Who attacked first on October 7?

7 October 2023

At dawn on 7 October 2023, during a ceasefire, thousands of Hamas terrorists broke through the Gaza fence and murdered some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, at a music festival, in their kitchens, in their beds, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza, from babies to Holocaust survivors. Every day of the war that followed traces to that morning, and to the hostages taken. There is no framing, no context, and no “cycle” that changes who attacked whom on October 7. The memorial →

Who attacked, and who was attacked

The attacker was Hamas, the Islamist movement that has ruled the Gaza Strip since seizing it by force in a 2007 coup against the Palestinian Authority, joined that morning by fighters from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and by ordinary Gazan civilians who crossed the breached fence behind them and took part in the killing and looting. The target was Israel’s civilian south: kibbutzim along the Gaza border, an open-air music festival at Re’im, and the small towns of the Gaza envelope, defended that morning by a thin, undermanned garrison. This was not a clash between armies. It was an armed movement, holding governing power over two million people, sending thousands of trained fighters into homes, bomb shelters, and a dance floor.

What happened

Hamas called the operation “al-Aqsa Flood.” Beginning at 6:29 a.m., some 3,000 to 5,000 fighters breached the Gaza border fence at more than 30 points using bulldozers, explosives, paragliders, and boats, after firing roughly 3,000 rockets into Israel as cover. Israel’s official casualty count settled at about 1,200 dead, most of them civilians, including entire families murdered in their homes in Kfar Aza, Be’eri, Nir Oz, and Nahal Oz. At the Re’im festival, gunmen killed some 364 young people fleeing across open fields. A UN-mandated fact-finding mission led by Pramila Patten later found “reasonable grounds” that conflict-related sexual violence occurred on 7 October and against hostages held in Gaza, documented further in the wiki’s own record of the sexual and gender-based violence; the claim that these atrocities were invented is answered directly here. Fighters dragged 251 people, civilians and soldiers, from babies to an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, back across the fence as hostages. An Israeli military inquiry published in February 2025 found the army had obtained Hamas’s detailed invasion plan, nicknamed “Jericho Wall,” more than a year in advance and did not treat it as credible, a failure that let a heavily outnumbered handful of soldiers and civilian defenders face the initial assault largely alone for hours.

Where and when

The assault struck a roughly 20-mile stretch of Israel’s Gaza-adjacent communities in the western Negev, from Sderot to Kissufim, on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, a Saturday, exploiting the quiet of the holiday and Shabbat. It came almost exactly fifty years and a day after the surprise attack that opened the Yom Kippur War, a parallel Hamas’s own communications made explicit. The fighting inside Israel lasted through the day and into the next before the army fully secured the border communities; Israel’s counteroffensive, named Operation Swords of Iron, began with airstrikes that same day and a ground invasion of Gaza on 27 October 2023.

Why it happened

Hamas’s founding charter and its 2017 policy document both commit the movement to Israel’s destruction, not coexistence with it; October 7 was the declared program, not a departure from it. The attack came weeks after Israel had quietly worked to increase Qatari cash transfers into Gaza to stabilize the border, a policy of managing Hamas that the war forced Israel to abandon. It also landed amid normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a breakthrough Hamas and its patron Iran had every reason to want to blow up before it happened. None of this excuses the choice to murder civilians; it explains the timing of a massacre the group had been planning for years.

The war that followed

Israel’s ground campaign pushed through northern Gaza in late 2023, encircling Gaza City and raiding al-Shifa Hospital, which the White House said US intelligence confirmed Hamas had used as a command center beneath. A week-long truce from 24 November to 1 December 2023 freed 105 hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners before collapsing when Hamas fired rockets again. Israel then moved south into Khan Younis and eventually Rafah. Hostage-rescue operations recovered some captives alive, including Noa Argamani in June 2024, while other rescues turned deadly, documented in the Nuseirat rescue and the massacre that followed it. Hamas’s military chief Mohammed Deif was killed in a July 2024 strike and its Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in combat that October. A ceasefire and phased hostage-release deal took effect in January 2025, broke down in March, and further rounds of fighting and diplomacy followed through 2025 as Israel pressed to recover the last hostages, alongside a widening of the war on other fronts entirely of the enemy’s choosing: Hezbollah opened a second front from Lebanon the day after October 7, the Houthis began firing at Israel from Yemen that November, and Iran struck Israel directly twice before Israel struck Iran’s nuclear program in June 2025.

Casualties, honestly stated

On the Israeli side: roughly 1,200 killed on 7 October itself, over 250 hostages taken, and more than 460 soldiers killed in the Gaza campaign that followed. On the Gaza side, Israel’s own military assessment put the toll at roughly 70,000 dead by early 2026, of whom it estimated a quarter to a third were combatants, close to the Gaza Health Ministry’s total but starkly different in its combatant breakdown; independent analysts have documented how Hamas’s public figures merge fighters into the civilian count. How many people have died in Gaza, and how many were combatants, is examined in full here. Every count in this war is contested and weaponized; an honest article states so plainly rather than picking the number that flatters a conclusion.

Aftermath and how it is misrepresented

By 2026 Hamas’s military structure in Gaza was severely degraded, its senior leadership killed, and its rocket arsenal a fraction of its 2023 size, while the question of who governs postwar Gaza remained unresolved. The war reshaped the region beyond Gaza too: Hezbollah’s command was decapitated, the Assad regime in Syria fell, and Iran’s capacity to strike Israel directly was set back by the June 2025 war, outcomes traceable to the morning Hamas chose to attack. The most persistent misrepresentation is chronological: framing this as “the Israel-Gaza war” or “the occupation” without the date 7 October, as though the war began with Israel’s response rather than Hamas’s invasion, a habit visible across how casualty figures from the Israel-Hamas war get sourced and reported and in how Gaza’s Ministry of Health, a Hamas-run body, gets cited as a neutral authority. A second is staged or recycled footage passed off as real-time atrocity, a pattern catalogued at Pallywood. A third is the use of Hamas’s own tactic, fighting from hospitals, schools, and homes, documented as human shielding, as evidence against Israel rather than against the group that chose the battlefield. Whatever one concludes about how the war was fought, it did not start with Israel, and no accounting of it is honest without that fact first.

The October 7 attacks · Casualties of the Israel-Hamas war · Who attacked first on the Lebanon front · Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? · The memorial · Who attacked first, every war

Sources

From Who attacked first on the main site.