Donald Trump has expressed optimism about ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, as Israelis mourned those killed two years after the October 7 attacks.

The US president described the negotiations as “very serious”, adding: “I think there’s a possibility we could have peace in the Middle East”.

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One of the key mediators, Qatar’s prime minister, along with senior American diplomats Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, will now head to Egypt to join the third day of indirect negotiations between the Palestinian militant group and Israel.

Memorial events took place around the world on Tuesday, including in Israel, as grieving families gathered and relatives hoped a ceasefire deal could see the remaining hostages freed.

It has been two years since thousands of Hamas-led militants poured into southern Israel after a surprise barrage of rockets.

They stormed army bases, farming communities and the outdoor Nova music festival, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, including women, children and older adults.

The attack plunged the region into a devastating war, including a brutal retaliatory offensive by Israel on Gaza that has left tens of thousands of people dead, turned entire towns and cities to rubble, triggered a widespread famine and displaced around 90% of the population.

Hamas abducted 251 others, most of whom have since been released in ceasefires or other deals, with 48 hostages remaining inside Gaza, around 20 of them believed by Israel to be alive.

Israel mourns October 7 victims

In Tel Aviv, dozens gathered at a memorial site that was set up in a city square.

Others visited the scene of the Nova music festival in the border community of Reim, where nearly 400 Israelis were killed and where portraits of the kidnapped and dead have been erected.

Thousands of people visited throughout the day to share memories of relatives and friends who were killed.

Pro-Palestinian rallies, opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza, were also held in several European cities including Paris, Geneva, Athens, Istanbul, Stockholm, and London.

Sir Keir Starmer labelled the UK protests as “un-British” and said they showed a lack of respect.

Hamas wants ‘guarantees’

On the second day of talks, top Hamas leader Khalil Al-Hayya told Egyptian state-affiliated Al Qahera News TV the group had come “to engage in serious and responsible negotiations”.

He said Hamas was ready to reach a deal, yet it needed a “guarantee” to end the war and ensure “it is not repeated”.

US officials have suggested the talks should initially focus on the first phase: halting the fighting and working out logistics for the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners.

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A spokesperson for Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani of Qatar said he would attend the talks in Sharm el-Sheikh “with the aim of pushing forward the Gaza ceasefire plan and hostage release agreement”.

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The failure by Hamas to return hostages has left Israel deeply divided, with weekly mass protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It has also left Israel more isolated internationally than it has been in decades.

The war has already killed over 67,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants.

Experts and major rights groups have accused Israel of genocide – something Israel vehemently denies.

The International Criminal Court is seeking the arrest of Mr Netanyahu and his former defence minister for allegedly using starvation as a method of war.

For a long time, Rita Lifshitz would come back to Kibbutz Nir Oz every week, sit outside the house of her father-in-law, Oded, and have a drink.

To raise a glass to the people who had gone. To remember October 7.

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“We used to drink a beer every weekend,” she tells me, her eyes trained on the small little table on the patio where they would sit and talk.

“So for 500 days I came to have a beer outside the table. Here I put the beer for grandpa and I put the beer for me. He was my psychologist for 500 days.

“He was only a few kilometres from me and I just imagine him coming in with a big smile.”

Around her, the charred remains of violence, death, and devastation. The burnt-out wreckage of happy lives that came to a horrific end.

I spent two hours walking around this kibbutz with Rita. She showed me the places where friends had been murdered, where loved ones had been taken hostage, and where her best friend had been shot and then dragged away, his blood still smeared over the floor of his home.

“It is a trauma,” she says. “And all of us, the whole kibbutz, wakes up every morning to the 7th of October.”

On the morning of 7 October 2023, this small kibbutz, which sits within sight of the border with Gaza, was overrun by Hamas fighters.

In total, 117 people, more than a quarter of those who were there that morning, were either killed or kidnapped. No other kibbutz suffered such a high proportion of casualties.

Among them, Oded Lifshitz and his wife, Yocheved. Both were in their 80s, and both had volunteered for charities promoting peaceful relations with Gazans. Both were taken hostage on October 7.

