Clausewitz analyses Gaza — friction and fog.
Litterae ex Sepulchris
Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.
— Carl von Clausewitz, On War
October 1-6, 2023
“Reports from an unreliable enemy can seldom be relied upon... Intelligence reports in war are contradictory; the majority are false, and most are uncertain.” — Carl von Clausewitz
In the first week of October 2023, Captain Yael Shimoni knew that Hamas was planning something.
She sat in the basement operations center of Unit 8200 in the northern Negev, staring at intercepts that told a story no one wanted to hear. The fluorescent lights hummed above her workstation, casting their familiar greenish pallor over the monitors that displayed signal intelligence feeds from Gaza. Around her, other analysts worked in focused silence, the soft clicking of keyboards the only sound beneath the ventilation system’s persistent drone.
Yael was twenty-eight years old, with dark hair pulled back in a regulation ponytail and the kind of circles under her eyes that came from years of watching screens in artificial light. She had been in Unit 8200 for six years now, long enough to understand both the power and the limits of what she did. Long enough to know when something was wrong.
The intercepts from the past two weeks formed a pattern she had documented in three separate reports. Increased communication among Hamas military leadership. References to training exercises that didn’t match known exercise schedules. Unusual activity at tunnel openings near the border fence. A phrase that kept recurring in encrypted messages: operation followed by numbers she couldn’t decode.
She had flagged all of it. Standard procedure. The flags went into the system, into the daily briefings, into the vast machinery of Israeli intelligence that was supposed to transform raw data into actionable understanding.
Nothing came back.
“You’re still on the Hamas desk?” Lieutenant Colonel David Baratz appeared beside her workstation, coffee in hand. Her section chief was a man in his fifties who had spent thirty years in signals intelligence and had the permanent squint of someone who had stared at too many screens for too long.
“The traffic analysis from last week,” Yael said, turning her monitor toward him. “The communication spikes. Did anyone—”
“It went up the chain.” Baratz sipped his coffee. “Assessment came back. Training exercises. They do them every few months. You know this.”
“The pattern is different this time.”
“Different how?”
Yael pulled up the comparison charts she had prepared. “Duration. Intensity. The geographic spread of the signals. And there’s cross-talk with external nodes—Iran, Lebanon. That’s not typical for training.”
Baratz studied the charts for perhaps ten seconds. “The conceptual assessment stands. Hamas is deterred. They’re focused on governance, on managing Gaza. They don’t have the capability for anything significant.”
“Sir, with respect—”
“Yael.” His voice softened, which somehow made it worse. “I know you’re thorough. It’s why you’re good at this job. But you’re seeing threats because it’s your job to see threats. That’s the paradox of intelligence work. We’re trained to find patterns, so we find them everywhere.”
“I’m not imagining this.”
“No one said you were. But the assessment is the assessment. Hamas learned their lesson in 2014, in 2021. They know what happens if they push too hard. They’re not suicidal.”
After he walked away, Yael sat for a long moment staring at her screens. The intercepts continued to flow, green text scrolling in windows she had arranged according to priority. Priority that no longer seemed to matter.
She thought about the document she had seen referenced in a briefing two months ago. Jericho Walls—a detailed Hamas operational plan for breaching the border fence and attacking communities in the Gaza periphery. The plan had been in Israeli intelligence hands since 2018. Five years. It described paraglider assaults, motorcycle infiltrations, attacks on military bases and civilian communities simultaneously.
The assessment then had been the same as now: aspirational. A fantasy document. Hamas didn’t have the capability. Hamas wouldn’t risk the consequences.
Conceptzia, some of the older analysts called it. The conception. The framework of assumptions that shaped how intelligence was interpreted. Hamas was a problem to be managed, not an enemy capable of decisive action. The fence was impenetrable. The technological superiority was overwhelming. The threat was known, contained, deterred.
Yael had never questioned the conceptzia before. You didn’t rise in Unit 8200 by questioning the framework. You rose by fitting your analysis into it, by finding the patterns that confirmed what leadership already believed.
But the intercepts kept coming.
On October 4, she received a visit from a liaison officer with the Gaza Division. Major Amit Raviv was young for his rank, earnest, clearly troubled by something he wasn’t sure how to express.
“You’ve been flagging Hamas traffic,” he said, standing awkwardly beside her workstation.
“For three weeks now.”
“I know. I’ve been reading your reports.” He glanced around the operations center, then lowered his voice. “The spotters have been reporting things too.”
“The female observers? What kind of things?”
“Movement near the fence. Training that looks... different. More serious. Some of them have submitted formal concerns through their chain of command.”
Yael felt something cold settle in her chest. “What happened to the concerns?”
“Same as yours. Assessment: routine. Training exercises. Nothing to indicate operational intent.”
“And what do you think?”
Raviv was quiet for a moment. “I think something doesn’t feel right. But I’m not intelligence. I’m operations. My job is to prepare for what intelligence tells me to prepare for.”
“And intelligence is telling you not to worry.”
“Intelligence is telling me Hamas is deterred.”
After he left, Yael submitted another report. She highlighted the convergence of signals intelligence with the human reporting from the Gaza Division observers. She noted the historical precedent of the Jericho Walls document. She concluded with a recommendation for elevated alert status along the border.
The report went into the system. The system was vast, professional, sophisticated. It could process millions of data points, cross-reference sources, generate assessments that were presented to the highest levels of command.
The system believed what it was designed to believe.
On October 5, a Thursday, Yael took her concerns to Major General Sarah Neumann, her ultimate superior in the analytical division. It was an extraordinary step—junior captains did not normally request meetings with general officers—but Yael had found that Neumann, a woman in her late fifties with steel-gray hair and a reputation for intellectual honesty, sometimes listened when others didn’t.
The general’s office was austere: a desk, two chairs, Israeli flags, photographs of Neumann with various prime ministers over the decades. No personal touches. The office of someone who lived entirely within the institution.
“You’ve been flagging Hamas activity,” Neumann said without preamble. “I’ve read your reports.”
“Ma’am, I believe the assessment framework may be wrong.”
“The conceptzia.”
“Yes.”
Neumann leaned back in her chair. “Do you know how many intelligence officers have sat in that chair and told me the assessment framework was wrong?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Many. Some of them were right. The Yom Kippur War was an intelligence failure of exactly this type—we knew the Egyptian and Syrian forces were massing, but we interpreted the data through a framework that told us they wouldn’t attack.” She paused. “Others were wrong. They saw threats that weren’t there, pushed for responses that would have been catastrophic. Part of this job is telling the difference.”
“And how do you tell the difference?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Neumann picked up a pen, turned it over in her fingers. “We know Hamas has the Jericho Walls plan. We’ve known for five years. The question is whether they have the intent and the capability to execute it.”
