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Just off the main road, in sight of southern Lebanon, builders tap away at concrete blocks of a half-built house, the sun merciless as it beats down.
Equipped with its very own bomb shelter, a young family was preparing to move into the home in Kibbutz Matzuva, northern Israel. But Ishay Efroni, head of security for the regional council covering the kibbutz, told Newsweek: “When they move here, I’m not going to sleep.”
A few months ago, Efroni had given the builders permission to resume work on the property, just a mile-and-a-half from the Lebanese border. The family should move in within two months, Efroni said when Newsweek visited in mid-September.
Although deeply worried for their safety, Efroni said, he is anxious to get residents back to the north after nearly a year away from their homes.
Weeks after Newsweek‘s tour of the kibbutz, the prospect of them unpacking their belongings in northern Israel seems more distant than ever.
Matzuva and its roughly 1,000 residents were evacuated shortly after Gaza-based Palestinian militant group Hamas launched its October 7 attacks, killing around 1,200 people and taking over 250 hostages. Israel then launched its war in Gaza, vowing to eradicate Hamas.
AP Photo/Ariel Schalit
The bombardment and ground operations have devastated Gaza. Hamas-run health authorities there say over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s campaign, and the international community has sounded alarm bells over humanitarian emergencies facing displaced Gazans.
Israel’s military has also exchanged fire with Lebanon-based, Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah almost the entire time, with Hezbollah saying it was acting in solidarity with Hamas.
Conflict has intensified in recent weeks, with Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and other senior officials killed in strikes by Israel, which is also believed to be behind the exploding pager and walkie-talkie attacks that killed at least 37 people and injured more than 3,000.
Ellie Cook
As of September 26, near-constant firing across Israel’s northern border had displaced an estimated 200,000 people in southern Lebanon and upward of 60,000 people in northern Israel. Officials there say the current situation cannot go on.
“Eleven months, nearly a year—what changed?” Efroni said. “Nothing.”
There has, however, been a “major change” in the mentality of Israelis in the north over the past 12 months, said Sarit Zehavi, a former intelligence officer and retired lieutenant colonel in Israel’s military who now runs the Alma Center, a research organization focused on Israel’s northern border.
With Hezbollah just 6 miles away—the range of the group’s lethal anti-tank guided missiles—and tensions rising, they fear a repeat of October 7 but in the north. “Can you tell them to live next to Hezbollah now?” Zehavi said, speaking to journalists at the center, some seven miles from the border.
“There is no reason that we would take the chance that there will be another massacre.”
Pushing For Return of Israel’s Hostages
October 7 hangs heavy in the air across Israel, relegating any kind of social recovery there, and with its neighbors, far out of reach. “We are still in the trauma,” Michael Milshtein, expert in Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University and retired head of the Palestinian Affairs department of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence body, told Newsweek. “I don’t think we are able to cure ourselves, or think about reconstruction or coexistence.”
This is certainly true for the families of the hostages. At the time of writing, 101 remain in Gaza. More than 100 were brought back during a brief ceasefire in November last year, and Israeli military operations have sporadically rescued a handful of hostages or recovered bodies of those killed in captivity.
Nobody involved in trying to get them released thought the process would last more than a few weeks, said Daniel Shek, a former Israeli diplomat and part of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum—a civilian, volunteer-led effort to return the hostages.
JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty
A year on, “the worst enemy of these people are obviously the captors, who are keeping them in the tunnels of Hamas,” Shek told reporters at the organization’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. “But the second worst enemy is forgetfulness. We will not allow these people to be forgotten.”
“It’s been almost a year, and I cannot describe what the families are going through,” said Colette Avital, a former Israeli ambassador to Portugal and member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, who is also involved with the Forum. “We need to put as much pressure as possible. Because time is running out. We don’t know honestly how many of them are still alive.”
Suffering Across Israel and Gaza’s Borders
While the fates of the remaining hostages are unknown, aid organizations are clear: the picture inside the Gaza Strip for the millions of displaced Gazans is bleak.
“There is no single word that can describe the past year,” Sondos Alashqar, a program assistant with the U.K.-based Medical Aid for Palestinians organization—which is working with emergency medical teams inside Gaza—told Newsweek.
Gaza has been largely destroyed by IDF strikes that Israel said aimed to take out Hamas’ infrastructure and commanders. “I’m not entirely sure that people grasp or understand the level of destruction that Gaza has endured over the past one year,” Juliette Touma, communications director for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, told Newsweek.
Humanitarian bodies have consistently reported a debilitating lack of water, food, medical care, vital hygiene supplies and other essentials reaching the territory’s uprooted population, many of whom have been forced to relocate several times.