Oded used to drive sick children from Gaza and take them to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Now we stand in the charred remains of their home.

Yocheved was eventually released after 16 days as a hostage, but Oded died in captivity. His body was not returned until earlier this year, but he had probably died a year earlier.

And now we stand in the charred remains of their house.

To Rita, this place is both a touchstone to a happier time and also a stark warning of inhumanity. A panel of metal is all that is left of the piano that Oded loved to play.

The couple’s crockery is still scattered in a corner, thrown there when their furniture was upended.

“They started firing rockets at us at 6.30 in the morning, but we didn’t worry because they have been firing rockets at us for 20 years,” says Rita.

“There was one day we had 800 rockets land round here, so we are not scared of rockets. We didn’t get any information about what was happening, no warning.

“The first we knew was when two people working in the fields saw Hamas, and they were the first ones to be killed.”

It is believed that around 540 fighters attacked the kibbutz – far more than Nir Oz’s entire population. It was a massacre. Only six houses escaped attack.

The nursery school workshops, gardens – all of them shot, burnt, destroyed.

We move to the far end of the home, picking our way through the debris that still litters the floor.

There is a steel door, the entrance to the bomb shelter where Oded and Yocheved often slept and where they tried to hide.

Their beds are still here, blackened and burnt. In the door are bullet holes – Oded had done his best to hold the door shut, but he was shot in the hand and the attackers stormed in.

‘The death road’

The last time Yocheved saw her husband was him lying on the floor, bleeding. As she was taken away, rolled into a carpet, she didn’t know if he was dead or alive.

To walk around this kibbutz is to witness the scars of trauma again and again. A black flag outside a house means someone died there.

A yellow flag designates that an occupant was taken hostage. There is a road that Rita calls “the death road,” where almost every house has at least one flag outside.

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We go into the home of one friend, who was murdered in the living room. Her clothes are still there, her handbag hangs on the bedroom door. It feels so intrusive to be here, but Rita insists the world needs to see.

We see Natan, a long-term resident who is now 88 years old. His home was one of only six to escape being ransacked, because the Hamas attackers couldn’t work out how to get through the front door.

He says he came back as soon as he could, despite the destruction around him, insistent he is not fearful.

“This is my home,” he says emphatically.

Rita takes me to the home of her best friend, Itzhak Elgarat. Unlike most of the homes, his was not set ablaze, so it still looks now as it did then.

A bottle of olive oil is on the side, cooking ingredients laid out, a couple of bottles of wine set on the table.

But also bullet holes strewn across the walls, in the furniture. Possessions thrown around and, horrendously, Itzhak’s blood still smeared across the walls, the floor, and the door where he was shot.

The other side

I climb a set of stairs, which used to belong to a house that has now been demolished.

You can see Gaza in the near distance, across a few fields.

And over there, not so long ago, Sabah might have been looking back.

Just as Rita’s life has been torn apart by the war, so has Sabah’s. For Rita, it is the mental torment of what happened on October 7, the struggle to process and to move on.

For Sabah, it is something more fundamental. A Gazan displaced from Khan Younis, she once lived in a grand home near the border, only a couple of miles from Kibbutz Nir Oz, as the crow flies.

It was a home for multiple generations, the pride of her life, “a place meant to give us stability and peace”.

Since then, she has been displaced 13 times, and she worries that her home has been reduced to rubble.

“Personally, I long to go back to even the ruins of my house, to sit among the rubble, simply to be there,” she says.

“Even that would be better than this life. At least then I might find a little peace.”

The last time she saw her home, it had been hit by an explosion. Some of it was destroyed, but other parts were habitable.

But since then, Sabah has been told that it has been damaged by both fire and military action – news that devastated her.

She says: “Someone told me ‘your house was the very first thing they burned. The fire raged inside for three days. And after they burned it, they brought in an armoured vehicle and blew it up’.

“Just imagine losing your home. When they told me what happened to mine, I spent nearly ten days doing nothing but crying.

“It feels like your soul is torn away. Your spirit leaves you.”