“The intercepts suggest—”
“The intercepts suggest they’re doing something. But Hamas is always doing something. They’re an organization under pressure, with multiple internal factions, trying to maintain credibility while avoiding destruction. That generates a lot of noise.”
“This feels different.”
Neumann was quiet for a long moment. Outside the office, Yael could hear the muffled sounds of the base going about its normal operations.
“I’m going to tell you something that I’ve learned over thirty years in this business,” the general said finally. “Intelligence work creates a particular kind of blindness. We become so focused on the data, on the patterns, that we forget something fundamental: the enemy also thinks. They know we’re watching them. They know how we interpret signals. And they can use that knowledge against us.”
“You mean Hamas might be deceiving us?”
“I mean we should always consider the possibility. But I also mean this: the enemy’s thinking has limits too. Hamas leadership isn’t stupid. They know that a large-scale attack on Israel would bring massive retaliation. They know they could lose everything they’ve built in Gaza over fifteen years. The question is whether they care more about that than about whatever they hope to achieve.”
“And the assessment is that they do care.”
“The assessment is that they’re rational actors operating under constraints. That doesn’t mean they’re friendly. It means they’re predictable within certain parameters.” Neumann set down the pen. “I’m not dismissing your concerns, Captain. I’m telling you why the system responds to them the way it does. The conceptzia isn’t stupidity. It’s a model based on years of observation and analysis.”
“Models can be wrong.”
“Yes. They can.” The general stood, indicating the meeting was over. “Continue your work. Keep flagging what you see. If the pattern continues to develop, escalate again. That’s how the system is supposed to work.”
Yael left the office knowing that she had done everything procedure allowed. She had documented. She had reported. She had escalated. The system had received her concerns and processed them according to its logic.
The system was certain.
That night, she drove home to her apartment in Be’er Sheva and couldn’t sleep. She lay in the darkness thinking about the intercepts, about the pattern she could see that no one else seemed willing to see, about the gap between data and belief that seemed to grow wider every day.
She thought about the phrase she had heard from Major Raviv: something doesn’t feel right.
Intelligence work wasn’t supposed to be about feeling. It was supposed to be about analysis, about rigorous interpretation of data, about distinguishing signal from noise. But there was something beneath the data that her training couldn’t quite capture—a quality of urgency in the intercepted communications, a concentration of activity that felt like preparation for something significant.
She had seen similar patterns before. In 2014, before Operation Protective Edge. In 2021, before Guardian of the Walls. Both times, Hamas had launched operations that Israel had anticipated at least partially, had responded to effectively, had ultimately defeated.
But those operations had been rocket barrages, tunnel infiltrations, harassment campaigns. The data she was seeing now suggested something different. Something larger. The cross-talk with external nodes, the coordination with Hezbollah frequencies, the references to timing windows that coincided with a major Jewish holiday.
Simchat Torah. The celebration of the completion of the Torah reading cycle. A day when many IDF soldiers would be home with their families, when the country would be in a festive mood, when vigilance would be relaxed.
She sat up in the darkness and reached for her phone. She could call someone. Escalate again. But who would answer at this hour? And what would she say that she hadn’t already said?
The assessment is that they’re rational actors operating under constraints.
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe Hamas had concluded that the constraints no longer applied. That the costs of action had become acceptable for reasons Israeli intelligence couldn’t understand because it was too busy modeling them as rational actors who thought the way Israeli analysts thought.
But that would mean—
She stopped herself. That way lay paranoia. See threats everywhere and you became useless, crying wolf until no one listened at all. The system existed precisely to filter out the noise of individual anxiety, to aggregate and analyze and produce assessments that could be trusted.
The system was her institution. She had given it six years of her life. She believed in it.
She lay back down in the darkness and eventually slept.
On Friday, October 6, the day before Simchat Torah, Yael was back at her workstation at 0600. The weekend duty rotation was lighter than usual—holiday scheduling had thinned the ranks—but the feeds continued to flow regardless of the calendar.
She scanned the overnight intercepts and felt her stomach clench.
The communication spike had intensified. Multiple nodes in Gaza were active simultaneously, something she had never seen outside of actual military operations. There were references to equipment distribution, to final preparations, to timing coordination.
She flagged everything, priority alpha. She called her section chief at home.
“David, you need to see this.”
Baratz’s voice was groggy, irritated. “It’s the holiday, Yael. Is someone actively attacking?”
“Not yet. But the traffic—”
“Is the traffic saying they’re going to attack today?”
“It’s saying they’re preparing for something. The coordination level—”
“Send me the summary. I’ll look at it after shul.”
The line went dead.
Yael sat staring at her screens. Around her, the skeleton crew of Friday analysts worked without urgency, processing routine intercepts, preparing for the quiet of Shabbat. Someone had brought pastries from a bakery in town; the smell of sugar and butter drifted through the air-conditioned staleness.
She drafted another report. She marked it urgent. She sent it into the system.
The system processed it. The system was very good at processing.
By noon, she had received acknowledgment of receipt but no response to her assessment. The normal channels were operating normally. The hierarchy was intact. The conceptzia held.
She stayed at her workstation through the afternoon, watching the feeds, documenting the patterns, fighting the growing certainty that something was about to happen that no one would believe until it was too late.
At 1800, Baratz called her. “Go home, Yael. Get some rest. We’ll review everything on Sunday.”
“The traffic—”
“Is noted. It’s in the system. If anything changes, we’ll respond. But right now, you need to step back. You’re too close to this.”
She wanted to argue, but she could hear in his voice the same patience that covered dismissal, the same certainty that she had encountered at every level of the chain. She was a junior captain with a pattern recognition complex. They were senior officers with decades of experience and a framework that had kept Israel safe through multiple conflicts.
The framework said Hamas was deterred.
The framework said the fence was secure.
The framework said nothing significant could happen.
Yael drove home through the gathering dusk, the lights of Be’er Sheva glittering against the desert darkness. Somewhere to the south, beyond the communities of the Gaza periphery, beyond the sophisticated fence with its sensors and cameras and automated weapons systems, beyond all the technology and vigilance that defined Israeli security—somewhere in that other place, in the narrow strip of land where two million people lived under the rule of an organization that Israel’s intelligence services believed they understood—preparations continued that would shatter every assumption the system held.
She didn’t know this yet. She only knew what the data told her, and the data wasn’t enough to overcome belief.
That night, she slept badly again. In the morning, everything would change.
But until it changed, the framework held. The conceptzia was secure. The watchers watched, and the system processed what they saw, and the assessment remained the assessment.
Hamas was deterred.
