Three years on, October 7 trauma persists beneath Israel's surface calm

Walk past the Tel Aviv Museum of Art these days and you'll find Hostage Square nearly empty. A tunnel replica still stands. A few yellow ribbons hang from the railings. A sign reads "Remember 7.10.23." Three years after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, the physical traces of what once filled this plaza have mostly vanished—the "Bring Them Home" posters, the yellow balloons, the Empty Shabbat Table that families erected as a haunting reminder of their missing loved ones. The square that hosted demonstrations and press conferences, that held thousands of Israelis watching the last living hostages return home, now sits quiet. By surface measures, the country has moved forward.

But the quiet is deceptive. Beneath it runs a current of unresolved fear and fractured trust that shows no sign of receding. In a June poll by N12 news, 74 percent of Israelis said they fear another large-scale terrorist attack. Two-thirds want the October 7 attack investigated by a state commission of inquiry. When the Israel Democracy Institute surveyed voters last month, 68 percent of Jewish Israelis and 32 of Arab Israelis named October 7 as a central factor in deciding how to vote—a weight that rivals security concerns and the cost of living itself.

Isaac Badra, a 33-year-old realtor sitting in a café at the edge of the square, remembers opening his ground-floor apartment to neighbors on Simchat Torah because his Tel Aviv building had no bomb shelter. He remembers the air-raid sirens. He remembers his wife's mother, who lives near Gaza in Sderot, calling to say she saw terrorists in the street—a sentence he couldn't process until he turned on the television and grasped the scale of what was happening. He locked every door and window and prayed. Three years later, he still jumps at noises outside. When Arab construction workers shout to each other, his body reacts before his mind catches up. He has begun to doubt whether friends abroad truly have Israel's back.

Roni Shoval, a 54-year-old defense industry worker from northern Israel near the Lebanon border, calls the past three years "a modern Holocaust for Israel." The trauma, he says, is still inside him. He has not yet visited the Nova memorial—the site where Hamas killed 378 people at a music festival and abducted dozens more—because even speaking about it brings goosebumps to his skin. He continues doing IDF reserve duty years beyond the maximum age because the military needs his expertise. His son will be drafted soon, and Shoval does not want him sent to Gaza and Lebanon, the places where he himself served.

At another table, Yael Meyer, 24, sits with classmates from Tel Aviv University. A flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv was attacked the day before the anniversary—a reminder that the threat persists. Meyer said she was always aware that terror attacks could happen, but she believed the security services would protect her. That trust is gone. Her friend Talia Zecler, also 24, felt helpless after October 7. She was angry at her country. Entire families were killed or kidnapped. "It feels like we're living in an endless war," she said. Her heart races when a passing motorcycle sounds like an air-raid siren. Yet she also remembers the solidarity that emerged in the months after the attack—the volunteers at Hostage Square, the sense that Israelis were in it together. "This is the Israeli spirit," she said.

S., a 19-year-old IDF soldier sitting with her parents, experienced the trauma of October 7 at her home in Jerusalem, but she frames it as "minuscule" compared to what those near the Gaza border and those affected by later attacks from Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis endured. When she hears a plane overhead, she wonders if there will be another war with Iran. But as the country prepares to vote for its next government on October 27, she plans to channel her hopes into the voting booth. The election itself has become a vessel for the unresolved weight of three years—a moment when Israelis will attempt to translate their trauma, their fear, and their fractured sense of security into a political choice.