October 7 attacks

The October 7 attacks were a premeditated, multi-front invasion of Israel by Hamas and allied Gaza factions on October 7, 2023, the Simchat Torah holiday, that killed roughly 1,200 people (the overwhelming majority civilians), wounded thousands, and dragged 251 hostages back into Gaza. It was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, planned for more than a year, and it opened the deadliest war in the region’s modern history.

What happened

Before dawn on Saturday, October 7, 2023, Hamas opened with a barrage of several thousand rockets toward Israeli cities, then breached the Gaza border fence at more than 30 points using explosives, bulldozers and paragliders. Some 3,000 to 6,000 gunmen, drawn from Hamas’s Nukhba commando force, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, smaller factions and armed civilians who followed the breach, poured into southern Israel over the following hours and attacked military bases and roughly twenty civilian communities along the Gaza Strip border. The Nova music festival near Re’im lost the largest single share of the dead, several hundred young people machine-gunned and hunted through fields and roadside ditches as they tried to flee. The kibbutzim of Be’eri, Kfar Aza and Nir Oz were overrun house by house; at Nir Oz, roughly a quarter of the community was killed or taken captive. Israeli forces did not fully regain control of the border communities until the following day. It was, in raw numbers, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Who carried it out

Hamas, an Islamist movement founded in 1987 as an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood and designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and others, planned and led the assault; its armed wing named the operation “al-Aqsa Flood.” Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller and more explicitly Iran-aligned faction, fought alongside it and also took hostages. Footage, forensic evidence and testimony gathered afterward showed ordinary Gaza civilians following the fighters through the breached fence, some to loot, some to join the killing and abduction; Israeli and international investigators have treated this as a documented, not merely alleged, feature of the day.

Why it happened, and how it was missed

The attack was not spontaneous. Israeli intelligence had obtained a detailed Hamas battle plan, later nicknamed “Jericho Wall,” more than a year before the attack, laying out routes, targets and the sequencing later used almost exactly on October 7; the warning was assessed and set aside as unrealistic for Hamas’s capabilities. In the weeks before the assault, Israel had been actively facilitating an increase in Qatari cash transfers into Gaza as part of a long-running policy of managing rather than dismantling Hamas’s rule, a policy this wiki examines on its own page. The live question of who struck first is not seriously contested: Hamas initiated an unprovoked, meticulously planned invasion during a religious holiday, choosing the moment precisely because Israeli forces were thinned out and civilians were home. Israel’s own February 2025 army inquiry found systemic command and intelligence failures on multiple fronts, and the government’s own promised state commission of inquiry, the kind Israel convened after the 1973 war and the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, has been repeatedly delayed.

The atrocities

Beyond the killing, the day produced mass sexual violence and hostage-taking on a scale unprecedented in Israel’s history. A United Nations fact-finding mission led by Special Representative Pramila Patten concluded in 2024 that it found “clear and convincing information” that conflict-related sexual violence occurred at multiple locations on October 7 and that some hostages were subjected to sexual violence in captivity. Some 251 people were taken hostage into Gaza, spanning infants to grandparents; the last living and deceased hostages were not fully accounted for until the ceasefire and release deals that followed in stages over the next two years. A body of denial and minimization grew around these facts almost immediately, from claims the rapes were fabricated to efforts to recast the massacre as a prison break or an “incursion”; this wiki answers that specific claim on its own page, and the companion article on the sexual violence itself goes deeper on the evidence.

What Israel’s own failures don’t change

The strongest objection: Israel’s own after-action reviews concede real command and intelligence failures that let the attack succeed as completely as it did, and casualty figures for October 7 itself were revised more than once in the weeks after, as unidentified remains were processed and a small number of deaths initially attributed to Hamas gunfire were later reassessed. Neither fact touches who planned the invasion, breached the fence, or built the year-long “Jericho Wall” battle plan Israel failed to act on in time; a country that missed a warning is not the country that wrote it. What followed, the war in Gaza and its own disputed casualty count, is a separate and heavily litigated subject covered on this wiki’s Israel-Hamas war casualties page. None of the revisions to October 7’s own toll changed the picture that emerged in the first hours: a mass-casualty, civilian-targeted atrocity planned and carried out by Hamas.

October 7, the glossary term · Who attacked first on October 7 · Were the rapes and atrocities fabricated? · Sexual and gender-based violence in the attacks · Wikipedia & the Conflict: the full audit · Who Attacked First, every war

Sources

The live Wikipedia article, for comparison.