself in tasks because it’s the only way to escape.
And yet, the more people Unpacked spoke to, the more we found the opposite to be true. Instead, we saw a renewed commitment to life.
Efrat moved to Israel from Vienna. On October 7, she was visiting her parents abroad. She could have stayed in Europe, where it was quieter, where she would have had her parents close by to help with the kids after her husband was called to the army reserves, but she refused to do that.
“Everyone in Vienna told me, ‘What are you doing? You have two toddlers. Stay in Vienna.’ All I thought was, ‘No. What are you talking about? We are Israelis. Like, where else would we be if not in Israel?'”
But going back home proved to be rough because Efrat became what is known in Israel as a miluima, one of the thousands of moms holding down the fort while their partners are on the front lines.
“Waking up alone, going to sleep alone. You think constantly about what’s happening with your husband. On the other hand, [you] play with your son. It’s like two different worlds that you have to live in,” Efrat said.
It’s happening all over the country, and it’s exhausting, so thousands upon thousands of Israelis have stepped in to help.
“I had lots of help from the community. Whether it’s food-wise, we got food. Kids just knocked on my door and said if they can help and babysit, or texted me, ‘Hey, can I come for an hour and help you?’” Efrat explained.
Despite the hardship, the Jewish community rallied around Efrat and all the other miluimas, so Efrat and her husband decided to grow the Jewish community.
“I remember; I think it was the first or the second time when my husband came to visit us. I said to him, ‘We have to have another child. We have to have more Jews in the world.'” Efrat said.
Even as people crumble inside, even as they struggle to hold down the fort entirely alone, they still do everything they can to honor life.
Doron Salomon has a message for all Israelis. His son Yuval is no longer with us, but Doron has no bitterness or hatred in his heart — quite the opposite.
“I have nothing else to say besides, live your life, well, with love, with unconditional love,” Doron said.
All over Israel, people know the name Aner Shapira. They know about the tall 22-year-old off-duty soldier who got a call early in the morning of October 7, when he was at a music festival with friends. All Israelis know that he rushed to the nearest shelter, which was crammed with 30 frantic people. All Israelis know what happened next.
They know that Aner protected those 30 people, that Hamas threw grenade after grenade into the shelter, and that he managed to toss them back out. They know that he saved at least eight people’s lives that way – at the cost of his own. And now, they know his music.
This is just one of the songs his family has put out since Aner was taken from them. It’s a lament – a call to end the divisions between Israelis, a call for unity, for peace, for love. It’s a unity he will never get to see. But despite their broken hearts, his parents are doing everything they can to make sure the world remembers their son.
And this is just a fraction of the ways that Israelis are honoring the memory of 10/7, the barest glimpse of their grief and their untouchable resilience.
Stage 5: Acceptance
Israel hasn’t arrived at the so-called “final stage” yet. Israelis cannot accept that the soldiers are still fighting, that over a hundred Israelis are still stuck in Gaza, that people around the world still dare to deny our pain. Today is not the day to talk about acceptance. But the Jewish people have survived thousands of years of suffering, and are still here, still breathing, living, remembering, creating, and hoping.
Our hearts are broken. But our spirits remain unbreakable: Now, and always.
