Sky News’ Yalda Hakim reflects on a year of war between Israel and Hamas, tracing the fighting, grief and future through one year, two sounds, three miles and four weeks

One year…

It’s been just over one year since the day that changed the lives of Israelis and Palestinians for generations.

The tragedy of 7 October lives inside most Israelis in a visceral way that is magnified by a unique history.

After enduring bloody pogroms and the Holocaust, this is a nation whose modern existence was meant as the ultimate guarantor that ‘never again’ would the Jewish people be slaughtered defenceless.

Yet on that day, as Hamas infiltrated Israel, a bloody chime of history sounded as 1,200 Jews were murdered.

For those in Gaza and now Lebanon, it is one year since Israeli retaliation began against Hamas and Hezbollah.

Displacement, disease and death hang in the air in these places, creating tragedy for hundreds of thousands of people.

And what began as a terrorist attack against Israel increasingly feels like it has become a regional war that risks engulfing the entire Middle East.

A year ago, it felt like the once inconceivable normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia might be inevitable.

Instead, the Palestinian issue is back on the international agenda at the price of thousands of dead.

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Across the world, and especially in the United States and Europe, the war in Gaza has polarized and enflamed societies in a way no other conflict has – with an outpouring of emotions about Israel and the Palestinians.

Hundreds of thousands march in capitals every weekend calling for an end to the conflict.

Two sounds…

The morning at the memorial was sombre and emotional. Parents wept for their lost children.

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As I walked around the site of the Nova Music Festival in Re’im, I was struck by two distinct sounds.

First, the anguished wailing of mothers – breaking the silence to cry out in unspeakable grief. The other – every 90 seconds – was the sound of artillery fire going into Gaza.

These are two sounds which have become inextricably linked over this year.

As mothers cry in Israel, just three miles away in Gaza, mothers also weep for their dead children.

According to the UN – at the time of writing – 11,355 children in Gaza have been killed by Israeli bombardment.

The health ministry in Gaza puts the total number of dead at over 42,000 people.

According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there are an estimated further 10,000 people still not found under the rubble.

In Lebanon, the death toll is also growing. Their health ministry says over 2,000 people have now died as a result of Israeli bombardment, and a fifth of the population is now displaced.

Three miles…

That is the distance between where I was standing at the site of the Nova Music Festival memorial and the Gaza Strip.

All that separates the two worlds – because they do feel like separate worlds – is a wall. A wall that was torn through on 7 October 2023.

In the early hours of that day, Hamas brutally killed more than 350 people gathered here at a music festival and took as many as 40 others hostage.

People hid for hours on end, watching helplessly as their friends were killed in front of them and others were dragged back into Gaza.

Many texted relatives saying the IDF was coming but it took the army five hours to arrive – arguably the worst intelligence and security failure in Israeli history.

In other communities, it was as many as 12 hours.

Three miles away, Hamas is no longer in control of Gaza, yet the overwhelming majority of hostages are still not freed and Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the 7 October attack, has not been captured or killed.

Gaza itself is in rubble. One in five buildings has been destroyed, and almost half damaged. Mosques, schools and shops are flattened.

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Life has changed for every single person in the Gaza Strip. The UN says nearly the entire population of Gaza has been displaced.

Four weeks…

It’s now just under four weeks until a knife-edged US presidential election.

Whoever wins is likely to inherit a widening war that is no longer centred on just the Israelis and the Palestinians, but Iran, its regional proxies and allies stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, and the fate of its quickening nuclear programme.

On one hand, Donald Trump is unpredictable. He says he would end the Ukraine war on day one, he claims there would never have been 7 October if he had been in the White House, and he warns darkly about the threat of World War Three absent his return to power.

But what would he do? Will he embolden and support Israeli pushback on the Iranians, or will he rein them in? No one knows for certain – including perhaps Trump himself.

Kamala Harris’s foreign policy will probably look similar to Joe Biden’s: Words of warning to Benjamin Netanyahu, but military and economic support to Israel.

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Israel’s offensives in the last few months have showcased the limits of American power, at least as wielded under President Biden.

Before Americans vote, however, it seems all but certain the Israelis will strike Iran – retaliation for an unprecedented ballistic missile attack on the Jewish State earlier this month that Israel and the US largely blunted.

