What Oct. 7 didn’t change

Hamas’s attack set in motion a year of violence that ended with a return to a familiar equilibrium

By David Ignatius

When Hamas burst through the Gaza fence at 7:43 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, they turned the Middle East upside down. The vaunted Israeli military was unprepared and vulnerable as Hamas stormed through Israeli settlements and military bases, butchering people at will. The Israeli Superman seemed to have lost his cape.Sign up for Shifts, an illustrated newsletter series about the future of work“Where’s the IDF?” frightened Israelis asked as they waited for the Israel Defense Forces to arrive. One of Israel’s top security officials told me the following month that the nation was so traumatized that it couldn’t make good decisions about its security. But Israel had more time to work with, and a stronger national will, than it appeared in those first weeks.

A year later, the shape of the Middle East is indeed different, but not in the way that most observers would have predicted. The military power of Hamas is hobbled, and its remaining fighters hide in an underground lair that increasingly resembles a dungeon. Hezbollah, the most ferocious of Iran’s proxies, is reeling after the decapitation of its leadership. Iran has tried to retaliate, but Israeli defenses stop most of its missiles and drones.

This year has reminded us that warfare is about unspeakable violence. Etched in my memory is a video of a Hamas fighter joyously telephoning his mother in Gaza to boast how many Jews he had killed; I recall, too, a senior Israeli officer blandly insisting to me that the IDF was limiting civilian casualties, even as the world saw images of dead Palestinian children in Gaza, day after day. Israel restored deterrence but amid a field of tens of thousands of dead and several million displaced civilians.Follow David IgnatiusFollowThe power equation in the Middle East has changed over the past year. That’s what the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have told the White House in recent days. Israel is up, Iran is down, and the moderate Arabs, no matter what they say in public, appear to be content. 

The Arab states have diplomatic ties to Iran, but during this year of war they have continued to operate a joint air-defense system with Israel. Saudi officials tell the White House that they still hope to pursue normalization with Israel, when the hurricane of war has passed.The outcome of war can seem inevitable in retrospect. Historians tell us the Confederacy could never have hoped to outlast the industrial might of the Union. 

Similarly, we know in hindsight that Imperial Japan could not have sustained the momentum of its surprise Pearl Harbor attack and that Soviet communism would collapse of its own corruption and incompetence.But those outcomes were purchased in blood, day by day. So, too, with Israel’s Gaza and Lebanon wars. And over the past year, with Hamas and Hezbollah hidden in dense urban areas, it was Palestinian and Lebanese civilians who paid the most terrible price.Human suffering can’t be quantified, but some statistics convey the scale of this disaster. 41,689 Palestinians have died in Gaza and 96,625 have been injured, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which has ties to Hamas. 

The United Nations says that 1.9 million Gazans, 90 percent of the population, have been displaced. The World Bank estimates that more than 60 percent of residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The United Nations calculates that in Israel, more than 1,200 Israelis have been killed and 5,400 have been injured. The United Nations calculates that 346 Israeli soldiers have died in Gaza and 2,297 have been injured. Since the beginning of the Israel-Gaza war, 1,664 Israelis have been killed, of which 706 were soldiers; 17,809 Israelis were wounded and about 143,000 people were evacuated from their homes, according to a September Israeli survey quoted by the Jerusalem Post.In Lebanon, more than 1 million people have been displaced, according to U.N. estimates. Israeli airstrikes there have killed more than 1,000 Lebanese and injured more than 6,000, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, in what may be just the early stages of that war.

The agony for Palestinian civilians in Gaza has been, for most of us, a collection of horrifying snapshots: Wounded children cradled in their parents’ arms, or stretchers being carried through shattered buildings. A personal glimpse of this horror came in 48 installments of a Gaza diary by “Ziad,” a 35-year-old Palestinian, published by the Guardian newspaper over the first six months of the war.Although Ziad’s full identity is not disclosed, his chronicle of the war is believable to me because the details are so ordinary: The impossibility of sleep amid the sound of explosions; the difficulty of caring for pets; the degrading lack of personal hygiene; the sense of meaninglessness; the fear of death. During the first two weeks of war, the price of renting a generator increased eightfold, as did the cost of a taxi ride, according to the diary. Gaza was a box, and Ziad and his family were trapped.The Palestinian diarist wrote that he fled his home in Gaza City in the first days of the war and then had to move two more times in the first two weeks. “I am losing track of time,” he says of the sleepless early days. “It’s okay to feel scared,” he tells a young relative. He wonders what his gravestone would say if he died during this “horrendous period” and draws a blank. 