The friction which is brought about by countless petty circumstances in war is the greatest obstacle to following one’s plans with precision; but it is the lot of every commander to have to overcome this friction through the force of his own judgment and energy. — Carl von Clausewitz
“War is the province of uncertainty: three-fourths of those things upon which action in war must be calculated are hidden more or less in the clouds of great uncertainty.” — Carl von Clausewitz
The lights pulsed in time with the bass, and Noa Harari danced.
She was thirty-two years old, a booking agent for electronic music artists, and she had been to dozens of festivals like this one across three continents. But there was something about this night—the desert air warm against her skin, the crowd of three thousand people moving as one organism beneath the stars, the DJ whose set she had helped arrange playing the mix she had heard him perfecting for months—that felt like the culmination of everything she had worked to create.
The Supernova Sukkot Gathering spread across an open field near Kibbutz Re’im, perhaps five kilometers from the Gaza border. Noa had driven out from Tel Aviv that afternoon with her younger brother Eitan, who had finally agreed to come to one of her events after years of saying electronic music wasn’t his thing.
“Okay, I get it now,” he had shouted in her ear an hour ago, his eyes wide with the kind of revelation that came from experiencing something beyond your assumptions. “This is actually—”
“I know!” She had hugged him, laughing, feeling the bass vibrate through both their bodies.
Eitan was twenty-seven, a software engineer for a startup that did something with fintech that Noa had never quite understood despite his multiple explanations. He was taller than her, thin, with the same dark curly hair their mother had passed to both of them. He had come to the festival reluctantly, agreeing only after she had pointed out that she rarely asked him for anything and that he could at least give her world a try before dismissing it.
Now he was somewhere in the crowd, lost in the music like everyone else, and Noa felt a contentment that had nothing to do with the alcohol she had decided not to drink tonight. She was working, technically—checking on the artist hospitality area, coordinating with the production team, making sure the logistics held together—but the work had become invisible beneath the larger experience of the gathering itself.
Three thousand people, most of them young, dancing together in the desert. The festival had started the previous evening and would continue through the weekend. It was the kind of event that felt, in its best moments, like a brief utopia—a space carved out of ordinary reality where strangers became friends and the divisions that defined Israeli society dissolved into movement and sound.
Noa made her way through the crowd toward the backstage area, her laminated credential bouncing against her chest. The DJ was transitioning into a slower section of his set, the pounding rhythm giving way to something more melodic, and people began to catch their breath, reach for water bottles, turn to their companions with the kind of smiles that meant can you believe this?
She found Eitan near the water station, looking happily exhausted.
“I’m going to check on things backstage,” she shouted over the music. “You okay?”
“More than okay.” He hugged her again, something he rarely did. “Thank you for making me come.”
“Thank you for actually coming.”
She left him there and made her way to the production area behind the main stage. The usual chaos awaited—a lighting technician with a problem, a sound engineer with a question, an artist manager who wanted to discuss the set time for tomorrow—but it was the kind of chaos she had learned to navigate without effort. This was her world. She knew its rules.
By 3:00 AM, the crowd had thinned slightly as some people retreated to tents or cars for a few hours of rest before the dawn set that was the festival’s signature feature. The DJ was still performing, the music gentler now, almost ambient, the kind of sound that accompanied the transition from night to morning.
Noa found a quiet spot at the edge of the production area and sat down on a equipment case, letting the music wash over her. The desert sky was impossibly clear, the stars bright enough to cast faint shadows. To the south, she could see the lights of Gaza City on the horizon, a glow that was easy to forget about most of the time.
She had grown up in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv, far from the border communities that lived in daily proximity to the Strip. Gaza was an abstraction for most Israelis like her—a place that occasionally generated rockets and headlines, a problem that seemed permanent and largely someone else’s concern. She knew it was more complicated than that. She had friends who had served in the IDF, who had done tours near the border, who spoke of the tension that characterized life in the periphery communities. But she had never experienced it directly.
The festival’s location near Re’im had been a minor concern during planning, something the organizers had discussed and ultimately dismissed. The Iron Dome was effective. The fence was secure. There hadn’t been a significant incident in years. The music community had held events in this area before without problems.
The risk was theoretical, distant, outweighed by the beauty of the location and the significance of the timing. Sukkot, the harvest festival. Simchat Torah, the celebration of Torah completion. A gathering of young people celebrating life in a land that had seen too much death.
Noa’s phone buzzed with a message from her mother: Are you being safe?
Always, she typed back. It’s beautiful out here.
Your brother?
Having the time of his life.
Good. I worry.
I know. But everything is fine.
She put the phone away and watched the stars wheel slowly overhead. The music continued, the crowd moved, and somewhere in her chest there was a feeling she would later identify as the last moment of peace before everything changed.
By 6:00 AM, the sun was beginning to lighten the eastern horizon. The dawn set would start soon—the festival’s climactic moment, when the DJ would build toward a crescendo that coincided with the sun breaking over the desert. Noa had seen it at other events, the way the music and the light combined to create something that felt almost sacred, a moment of transcendence that justified all the logistics and coordination that went into making it possible.
She found Eitan near the front of the stage, surrounded by others who had stayed awake through the night. He looked tired but happy, swaying gently to the ambient sounds that preceded the dawn set proper.
“Ready for this?” she asked, moving to stand beside him.
“I didn’t know music could feel like this,” he said. “Like everything is connected.”
“That’s why I do this job.”
The DJ began the transition, the ambient textures giving way to a slow build of rhythm. The crowd, perhaps two thousand people now, began to stir, to orient themselves toward the stage and the horizon beyond it. The sky was turning pink.
At 6:29 AM, the first sirens began.
Noa’s initial thought was that it was part of the performance—some artists incorporated unconventional sounds, and the wail had a certain industrial quality that might have been intentional. But then she saw the confusion on the faces around her, the way people were pulling out phones, the sudden stillness that replaced the building energy.
“Red Alert,” someone near her said. “Rockets.”
The protocol was familiar. Every Israeli knew it. You had fifteen seconds, maybe less depending on where you were, to find shelter. The nearest bomb shelter to the festival site was—
Noa realized she didn’t know. She had checked the site during planning, had confirmed that shelters existed somewhere nearby, but in this moment she couldn’t remember where.
The first impacts were audible before she could process what they meant. Not close, but not far either. Detonations that she could feel through her feet.
“Stay calm!” someone was shouting through the PA system. “Make your way to your vehicles in an orderly—”
The second wave of sirens cut off whatever else they were going to say. And then, beneath the sirens, another sound. Gunfire. Automatic weapons. Close.
Noa grabbed Eitan’s arm. “We need to go. Now.”