During at least one point in the war, people in Gaza had no choice but to eat animal feed to survive, said Alashqar. Israeli officials have said repeatedly that aid is flowing into Gaza and have dismissed reports of hunger in the territory.
MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/Getty
“People leave everything behind and just go and have to start from scratch over and over again,” Touma said. Rain from mid-September caused flooding, meaning tents many are forced to live in were swept away. Residents of Gaza then become more vulnerable to seasonal diseases that there is scant medicine to treat, Touma added.
“We sleep in tents—an experience we never dreamed of, not even for fun,” said Alashqar, who is sheltering in central Gaza after fleeing Gaza City. A heavily pregnant colleague, Alashqar recounted, gave birth amid an evacuation from southern Gaza, then returned with an hours-old child “to a tent while it was raining heavily, instead of a secure home.”
“The past year has been nothing short of catastrophic for Palestinians in both human and political terms,” Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and director of its Program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs, told Newsweek.
“It is impossible to overstate the scale [of] death and destruction in Gaza, which is at once the deadliest event and the largest forced displacement of Palestinians in their modern history.”
Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty
At one point, UNRWA was housing more than one million people in schools, clinics and warehouses not designed for humans to live in, Touma said. “This war has been like nothing we’ve ever seen in the history of this United Nations agency,” Touma said. “It’s a place not fit for humans.”
Aid agencies operating in the region described crippling difficulties in planning the provision of aid and maintaining logistics chains for funneling aid into Gaza. They said areas have become difficult or impossible to reach at various points in the past year.
The organizations also point to the high number of deaths of humanitarian workers, many of whom hail from communities directly impacted by the fighting, or attacks on their facilities and convoys. Sigrid Kaag, the U.N.’s senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, told the BBC in mid-September that Gaza was “the most unsafe place in the world to work.”
“It has been a year of suffering,” said Tommaso Della Longa of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which includes nearly 200 smaller organizations. “We think that we see the worst, and the day after, there is something even worse,” Della Longa told Newsweek.
Organizations operating under the IFRC across the region have lost at least 27 members since last October, Della Longa said.
According to Touma, at least 224 UNRWA staff have been killed. It is “beyond sad,” Touma said, and “very hard to overcome as an agency, because we lost emergency workers, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, logisticians, security personnel, teachers, social workers.”
UNRWA came under fire after the U.N. said it had investigated 19 cases where its staff were accused of being involved in the October 7 attacks. In early August, the U.N. said it had fired nine staff members where “the evidence was sufficient to conclude that they may have been involved in the 7 October attacks.” Touma told Newsweek the nine sackings had “no impact on our work” as a team of 30,000 people.
Aid organizations stress that the priorities are an immediate ceasefire, the return of the remaining hostages and getting aid to Gaza. Until then, they say, there is little prospect for improving the desperation of the situation for around two million Gazans.
“Everyone else around the world moves forward,” said Alashqar. “Their children live in proper homes, receive a good education and grow up in a better environment. Meanwhile, in Gaza, time stands still, yet we continue to age, along with our children. Life moves on, but our time remains frozen.”
“I can only describe the past year as if we were living in limbo—neither in the sky nor on the ground.”
Developing Stronger Defenses for Israel
The year of war in Gaza—and the escalating conflict with Hezbollah—has been propped up by Israel’s defense industry. The country’s defense officials told Newsweek that there has been a “growing recognition” in recent years that Israel needs to shore up its ability to produce defense equipment domestically, but this sharpened from October 2023.
Ellie Cook
In the past year, the officials said, the defense ministry has placed “significant orders with local companies.” The move toward producing and developing technology inside Israel covers all aspects of the military, defense officials said.
In practice, this means “all hands on deck, 24 hours a day,” a spokesperson for state-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems told Newsweek.
Shortly after October 7, around a fifth of its workforce were pulled away into military service, the company said. Since January, Rafael has recruited more than 1,000 employees, a spokesperson said, with plans in place to recruit a further 2,000 by the end of 2024. A separate industry source said “thousands” of personnel are being recruited across the defense industry.
Elbit Systems announced several new contracts with the defense ministry recently. In August, the Israeli defense contractor said it will build a manufacturing facility to produce $340 million of ammunition for the ministry over 10 years. “It’s quite obvious the company will continue to grow quite rapidly in the coming years,” CEO Bezhalel Machlis told Reuters.
Israeli defense and industry sources are keen to stress that the defense firms and government are balancing upping production of existing systems with the need to keep ahead of the curve. The government is tipping “significant resources” into research and development for next-generation technologies, defense officials said.
