A year of war in Gaza: the anniversary the calendar delivered

A year has passed since the morning of October 7, and the war that began with the deadliest single day in Israel’s history has become something larger than the conflict it was meant to answer. The anniversary fell on a Monday, and it was marked in the ways that the year had made familiar: the memorials in Israel, where the families of the dead and the hostages gathered at the sites of the attacks; the commemorations in the cities of the diaspora; and in Gaza, where the commemorations took the form of the war itself, the strikes and the shortages and the counting of the dead. The numbers of the year are the ones that have been repeated so often they have lost their weight: the 1,200 people killed on October 7, the 250 taken hostage, the more than forty thousand Palestinians killed in the year since, the hundreds of thousands displaced from homes that no longer exist. The figures are disputed in their details, and they are not disputed in their scale.

The year has redrawn the map of the conflict. The war that was meant to be fought in Gaza has expanded into Lebanon, where the campaign against Hezbollah has killed its leader and most of its command; into the air over Iran, where the missile exchanges of April and October brought the two states into direct conflict for the first time; and into the Red Sea, where the Houthis have made the shipping lanes their front. The single front has become several, the war has acquired the name of a regional conflict, and the diplomacy that was supposed to end it has been conducted in the intervals between escalations, with the parties no closer to an agreement than they were in the autumn of last year.

The anniversary exposed the war’s two audiences. In Israel, the grief is genuine and the politics around it are volatile: the families of the hostages have held the government to account with a persistence that has shaken the coalition, and the demand to bring the remaining hostages home has become the country’s central political argument, running against the government’s insistence that the war must continue until Hamas is destroyed. In Gaza, the war’s cost has been borne by a population that has had no voice in its own fate, and the humanitarian catastrophe, the famine warnings, the collapse of the health system, the displacement of nearly the entire population, has become the war’s permanent background.

The anniversary produced the usual statements: the commitments to continue until victory, the calls for a ceasefire, the pledges of support from the capitals of the world. The statements produced no movement, and the year’s lesson is that the war has its own momentum, sustained by the logic of each side’s leadership, which sees survival in continuing and defeat in stopping. The hostages still in Gaza, the families in Israel, the people under the rubble and in the camps, all of them are waiting for a decision that the politics of the region has not yet been able to make.

The calendar delivered the anniversary, and the anniversary delivered no change. The war is a year old, the region is larger and more dangerous than it was when it began, and the leaders who started it, and those who answered them, have all chosen, so far, to continue rather than to stop. The memorials were held, the numbers were read out, and the war went on, as it has every day since the morning that began it.