She insists that this story is not just about October 7, not just about Hamas, but about decades of struggle that led to this point, about Palestinian anger and accusations that they are oppressed by Israel.

“This goes back generations. What happened on October 7 was not the beginning of the story. I remember my father, my grandfather, and their fathers before them telling what they had endured. We have lived our entire lives under this weight.

“This land is ours, our homeland. We did not buy it. It has been passed down from our ancestors, generation to generation. That is why it is not easy for me, or for any of us, to surrender it.

“The truth is that we are exhausted. We are an oppressed people. October 7 was just one day, but for us, it has felt like living through hundreds of October 7th’s, over and over again.”

It is hard to remember the Middle East before October 7 2023, so much has changed in the wake of its horrendous events.

Before the attack, the region’s geopolitical tectonic plates were grinding, but an uneasy status quo held sway and observed certain rules.

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But that day unleashed an earthquake, changing everything.

In two years of turmoil since, the region’s rulebook has been torn to pieces.

The first rule: Israel would manage the threat from Hamas but not try to eradicate it. Israel’s policy of dividing and ruling the Palestinians’ rival factions had come back to bite them.

Instead, Israelis insisted in one voice after October 7 no more “mowing the grass”, their euphemism for cutting Hamas down to size, from time to time. This time, the job must be finished.

That would change the way Israelis waged their war in Gaza. Not least in the way they would tolerate many more civilians dying, in the name of defeating their enemy. If the target’s rank was high enough, the deaths of scores of civilians – women and children – would be acceptable.

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The outcome has been an unprecedentedly high civilian death toll.

Israel’s war on Hamas has now killed more than 67,000 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians or combatants.

Its impact will be felt for generations to come, not least no doubt on the potential radicalisation of those who have survived.

And it has seen Israel, a nation conceived in the wake of one genocide, accused of perpetrating another. That stain, justified or not, has implications for Israel’s psyche and own sense of identity.

Israel denies all accusations of genocide. But it has potentially grave repercussions for its future.

Abroad, popular support for Israel has fallen most of all among the young and most of all where it needs it most: America. The rule that supporting Israel will always be a vote-winner in the US is also now in question.

But the rules have changed Israel’s borders and in the way it has chosen to wield its increasingly hegemonic military power even more dramatically.

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Israel’s leaders found a new boldness in the wake of October 7, at the same time as technological and tactical advances gave them the tools to pursue it.

The pager operation against Hezbollah that crippled the Shiite Lebanese militia was planned long before October 7. But it reached operational utility just as Israel found the risk appetite to implement it.

It was decisive in the events that led to the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Since 2006 and Israel’s last war with Hezbollah, the rule held that neither would risk provoking another. It would be too devastating for both.

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The pager attack disabled Hezbollah’s ability to launch tens of thousands of missiles, after months of attritive attacks on them by Israel.

For as long as Hezbollah held that arsenal of missiles, it was assumed Israel would not risk attacking Iran. With that neutralised, Israel could now take on its ultimate enemies there.

The rules were rewritten in the skies over Iran and Israel in their first direct attacks on each other in April and October last year. Then, in June this year, Israel unleashed a devastating 12-day war on Iran, joined in its closing stages by US warplanes too.

But after reaching that zenith in military supremacy, Israel has since overreached. A failed airstrike on Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, provoked the anger of allies, most crucially Donald Trump.

In the prelude to this anniversary, Benjamin Netanyahu is learning the limits of what can be achieved by military power alone. Having invested more in military action than constructive diplomacy, Netanyahu’s Israel is now increasingly isolated.

Israel’s leader finds himself hemmed in by a US president being leant on by Arab allies. Trump will not tolerate Israel annexing the West Bank and wants a deal that offers a “credible pathway” to a future Palestinian state.

Netanyahu needs to show he can still bring the remaining hostages home, that fighting the war this long was justified, and he has a plan for what happens the day after.

And if the war is being drawn to a close, with American mediation and the support of Arab partners and allies, they all have responsibilities too.

To find a better new status quo with far better rules, to make sure the carnage and regionwide turmoil of the last two years can be brought to a close and never repeated.