How and when Israel hits Iran is the source of intense speculation – including whether the target could include the country’s energy infrastructure or nuclear sites.

The term ‘October surprise’ was coined in 1980 when Ronald Reagan feared that a last-minute deal to release American hostages in Iran might earn Jimmy Carter enough votes to remain as president.

Forty-four years later, and less than a month before election day, Iran and the wider Middle East could once again deliver another surprise.

Nihon Hidankyo – a group of Japanese atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki – has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised the group’s extraordinary efforts “to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons” and “to remind the world of the pressing need for nuclear disarmament”.

It said: “This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the peace prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.

“These historical witnesses have helped to generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons around the world by drawing on personal stories, creating educational campaigns based on their own experience, and issuing urgent warnings against the spread and use of nuclear weapons.”

In awarding the prestigious accolade to the group, committee chairman Jorgen Watne Frydnes said it wished “to honour all survivors who, despite physical suffering and painful memories, have chosen to use their costly experience to cultivate hope and engagement for peace”.

“Never did I dream this could happen,” Toshiyuki Mimaki, head of Nihon Hidankyo, told reporters at a news conference in Hiroshima on Friday with tears in his eyes.

He was three years old and playing in front of his family home on the morning of 6 August 1945 when he saw a flash in the sky.

Mr Mimaki said the group’s win would give a major boost to its efforts to demonstrate to the world “the abolition of nuclear weapons can be achieved”.

“Nuclear weapons should absolutely be abolished,” he said.

Next year will mark 80 years since the atomic bombings by the United States of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 during World War Two.

Without naming specific countries, Mr Frydnes warned today’s nuclear weapons have far greater destructive power, and could kill millions of people.

“A nuclear war could destroy our civilisation,” he said.

It is not the first time efforts to eradicate nuclear weapons have been honoured by the committee.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons won the prize in 2017 – and in 1995, Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs were awarded the prestigious accolade for “their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.”

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Last year, the award went to Narges Mohammadi, an imprisoned Iranian women’s rights activist.

Other previous winners of the award include South Africa’s anti-apartheid champion Nelson Mandela, former US president Barack Obama for his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy, and Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai for her fight for the right of girls to receive an education.

The Nobel Prize was created by wealthy Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who in his will dictated his estate should be used to fund “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”.

The peace prize is the fifth Nobel awarded this week, after literature, chemistry, physics and medicine.

Earlier this week, British computer scientist Sir Demis Hassabis was one of three winners of the Nobel Prize for chemistry for breakthroughs in predicting the structure of proteins and creating entirely new ones.

Sir Demis, who is the chief executive and co-founder of London-based artificial intelligence start-up Google DeepMind, received the honour alongside John Jumper, a senior research scientist at the company, and David Baker, of the University of Washington.

The residential district in central Beirut where the airstrike struck is claustrophobic.

The buildings that still stand around the site of destruction are about seven to eight storeys tall.

This area was packed with people when it was attacked.

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In many ways, it’s surprising the death toll was not even higher than the 22 people who are reported to have been killed so far.

The nearby hospitals are crowded with the injured – many of them seriously.

It’s reported Israel was attempting to assassinate a Hezbollah leader, Wafiq Safa, who is the head of liaison and coordination for the group.

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His fate is unclear, although Hezbollah sources have told Sky News that he survived.

Many of the civilians in and around the building did not.

We watched as search and rescuers scoured through the rubble. The chance of finding any survivors is remote.

The building is just a mass of debris. Some of the walls of the buildings nearby have been blown out.

You can look in at the lives destroyed by this explosion. Family portraits still hang on the walls.

We met Ibrahim as he packed up his things to move away from the area.

He’s fearful about what comes next: “What do you want me to tell you? What happened was extremely scary.

“The sound was so loud, the building started to shake as if it was an earthquake. Now we came back to take our stuff and go stay by the seaside.”

The attack on this area is a significant escalation by Israel. It was thought to be relatively safe – away from the Hezbollah stronghold, Dahieh, in southern Beirut.

In fact, many of the families that were here at the time of the airstrikes had fled those areas, hoping to find sanctuary.

The fact they did not has left many people now wondering, is anywhere still safe in the capital?