The crowd was beginning to understand. The orderly dispersal the announcement had called for became something else—not quite panic yet, but the beginning of it, three thousand people all realizing simultaneously that something was very wrong.
They moved toward the parking area, joining a stream of others doing the same thing. Noa’s car was somewhere in the middle of the field where vehicles had parked in loose rows. The gunfire was getting closer.
“What’s happening?” Eitan asked. His voice was controlled but she could see the fear in his eyes.
“I don’t know. Just stay with me.”
She saw people starting to run. She saw others standing frozen, unable to process the transition from celebration to crisis. She saw a vehicle—a pickup truck—speeding across the field in a direction that made no sense, toward the crowd rather than away from it.
And then she saw the men in the truck, and the weapons they were holding, and she understood.
“Run,” she said. “Eitan, run!”
They ran. The field was chaos now, people scattering in every direction, the sound of gunfire mixing with screams mixing with the sirens that wouldn’t stop. Noa held Eitan’s hand and they ran toward where she thought her car might be, but the rows had become meaningless in the confusion and she couldn’t find it.
A vehicle raced past them, close enough that she felt the wind of its passage. Another burst of gunfire. Someone fell near her—she didn’t know who, didn’t stop to check—and they kept running.
They reached a row of cars. People were trying to start engines, were pulling out of parking spaces, were creating a traffic jam that would trap everyone here.
“This way,” Eitan said, pulling her toward the edge of the field. “We can’t drive out of this.”
They ran on foot, leaving the festival grounds behind, leaving everything behind. The sounds of violence continued—gunfire, explosions, screaming—but Noa stopped hearing them as individual sounds. They became a single roar, the sound of a world coming apart.
They ran into orchards, into agricultural fields, into terrain they didn’t know. They ran until they couldn’t run anymore, and then they walked, and then they found a depression in the ground beside an irrigation channel and they hid.
Noa lay there with her brother, both of them breathing hard, listening to the helicopters that had begun to appear overhead, listening to the sounds of gunfire that seemed to come from everywhere.
“What’s happening?” Eitan said again.
She didn’t have an answer. She held his hand and waited for the world to start making sense again.
They hid for three hours.
During that time, Noa’s phone died. Eitan’s still had battery, and they watched through its small screen as fragmentary reports began to emerge. An attack. Multiple locations. Hundreds dead. Hostages taken.
The scale was impossible to comprehend. The festival, they learned, was just one target among many. Communities along the border—kibbutzim that had existed for decades, places where generations of families had built their lives—were under attack. The army was responding, but slowly, too slowly, overwhelmed by the scope of what was happening.
Around 10:00 AM, they saw IDF vehicles on a nearby road and decided to emerge. A patrol found them—two civilians in festival clothes, exhausted and terrified—and loaded them into an armored personnel carrier that was already crowded with other survivors.
Noa learned later that they were among the lucky ones. They had run in the right direction. They had hidden effectively. They had survived.
Eitan was not so lucky.
They were separated at the first checkpoint. Men of military age were being questioned, documented, assessed. Noa was directed to one area, Eitan to another. She protested, tried to stay with him, but in the chaos she lost sight of him.
She didn’t see him again that day.
She didn’t see him again that week.
Three days later, she received confirmation from the IDF that Eitan Harari, software engineer, age 27, had been identified in footage captured from Gaza. He was alive. He was being held hostage.
The last image she had of him was from the APC, his face through the small window as they were separated, his mouth forming words she couldn’t hear.
I’ll find you.
Or maybe: Find me.
Or maybe something else entirely. She would replay that moment for months, trying to read his lips, trying to understand what he had been trying to tell her in the last seconds before he disappeared into the system that would take him—how, she never learned—from an IDF checkpoint to a tunnel beneath Gaza where Israeli intelligence believed hostages were being held.
Everything is connected, he had said, hours before, when the music made him feel like the universe was coherent.
Now everything was scattered, broken, incomprehensible.
Noa Harari walked out of the processing center three days after the attack, hollow with shock and grief and a new feeling she didn’t yet have a name for. Later, she would recognize it as the beginning of something that would define the rest of her life.
The feeling of having someone you love taken from you. The feeling of not knowing if they were alive or dead. The feeling of being helpless in the face of a violence that had announced, in the most brutal terms possible, that the world was not safe and had never been safe and that everything she had believed about her life was a comfortable illusion that three thousand men with guns and hatred had ripped apart in a single morning.
She would spend the next sixteen months trying to bring him home.
The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. — Carl von Clausewitz
“The defensive form of war is in itself stronger than the offensive... The defensive form of warfare is stronger than the offensive, but has a negative object.” — Carl von Clausewitz
Dr. Tariq Al-Nasser had worked at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for eleven years, and in that time he had learned to expect the unexpected.
He was thirty-eight years old, tall and thin with graying temples that had appeared prematurely after the 2014 war. His specialty was emergency medicine, though in Gaza that specialty had expanded to include trauma surgery, triage under fire, and the particular art of practicing medicine without sufficient supplies. He had trained in Jordan, had briefly considered emigrating, had ultimately returned to Gaza because this was his home and because hospitals here needed doctors who understood what war did to bodies.
On the morning of October 6, 2023, he was completing a routine shift that had involved three car accident victims, two construction injuries, and an elderly woman with cardiac complications. Routine by Gaza standards, which meant he had lost one patient—the construction worker with the crush injury to his chest—and saved the rest. The mathematics of triage, of deciding who could be helped and who could not, had become second nature over the years. He no longer felt the weight of those decisions the way he once had.
“You look tired,” his colleague Dr. Samir Khalil observed in the break room. “How long have you been on?”
“Eighteen hours. Relief is coming at noon.”
“Inshallah.” Samir poured himself coffee from the industrial pot that someone kept perpetually brewing. “Did you hear the news? Something is happening.”
“Something is always happening.”
“This feels different. The radio is full of... I don’t know. Energy. Something is about to change.”
Tariq accepted a cup of coffee and sat down heavily in one of the plastic chairs that lined the break room wall. “I try not to listen to the radio.”
“I know. But Tariq—” Samir lowered his voice, though they were alone. “People are talking about an operation. A big one. Tomorrow, maybe. Simchat Torah.”
“People are always talking about operations.”
“This time the talk has specificity. They’re saying the fence will be breached. That our fighters will enter Israel.”
Tariq looked at his colleague, trying to read what was behind the words. Samir was not affiliated with Hamas—neither of them was, as far as Tariq knew—but in Gaza, everyone knew someone who knew something. Information circulated through networks that overlapped and intersected in ways that made it impossible to be entirely ignorant of what the resistance was planning.
