The War That Won’t End: How Oct. 7 Sparked a Year of Conflict

Yaniv Hegyi, an Israeli community organizer, fled his home last Oct. 7, after terrorists from Gaza overran his village in southern Israel. “I was sure that by January we would go back,” Mr. Hegyi said.

Mohammed Shakib Hassan, a Palestinian civil servant, fled his home on Oct. 12, after the Israeli Air Force responded by striking his city in northern Gaza. “We thought it would be two months — at most,” Mr. Hassan said.

Instead, the war in Gaza has dragged on for a year, with no end in sight.

It is the longest war between Israelis and Arabs since the end of the conflict that set the boundaries of the Israeli state in 1949. It is also by far the deadliest. More than 1,500 Israelis have been killed, mostly during Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, and roughly 250 others were abducted. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s counterattack, which began with one of the most intense bombardments ever recorded in modern warfare.

A wider, multifront war between Israel and Hamas’s regional allies is now unfolding — most recently with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and Iran’s bombardment of Israel — but the core of the conflict remains the original battle between Hamas and Israel, and the almost Sisyphean challenge of ending it.