Commemoration and opinion · Originally published October 8, 2026
October 7, three years later: remembering is not enough.
JewsyNews Editorial | Commemoration and opinion
October 7 was yesterday.
Remembering it does not expire at midnight.
Three years ago, Hamas-led attackers killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 people hostage into Gaza.
Those numbers belong to people, not to a debate scorecard.
They belong to families whose lives still carry the break between before and after.
What is different this year.
This was the first October 7 anniversary with no hostages remaining in Gaza.
The last hostage’s remains were recovered in January 2026.
Everyone being returned is not the same as everyone coming home alive.
For surviving hostages and bereaved families, the end of that wait does not erase what happened.
The ceasefire that began on October 10, 2025, halted the heaviest fighting.
It has not meant an end to attacks, deaths or civilian suffering.
Gaza remains devastated, and Palestinians are still living with the consequences of the war.
Did this year feel quieter?
Avi Cohen asked that question after finding that fewer reminders of the anniversary seemed to reach him this year.
Not to take a shot at a community or an organizer, but to ask whether others felt it too.
The change in Israel was real, though it was not silence.
JTA reported that about 50,000 people gathered at Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park on October 7.
A year earlier, 48 yellow chairs hung above that same stage for the hostages still in Gaza.
This year, with none remaining there, the ceremony’s emphasis shifted toward remembrance and demands for an investigation.
The urgent call to bring them home had changed.
The need to remember had not.
If the day felt quieter around us, that is worth talking about without assuming nobody commemorated it.
Bringing everyone back must not become a reason to let the anniversary slip out of view.
JTA’s account of the memorial and its changed emphasis
Grief does not require us to forget responsibility.
Our position is plain: Hamas bears responsibility for launching the October 7 massacre and the war it set in motion.
That responsibility does not stop at Israel’s border.
In our view, Hamas also carries moral responsibility for the Palestinian lives destroyed in the catastrophe that followed.
Those who celebrate the massacre while claiming to stand for Palestinian life cannot wash their hands of its consequences.
Cheering the attack and mourning the suffering it helped unleash are not separate moral accounts.
This is our judgment about moral responsibility, not a finding about who caused each individual death or injury.
Every specific allegation still needs evidence, and every party remains responsible for its own conduct.
Palestinian civilians are not Hamas, and their deaths are not something to celebrate.
Neither are Israeli deaths.
One standard.
We reject the double standard that turns the people attacked on October 7 into the aggressors while excusing or celebrating those who attacked them.
Calling the massacre resistance does not change what was done to the people killed or abducted.
Supporting Palestinian rights does not require defending Hamas.
Remembering Israeli victims does not require denying Palestinian suffering.
Both things can be true.
And neither makes celebrating October 7 acceptable.
Israel has the right to exist and to protect its people.
That right and the duty to protect civilians are not opposites.
We are still here.
Jewish life is more than the violence directed at it.
We remember the murdered, honor those who survived, and stand with the families whose grief does not follow a calendar.
We also keep learning, building, helping one another and making room for the next generation.
Our story does not end with what was done to us.
Three years later, that is part of what remembering must mean.