“If that happens,” Tariq said carefully, “what follows will be terrible.”
“You think it won’t succeed?”
“I think it doesn’t matter if it succeeds or not. If Hamas attacks Israel, Israel will attack Gaza. That is how it works. That is how it has always worked.”
Samir was quiet for a moment. “Maybe this time will be different.”
“It is never different.”
Tariq finished his coffee and went home to the apartment in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood where he lived with his wife Dina and their two children, Sara and Mahmoud. The apartment was modest—three rooms, a small kitchen, a balcony overlooking a street that was usually noisy with vendors and traffic—but it was theirs, purchased with savings from fifteen years of medical work. In Gaza, ownership was precarious, but it was also the only anchor many people had.
Dina was preparing lunch when he arrived. She was a mathematics teacher at an UNRWA school, a woman of infinite patience who had married Tariq when they were both young and who had stayed with him through three wars and the endless hardship of life under blockade. Their daughter Sara was fourteen, serious and studious, already talking about someday becoming a doctor like her father. Mahmoud was ten, more interested in football than academics, full of the boundless energy that seemed to characterize boys of that age everywhere in the world.
“You look exhausted,” Dina said, the same observation Samir had made.
“Long night.” He kissed her cheek, then went to wash his hands in the small bathroom. The water pressure was low, as usual. “Where are the children?”
“Sara is studying. Mahmoud is playing downstairs with friends.”
“Tell him to come inside.”
Something in his tone made Dina look up from the vegetables she was cutting. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong. I just... want the family together today.”
He didn’t tell her what Samir had said. He didn’t know what to tell her. The rumors might be nothing—Gaza was always full of rumors—or they might be everything. Either way, there was little he could do except wait and prepare as best he could for whatever came next.
That night, he slept poorly. He dreamed of the 2014 war, of the hospital overwhelmed with casualties, of children with wounds that no child should ever have. He woke several times, checked on the children, stood for a moment on the balcony looking out at the city that had been his home for nearly four decades.
Gaza City at night was never entirely quiet. The sound of generators filled the gaps when the power was out—which was most of the time—and there was always someone moving through the streets, someone going to work or returning from it, someone living a life in the narrow hours between obligations. It was a city that had survived wars and blockades and occupations, a city that remade itself after each disaster, a city that Tariq loved despite everything it had cost him.
Tomorrow was Simchat Torah in Israel. A day of celebration. A day when defenses might be relaxed.
He went back inside and lay down beside Dina, who was sleeping peacefully, and waited for the morning.
He was at the hospital when it began.
The first rockets were launched at 6:30 AM. Tariq heard them from the emergency department, where he had returned for another shift after his replacement called in sick. The sound was familiar—the roar of motors, the arc of the missiles, the distant detonations—but the volume was different. Instead of a few rockets, there were hundreds. Thousands.
Within minutes, the phones began ringing. Not casualties yet—the attack was still outgoing—but calls from staff asking what was happening, from families seeking information, from administrators trying to understand the scale of what was unfolding.
Then the news began to filter in. Not just rockets. An invasion. Fighters crossing the fence in multiple locations. Attacks on Israeli communities.
Tariq felt his stomach tighten. He had been right. The response was coming.
“How long do we have?” Dr. Khalil asked, appearing at his side.
“I don’t know. Hours, maybe. Maybe less.”
“Should we begin preparations?”
“We should have begun preparations yesterday.”
They started the protocols they had developed over years of intermittent conflict. Clearing beds that could be cleared. Staging supplies—what supplies they had—in the most accessible locations. Alerting the blood bank. Notifying the surgery teams. All the steps that transformed a hospital from a place of routine care into a mechanism for processing mass casualties.
The first Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza at approximately 9:00 AM.
The sound was different from the rockets. Deeper, more concussive. The windows of the hospital rattled, and then the first ambulances began to arrive.
Tariq worked for the next eighteen hours without pause. The casualties were the kinds he had seen before but in numbers he had never experienced. Shrapnel wounds. Blast injuries. Burns. Crush injuries from collapsed buildings. Children. Women. Men. Entire families arriving together, their wounds telling a single story of a single strike on a single location.
He saved who he could. He lost who he couldn’t. He made the decisions that emergency medicine required, decisions that sorted human beings into categories of possibility: those who would survive with treatment, those who would survive without treatment, those who could not be saved. Triage was not cruel. Triage was necessity. But it was also a kind of violence, and by the end of that first night Tariq felt as though something inside him had been worn away.
During a brief moment of rest around 2:00 AM, he managed to call Dina. She and the children were safe—the strikes hadn’t reached their neighborhood yet—but she was frightened in a way he had never heard from her before.
“They’re saying it’s going to be different this time,” she said. “They’re saying Israel will try to finish us.”
“Don’t listen to what they’re saying. Just stay inside. I’ll come home when I can.”
“Tariq—” Her voice broke. “I love you.”
“I love you too. Tell the children I love them. I’ll be home soon.”
He went back to work.
By October 9, Al-Shifa had exceeded its capacity several times over. Patients lay in hallways, in waiting rooms, in any space that could hold a bed. The morgue was full, and bodies had been placed in the parking lot for lack of anywhere else to put them. The supply of anesthetics was running low. The supply of blood was critically short. The generators were consuming fuel at an unsustainable rate, and the electricity from the grid—when it came at all—was intermittent.
Tariq had slept perhaps six hours in the past three days, in fragments, in whatever corner he could find between surgeries. His hands trembled slightly when he held them still, and he had stopped being able to taste the coffee that someone kept making sure was available to the medical staff.
The numbers were impossible to process. Hundreds dead, then thousands. The strikes continued, hitting residential buildings, hitting infrastructure, hitting places that Tariq had known all his life. His own neighborhood was intact so far, but he had colleagues whose homes had been destroyed, whose families had been killed.
And still the casualties came. Still the ambulances arrived, when they could get through the rubble. Still the bodies piled up, waiting for burial, waiting for identification, waiting for someone to claim them.
On the morning of the 9th, he received a call from his wife.
“Tariq.” Her voice was strange, flat. “There’s an evacuation order. They’re telling everyone north of the Wadi to leave.”
“Leave for where?”
“The south. They say it’s safer in the south.”
“Nothing is safer. It’s all Gaza.”
“I know. But what do we do?”
He thought about it. The hospital was in the north, in Gaza City. If the family stayed, they would be close to him, but they would also be in what the Israelis had designated as a combat zone. If they left, they would have to travel through areas that were being struck continuously, to reach a destination that might not be any more secure.
“Go,” he said finally. “Take the children. Go to your sister in Khan Younis.”
“What about you?”
“I can’t leave. The hospital needs every doctor we have.”
