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October 7

October 7 is the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust: a coordinated, multi-front invasion of southern Israel by Hamas and allied Gazan factions on 7 October 2023, a Saturday that was also Simchat Torah, that killed roughly 1,200 people and dragged 251 hostages back into Gaza.

Names for the day

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Hamas named its own operation “al-Aqsa Flood” (Arabic: طوفان الأقصى, Tawfan al-Aqsa), framing a massacre of civilians in their homes and at a music festival as a defense of the al-Aqsa Mosque, a rhetorical move at odds with the day’s own bodycam and dashcam footage. Israel named its military response “Swords of Iron” (Hebrew: חרבות ברזל, Charvot Barzel). Because the attack fell on Shabbat and Simchat Torah, some Israeli usage calls it Black Saturday, echoing the term used for the 1929 pattern of Sabbath-timed violence. English-language reference works, Wikipedia’s own article included, settled on “October 7 attacks,” terminology this wiki’s companion article on the October 7 attacks tracks section by section.

What happened

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At around 6:30am, roughly 3,000 Hamas gunmen, joined by Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters and armed civilians who followed them across the border, breached the perimeter fence at more than 30 points, jammed communications, and struck a music festival near Re’im, a string of kibbutzim including Be’eri, Kfar Aza and Nir Oz, the town of Sderot, and several IDF bases. Over the following hours they murdered roughly 1,200 people, the large majority civilians, and abducted 251 hostages, among them children, the elderly, and soldiers, back into Gaza. Israel’s Foreign Ministry keeps a name-by-name public registry of victims.

Israel had, in fact, obtained a version of Hamas’s battle plan roughly a year before the attack, an intelligence document later reported as “Jericho Wall,” and Israeli officials had separately sought a Qatari increase in cash transfers to Hamas weeks before the attack. A February 2025 IDF internal inquiry found serious command and intelligence failures on the Israeli side that let the plan succeed despite the warning.

Scope and the record

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Not all 251 hostages survived captivity, and rescues were rare and costly: Israeli forces freed Noa Argamani and three others from Nuseirat in June 2024, an operation this wiki covers at Nuseirat rescue and massacre. A United Nations mission led by Pramila Patten found reasonable grounds to believe conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the attack and against hostages held afterward, a finding this wiki details at sexual and gender-based violence in the October 7 attacks.

Misuse and accurate usage

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Some academics and activists, Judith Butler among the most prominent, have described the attack as “armed resistance,” a framing this wiki catalogs on its Judith Butler page. Others dismiss the documented sexual violence as fabricated propaganda, a claim answered point by point at were the October 7 rapes and atrocities fabricated. A further line of argument treats Gaza as still “occupied” in 2023 to justify the attack as resistance to occupation, despite Israel’s full 2005 military and settler withdrawal; that question gets its own treatment at was Gaza occupied when this war began and who attacked first on October 7. The accurate usage, anchored to forensics, hostage testimony and Hamas’s own footage, is that October 7 was a premeditated cross-border massacre and hostage-taking operation, not a prison uprising, a resistance operation, or a fabrication.

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Sources

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