Tel Aviv,Oct 7. (dpa/GNA) – Israel on Wednesday marked the third anniversary of the Hamas massacre, with President Isaac Herzog lighting a candle at his Jerusalem residence at 6:29 am, in memory of the dead and injured, the exact starting time of the attack in which some 1,200 people were killed.
“Three years since that horrific morning. Three years of pain, of loss, and of a memory that will not be erased,” Herzog wrote on X.
The police wrote on X that officers had also gathered in the morning at the “southern battle sites,” including in Sderot, a city near the Gaza border, to commemorate their fallen colleagues.
Mourners also came to the site of the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im to remember relatives and friends killed in the attack, many of whom died at the festival.
Around 50,000 people were also expected to gather at a park in Tel Aviv for the central memorial ceremony in the evening.
Demonstrations were also held in several Israeli cities, demanding a state commission of inquiry into the October 7 attack and the failures that allowed it to happen.
According to media reports, protesters gathered outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence and the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem.
The Times of Israel reported that demonstrators also briefly blocked a major highway in Tel Aviv.
Critics accuse Netanyahu and his coalition of failing to take personal responsibility for the political and military failures surrounding the attack.
The anniversary also comes during the final stages of Israel’s election campaign, with voters due to elect a new parliament in three weeks, the first parliamentary election since the October 7 attacks.
Opinion polls indicate that neither Netanyahu’s camp nor his opponents are on course for an outright majority.
Some 251 people were taken hostage to the Gaza Strip during the October 7, 2023, attack. According to Israeli figures, around 6,000 militants from the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement and other extremist groups entered Israel that day.
In the war that followed the attack, more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, according to the Hamas-controlled health authority there. Its figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The Israeli military said it had attacked around 100,000 targets across the region over the past three years, according to Israeli radio. The figure included 65,000 targets in the Gaza Strip, 28,000 in Lebanon and Syria and 4,500 in Iran.
The military also said 970 Israeli soldiers had been killed while on duty over the past three years.
GNA