“Tariq—”
“I know. I know. But I can’t.”
There was a long silence on the line. Then Dina said: “I understand.”
“Take the car. Leave before noon, when there’s supposed to be a pause in the strikes. And Dina—”
“Yes?”
“Don’t take Salah al-Din Road. Take the coastal route. It’s longer but there’s less traffic.”
“Okay.”
“I love you. I love the children.”
“I know.” Her voice broke again. “We love you.”
He went back to work.
That afternoon, he learned that a convoy of vehicles on the coastal road had been struck by an Israeli airstrike. The vehicles were carrying civilians fleeing south, as the evacuation order had instructed.
He tried to call Dina. The call didn’t connect.
He tried again. And again.
The calls never connected.
Three days later, Tariq received confirmation that his wife and children had been among those killed in the strike on the coastal road convoy.
He was in the middle of a surgery when the news came—a messenger from the hospital administration, whispering the information to Dr. Khalil, who waited until the surgery was complete before taking Tariq aside and telling him.
Tariq heard the words. He understood their meaning. But something in him failed to connect the information to reality. He stood in the corridor of the hospital, still wearing his surgical gown, and tried to feel what he knew he should be feeling.
Nothing came.
“You should go home,” Samir said. “You should rest.”
“There is no home. There is no rest.”
“Tariq—”
“I am needed here.” He heard his own voice as though from a distance, calm and flat. “There are patients waiting.”
He went back to work.
He worked through that day and the next day and the day after that. He worked through the weeks that followed, as the war intensified, as the casualties multiplied, as the hospital struggled to function without supplies or electricity or enough staff. He worked because work was the only thing left, because medicine required all his attention, because if he stopped working he would have to feel what he had lost, and he knew that if he allowed himself to feel it he would never be able to function again.
He worked through November, when the brief ceasefire brought a moment of hope and then ended. He worked through December, when the hospital was forced to relocate patients to the basement because the upper floors were too dangerous. He worked through the new year, when the scope of destruction became something that statistics could not convey.
He worked until the hospital itself was no longer functional, and then he worked in the field hospitals that sprang up to replace it, and then he worked in tents and abandoned buildings and anywhere else that casualties were brought for treatment.
The war continued.
His family did not come back.
He kept working.
The aggressor is always peace-loving; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed. — Carl von Clausewitz
October 7 - November 2023
“Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed.” — Carl von Clausewitz
Omer Levy received the mobilization order at 7:23 AM on October 7, 2023, while standing in his kitchen making coffee.
The text message was standard military format: report to your unit’s designated assembly point within eight hours. No explanation was required. Every Israeli who had served knew that when the call came, you went.
He was forty-three years old, a combat engineer who had done his mandatory service twenty years earlier and had been on reserve duty ever since. In civilian life he was a contractor, a builder of houses and renovations, a man who worked with his hands because he had discovered he was good at it and because it kept him too busy to think too much about things that couldn’t be changed. He lived in Petah Tikva with his wife Michal and their three children—Yonatan, seventeen, Shira, fourteen, and little Noam, who was only seven and didn’t yet understand what his father’s khaki uniform in the closet meant.
The television was on in the living room, and from the kitchen Omer could hear the breaking news. Reports of rocket fire... incidents at the border fence... developing situation... The language was careful, the tone urgent. Whatever was happening, it was more than routine.
“Omer?” Michal appeared in the doorway, still in her bathrobe. She had heard the phone buzz. “Is it—”
“Yes.”
She nodded once, her face suddenly composed in the way that military families learned to compose themselves. They had been through this before—in 2014, in 2021—but something about her expression told him she understood that this time was different.
“How long do you have?”
“Eight hours. I’ll report to Tze’elim.”
“I’ll pack your bag.”
She was practical, efficient, doing what needed to be done. It was one of the things he loved about her—the way she met crisis with action rather than panic. But as she turned to go, he caught her hand.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” he said. “But I think it’s bad.”
“I know.” She squeezed his hand once, then released it. “Go shower. I’ll get everything ready.”
By the time he reached the assembly point at Camp Tze’elim, the scale of the disaster was becoming clear.
Omer saw it in the faces of his fellow reservists, men his age and older, men with families and businesses and lives they had been pulled away from, all of them arriving with the same expression of disbelief and determination. He saw it in the chaos of the camp itself, the hurried activity of regular soldiers trying to process hundreds of arriving reservists while simultaneously monitoring a situation that was still unfolding. He saw it in the televisions that someone had set up in the processing area, the images that nobody could stop watching even though watching accomplished nothing.
The kibbutzim. The communities near the fence. The music festival.
Hundreds dead. Maybe more. Hostages taken. We don’t know how many.
Omer found his unit—the 614th Combat Engineering Battalion, a reserve unit attached to the 162nd Division—and reported to his company commander, Captain Amir Rosenberg. Amir was a younger man, early thirties, who in civilian life was an attorney. He looked as though he hadn’t slept.
“We’re deploying,” Amir said without preamble. “Full mobilization. We don’t have a specific mission yet, but we’re told to expect ground operations.”
“Into Gaza?”
“Probably. The politicians are still deciding, but—” He gestured toward the television. “After this? There’s going to be a response.”
Omer nodded. He had expected as much. The attacks were still ongoing in some places—the IDF was still fighting to retake the communities that had been overrun—but already the discussion was shifting from what happened to what happens next.
He found a bunk in the temporary barracks and sat down to call Michal. The connection was poor—everyone was trying to call at once—but he managed to get through.
“I’m safe,” he said. “We’re at Tze’elim. No deployment yet.”
“Thank God.” He could hear the relief in her voice. “The news is... I don’t have words.”
“I know.”
“Omer, some of the families on the news—they’re people we know. The Shohanis from Be’eri. The Goldsteins from Kfar Aza. Do you remember them? From Yonatan’s summer camp?”
“I remember.”
“They don’t know yet if they’re alive or—”
“I know.”
There was silence on the line. He could hear his children in the background, their voices raised in the particular tone of children who sense that something terrible has happened but don’t understand what.
“Come home,” Michal said. “When you can. Whatever comes next.”
“I will.”
The ground offensive began three weeks later.
During that time, Omer trained, waited, and tried to understand what had happened. The numbers emerged slowly: over 1,200 dead, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. 240 hostages, maybe more, taken into Gaza. Communities destroyed. An entire festival massacred.
And the response: the IDF had assembled the largest ground force since 1973. Three hundred thousand reservists mobilized. The entire Gaza Strip would be entered, building by building, street by street, tunnel by tunnel. The objective was the destruction of Hamas’s military capability.
The objective, as one of his commanders put it more bluntly, was to make sure this could never happen again.