The Iron Beam—Rafael’s pioneering high-energy laser weapon system primarily developed to intercept drones—is still expected to be ready by the end of 2025, Newsweek understands.
The industry has been tasked with expanding air defense production, one industry source said, attributing this not only to Israel’s needs, but also to a global shift in how important such stocks are considered. The war in Ukraine, with Kyiv repeatedly calling for more air defenses, has contributed to this surge.
A different industry source said there was “definitely” a spike in interest in Israeli-made air defense systems, including from other nations.
With Hezbollah sending cheap drones over the border, the likes of the Iron Dome and its expensive interceptor missiles are not always the best solution for shooting down incoming uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). “We have a challenge…locating and shooting down those drones,” said Lieutenant Colonel Dotan Razili, speaking to the media in Mitzpe Hila, around five miles from the Lebanon border. “It’s a challenge for the Western world. In Ukraine, they use other weapons systems, but it is still a challenge.”
Asked if the northern forces have enough low-tech solutions for Hezbollah drones, Razili said: “Not as much as we’d like.” An Israeli industry source said all defense companies in Israel were working toward a solution for inexpensive drone attacks. Another said this may include looking back at older systems.
Reevaluation of Israeli Security
Israel’s intelligence and security services are also still reeling from October 7, squarely blamed for failing to stop the attacks. Former Israeli intelligence officers say the information was there but the interpretation of it was not. “The accurate term that we should use is not a reevaluation but earthquake,” said Milshtein, adding that Israeli intelligence agencies have spent months in the “deepest crisis.”
JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty
High-profile resignations over the failures included Major General Aharon Haliva, the then-head of the IDF’s military intelligence unit, in April. “I carry that black day with me ever since, day after day, night after night. I will carry the horrible pain of the war with me forever,” Haliva said in a statement. In mid-September, the head of the IDF’s secretive Unit 8200 intelligence unit, Yossi Sariel, resigned.
It’s still hard to unpick how Israel’s security agencies and military intelligence fell so out of alignment, said a former Mossad official. They told Newsweek that on the night of the attacks, dozens of new telephones lit up in Gaza but the alert wasn’t raised—just one example of intelligence being brought to the attention of high-up officials but then disregarded, they claimed.
Several former Israeli intelligence officials said the security services, military, political and academic circles and the media fatally misunderstood Hamas. “The lesson that we learned from October 7 is that we should stop trying to read his mind,” said Zehavi. “We cannot—we don’t have the capability.”
There was a sense of “arrogance,” held up by Israel’s technological superiority and a belief it was invulnerable to the type of attacks Hamas could launch, Milshtein said. Other errors came down to misunderstanding Hamas’ priorities, or simply too many intelligence officers having little knowledge of Arabic, according to Milshtein. “You cannot really believe that you can predict, or you can analyze, the intentions of the other,” he said, “if you don’t know his language.”
With intense warfare ongoing, the ex-Mossad official suggested it is unlikely any significant reorganization of these inner workings could have taken place since. Newsweek reached out to the IDF for comment.
Looking to the Future in the Middle East
One year on from October 7, a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, stability in northern Israel and the return of southern Lebanon’s 200,000 displaced residents are likely a long way off. So, too, is a reprieve for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ellie Cook
Already facing fierce criticism before October 2023, the lack of security for northern Israelis and the hostages still in Gaza keep him firmly under a harsh spotlight, said Ruth Wasserman Lande, a former Knesset member from the opposition Blue and White party.
“Prospects for a two-state solution were already quite slim before 10/7 but are now nonexistent,” said Elgindy. Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told Newsweek the likelihood had been “dead years, if not decades, prior to October 7 and the subsequent genocide in Gaza.” Israel denies accusations of genocide.
The past year “highlighted the desperate need for a solution, any solution, but I fear the sheer scale of brutality that has ensued has rendered that unrealistic in the short term to medium term. In other words, it’ll get worse before it gets better,” said Kenney-Shawa.
From the Israeli side, Wasserman Lande told Newsweek the “watershed moment” of October 7 has “moved farther away the concept of Palestinian statehood.” “Israelis, by far, are actually far more fearful now to have a state led by Palestinians right next door to them,” she said.
At Kibbutz Matzuva, as of September 26, workers cannot finish construction due to Israeli authorities tightening restrictions in the north, Efroni said. Three workers fixing a house in a nearby kibbutz were injured in rocket attacks the previous day, he said.
“Everything stand[s] still, we don’t have any work on houses, on factories.” And yet, the young family still “hope to come back, for sure,” he said.
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About the writer
Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine …
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