A young member of his family asks what superpower he would choose, if he lived in a comic-book world. “I want the superpower of being normal, living a mundane life and discussing everyday topics.”The Biden administration this year has been an eager but stunningly unsuccessful peacemaker. That wasn’t for lack of effort. CIA Director William J. Burns and National Security Council Middle East Director Brett McGurk made perhaps a dozen mediation trips to the region, aided by Egyptian and Qatari officials.But the Biden team’s efforts mostly proved futile. This wasn’t Henry Kissinger’s version of shuttle diplomacy. 

The Hamas decision-maker Yahya Sinwar was in a tunnel under Gaza, having taken the enclave into the horror of war, Sinwar preferred martyrdom to compromise. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to be interested in a cease-fire and hostage deal, but his lodestar was his own political survival.Opinions on the Israel-Gaza warNextOpinionWhat Oct. 7 didn’t changeOpinionIsrael’s Oct. 7 counterpunchOpinionOct. 7 will rock colleges. 

The appropriate response is clear.OpinionHasan Nasrallah is gone. But the threat of Hezbollah remains.OpinionHasan Nasrallah chose his own fateOpinionWhy answer prayers with ridicule?OpinionA new kind of war is unfolding in LebanonOpinionA vanishing hope for peace in the Holy LandOpinionHezbollah device attacks: Is this a prelude to war, or an alternative?OpinionThe ominous implications of the pager attack against HezbollahOpinionPalestinian prime minister:

A day-after plan for GazaOpinionI was a captive of Hamas. After I was freed, I was imprisoned by online tro...OpinionThe U.S. urges restraint in the Mideast, but girds for a possible fightOpinionBiden scrambles to defuse the ticking Iran-Israel time bombOpinionA detainee-abuse scandal erupts just when Israel can least afford itOpinionThe first clean-up job for Harris is Biden’s horrible Gaza policyOpinionThe UAE tries to pull off an ‘Abraham Redux’ in GazaOpinionWhat’s holding up a Gaza cease-fire?OpinionNetanyahu’s rivals tack toward a Gaza ‘day after’ without himOpinionI’ve never seen Israelis as gloomy as they are todayNetanyahu’s oscillating fortunes have punctuated the war. He was an outcast a year ago, deeply unpopular within his country and scorned by some commentators as the worst prime minister in Israeli history. 

Netanyahu had said in 2011 his ambition was to “secure the life of the Jewish state and its future.” To the tens of thousands who were demonstrating against him on the streets of Tel Aviv, he was achieving the opposite. But Netanyahu held on, like a man dangling from the edge of a skyscraper, and by last week even his critics in Israel were applauding the destruction of Hezbollah.Israel regained its footing over the past year by waging a relentless campaign of retaliation for the horror and shame of Oct. 7. 

If there was one consistent theme, other than the resilience of Israel’s military and intelligence services, it was the lack of clear Israeli thinking about what would come next. Netanyahu ignored planning for the “day after” in Gaza and is making the same mistake now as the IDF shatters Lebanon.Perhaps Israel’s sword of vengeance has broken the power of Iran and its boldest proxies, as Netanyahu and his supporters seem to hope. But this is the Middle East. A more likely outcome is that, at a cost of so many thousands of dead, this war has restored the old paradigm of a strong Israel that can crush its enemies — until the next round.

Perhaps the saddest legacy of this war will be that it could so easily happen again. We all know the adage about those who don’t learn from history. When we see the hardened faces of Israelis, Palestinians and Lebanese, we know that many of them are thinking about the next conflict, even as they fight this one. The displaced Gazans, the stunned Hezbollah fighters, aren’t likely to forget. And in the Middle East, memory is an addictive drug, and a poison.