Omer was not a young man anymore, and twenty years of reserve duty had taught him to think critically about military operations. He understood that “destruction of Hamas’s military capability” was easier to say than to accomplish. He understood that fighting in Gaza—the most densely populated area on earth, honeycombed with tunnels, defended by an enemy that knew every street and alley—would be extraordinarily difficult. He understood that the anger driving the response was genuine but that anger alone did not win wars.
He kept these thoughts to himself. The men around him needed certainty, not doubt. And besides, the doubts changed nothing. The call had come. The mission had been given. What remained was to execute it as professionally and carefully as possible.
On October 27, his battalion crossed the fence.
Nothing had prepared him for Gaza.
He had been in Lebanon in 2006, briefly, near the end of that war. He had seen combat, had known fear, had lost men he cared about. But Lebanon was mountains and villages, places where you could see your enemy coming. Gaza was something else entirely.
The first thing he noticed was the density. Buildings packed so closely together that streets became canyons, each window a potential threat, each doorway a possible ambush point. The second thing was the destruction—much of it pre-existing, from earlier wars, but multiplied now by the intensity of the Israeli bombing campaign. Rubble everywhere, dust that coated everything, the smell of smoke and something worse that he learned not to identify.
His battalion’s mission was to clear and demolish structures that could harbor Hamas fighters or conceal tunnel entrances. In practice, this meant systematic destruction on a scale he had never experienced.
“This building,” Amir said on their third day, pointing to an apartment block that had already been evacuated—or so they hoped. “Intelligence says there’s a tunnel entrance in the basement.”
“The whole building?”
“The whole building.”
Omer’s team set the charges. Controlled demolition was his specialty; he knew how to bring structures down safely, how to direct the collapse, how to minimize risk to surrounding buildings. But in Gaza, the surrounding buildings were often already damaged, and the concept of “safe” had become relative.
The building came down in a cloud of dust and debris. They found the tunnel entrance in the rubble—Amir had been right—and sappers went in to assess it. Omer waited on the surface, watching the dust settle, thinking about the families who had lived in those apartments before the evacuation orders came.
Had they all gotten out? Had they had time? Or were there bodies in the rubble, people who had been too old or too stubborn or too frightened to leave?
He didn’t ask. The questions led nowhere. The mission continued.
By December, he had lost track of how many buildings he had demolished.
The numbers existed somewhere—carefully recorded by the battalion’s clerks, documented for after-action reports that would eventually be written—but Omer had stopped counting. Each building was the same: assess, clear, charge, demolish. The process became mechanical, the repetition a kind of protection against having to think about what he was doing.
They found tunnels everywhere. Beneath mosques. Beneath schools. Beneath apartment buildings. The tunnel network was more extensive than anything intelligence had predicted, a subterranean city that connected Hamas’s military infrastructure in ways that surface operations couldn’t fully address.
And they found other things too. Weapons caches. Command posts. Documents and computers that intelligence officers took away for analysis. And sometimes—not often, but sometimes—they found the people who had used those facilities.
Omer tried not to think about the people. They were enemies. They had helped plan or execute or support the attacks of October 7. They were combatants in a war that Hamas had started. These were the formulations he used, the categories that made it possible to continue.
But some nights, lying in whatever shelter the battalion had secured for rest, he thought about the other people. The ones who weren’t combatants. The children who had grown up in those buildings, who had played on those streets, who had known no life except the one shaped by blockade and occupation and periodic war. The medical workers in the hospitals that were running out of supplies. The families who had evacuated south as ordered, only to find that south was not safe either.
This is war, he told himself. This is what war looks like.
But he had seen war before, and this felt different. The scale was different. The duration was different. The systematic nature of the destruction was different.
In January, he called Michal during a brief pause in operations.
“When are you coming home?” she asked.
“I don’t know. They keep extending the deployments.”
“It’s been three months, Omer.”
“I know.”
“Yonatan got his draft notice. He’s been assigned to—”
“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know yet.”
There was silence. Then Michal said: “Are you okay?”
He thought about how to answer that. He thought about the buildings, the tunnels, the faces of men he had seen pulled from rubble. He thought about the weight he had lost, the sleep he wasn’t getting, the tremor in his hands that he had noticed starting sometime in December.
“I’m doing my job,” he said finally. “That’s all I can say.”
“Come home,” she said. “When you can. We need you.”
“I will.”
But even as he said it, he wasn’t sure it was true. The man who had left in October was not the same man who would return. Something had been built in him, or demolished—he wasn’t sure which—and he didn’t know what would remain when the work was finally done.
No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. — Carl von Clausewitz
“The first quality of a commander is a cool head which receives a correct impression of things. He should not allow himself to be confused by either the good or bad reports that follow one upon another.” — Carl von Clausewitz
Yael woke to the sound of sirens.
For a moment, lying in the darkness of her apartment in Be’er Sheva, she thought it was part of the dream she had been having—a dream of monitors and intercepts and warnings that scrolled endlessly across screens that no one was reading. Then the second siren began, and the third, overlapping, the familiar wail of Red Alert that meant rockets from Gaza.
She checked her phone: 6:31 AM. Simchat Torah. The holiday.
She had fifteen seconds to reach shelter. Her apartment building had a reinforced stairwell, and she made it there with seconds to spare, joining two neighbors who had emerged from their own apartments in various states of undress. They waited, listening. The booms came—distant, muffled by the Iron Dome’s interceptors—but they kept coming. More than usual. Many more.
“What’s happening?” one of her neighbors asked.
Yael shook her head. She didn’t know. But the intercepts from yesterday flickered through her mind, the patterns she had been trying to make people see for weeks. Something is happening.
Her phone buzzed. A message from Baratz: Report immediately.
She ran back to her apartment, threw on clothes, grabbed her keys. The sirens were still sounding as she drove toward the base, and she could see in her rearview mirror the trails of interceptors rising to meet the incoming rockets. The sky was full of them—more than she had ever seen—arcing white against the dawn.
The operations center was chaos.
Yael had never seen it like this. Every station was manned, every screen alive with data, every phone ringing. The normal hum of focused concentration had been replaced by something else—voices raised, people moving quickly between stations, the particular quality of noise that meant something had gone catastrophically wrong.
She found Baratz in the center of the room, staring at a main display that showed a map of the Gaza border region. Red markers were appearing faster than she could count—incidents, breaches, attacks. The fence had been breached in dozens of locations. Paragliders had been spotted over multiple communities. There were reports of gunfire from inside Israeli territory.
“How bad?” she asked.
Baratz turned to her, and she saw something in his face she had never seen before: fear.
“It’s all of them,” he said. “Every community along the fence. They’re everywhere.”
The display updated again. More red markers. More incidents. The scale was impossible.
“The festival,” someone called from across the room. “There’s a music festival near Re’im. Thousands of people. They’re reporting mass casualties.”
Yael felt the floor shift beneath her. The festival. She had heard about it—the Supernova gathering, the Sukkot celebration. Thousands of young people, dancing in the desert, five kilometers from the Gaza fence.
Five kilometers from the fence.
“How did this happen?” someone was asking. “How did we not see this coming?”
Yael said nothing. She had seen it coming. She had filed the reports, flagged the intercepts, escalated to her superiors. The system had received her warnings and processed them according to its logic.
The system had been wrong.
By 8:00 AM, the scope of the disaster was becoming clear.
Hamas forces—not dozens but thousands—had breached the fence and entered Israeli territory. They had attacked military bases first, neutralizing the Gaza Division’s response capability. Then they had moved to the civilian communities: kibbutzim, moshavim, towns that had existed for generations on land that abutted the Strip.
The attacks were coordinated, systematic, and brutal. Reports filtered in of executions, of families killed in their homes, of residents dragged from safe rooms and murdered. The holiday had caught everything at reduced readiness. Reserve forces were with their families. Regular units were operating with skeleton crews.
And the response was slow. Too slow. The IDF was mobilizing as fast as it could, but the scale of the attack had overwhelmed the local forces, and reinforcements were still hours away.
Yael worked her station, processing the intelligence that now flooded in. Intercepts from Hamas radio communications, real-time tracking of militant groups moving through Israeli territory, reports from survivors who had managed to call for help. The data that had been fragments before October 7 was now a torrent, and all of it pointed to the same conclusion: this was not a raid or an incursion. This was an invasion.
“The Jericho Walls plan,” she said to Baratz during a brief moment when he passed her station. “They executed it. Exactly as the document described.”
He looked at her, and she saw recognition in his eyes. He remembered the document. He remembered her warnings. He remembered dismissing them.
“Not now,” he said. “We deal with what’s in front of us.”
She turned back to her screens. He was right. Recriminations would come later. Now there was only the work.
At 10:30 AM, Major General Neumann came to the operations center.
Yael had never seen the general look old before. Neumann had always projected authority, competence, the kind of certainty that came from decades of experience. Now she looked like what she was: a woman in her sixties who had just watched everything she had built fail catastrophically.
She addressed the room briefly. The Prime Minister had declared war. Full mobilization was underway. Their job was to provide intelligence support for the response operations that would follow.
“We will have time to analyze what went wrong,” Neumann said. “But not today. Today we focus on saving lives and eliminating the threat. Is that understood?”
The room acknowledged. The general turned to leave, then paused at Yael’s station.
“Captain Shimoni.”
“Ma’am.”
“Your reports from last week. The pattern analysis.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Neumann was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was quiet enough that only Yael could hear.
“You were right. I’m sorry.”
She walked away before Yael could respond.
The hours that followed blurred together.
Yael processed intelligence, coordinated with field units, helped direct the response operations that were finally bringing the IDF’s full capability to bear. By afternoon, the military was regaining control of the border communities, killing or capturing the Hamas fighters who had penetrated Israeli territory. But the cost was becoming apparent with each new report.
The kibbutzim. Be’eri, where over a hundred had been killed and dozens taken hostage. Kfar Aza, where the bodies of families were being found in their homes. Nir Oz. Nahal Oz. Names that had been abstractions on her maps were now sites of massacre.
The festival. The Supernova gathering, where hundreds had been killed while trying to flee, where young people had been hunted through open fields and hiding places, where the celebration had become a slaughter.
The hostages. Numbers that climbed throughout the day—dozens, then over a hundred, then more than two hundred. Men, women, children, elderly, soldiers and civilians, dragged across the fence into Gaza.
Yael tracked it all, documented it all, fed the intelligence into the system that was now functioning at full capacity. The system that had failed to prevent the attack was working perfectly to respond to it. That was the paradox: the same apparatus that had dismissed her warnings was now the essential tool for managing the consequences of those dismissals.
At some point—she lost track of when—she realized she was crying. Not sobbing, not breaking down, just tears running silently down her face while she worked. She wiped them away and continued. There was too much to do for grief.
She finally left the operations center at 11:00 PM, nearly seventeen hours after she had arrived.
The base was still active—it would be active for days, for weeks, for however long this war lasted—but her shift had ended, and Baratz had ordered her to go home and rest. She would be needed tomorrow. They would all be needed.
She drove through empty streets. The country was in shock, everyone inside, everyone watching the news, everyone trying to understand what had happened. The death toll was over a thousand now, making this the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. The hostage count was still unclear—maybe two hundred, maybe more.
In her apartment, she sat on her bed and stared at the wall.
She had been right. She had seen the attack coming. She had done everything procedure allowed to warn the system. And it had made no difference.
The conceptzia, Neumann had called it. The framework of assumptions that shaped how intelligence was interpreted. Hamas was deterred. Hamas was focused on governance. Hamas wouldn’t risk regime-ending retaliation.
The conceptzia had been wrong. And because it had been wrong, over a thousand people were dead and hundreds were in captivity.
Yael thought about the intercepts she had flagged, the reports she had filed, the meetings she had requested. She thought about Baratz telling her to go home and rest, about Neumann explaining why the system responded the way it did. She thought about all the points where different decisions might have led to different outcomes.
Would it have mattered?
If she had pushed harder. If she had gone outside channels. If she had done something dramatic enough to force attention. Would anyone have listened? Would the conceptzia have shifted? Or would the system have simply processed her more aggressive warnings the same way it had processed her routine ones?
She didn’t know. She would never know. The alternative histories existed only in imagination, and imagination was not reality.
What she knew was this: she had done her job, and her job had not been enough. The system had worked as designed, and the design had failed. The intelligence had been there, and the intelligence had not mattered.
She thought about quitting. Walking away from Unit 8200, from the military, from the entire apparatus that had failed so catastrophically. What was the point of intelligence work if the intelligence was ignored?
But even as she thought it, she knew she wouldn’t do it. Not because she believed the system would change—though perhaps it would, eventually, as the investigations and recriminations unfolded—but because the work still needed to be done. The hostages were still in Gaza. The enemy was still there. The war that was beginning would require every analyst, every processor, every person who could help the IDF understand what it was facing.
She would go back tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. She would do her job because her job was the only thing she had to offer, and because doing nothing was worse than doing something imperfect.
She lay down on her bed, still in her uniform, and closed her eyes. Sleep came eventually, bringing dreams of monitors and warnings and red markers spreading across a map that no one was watching.
When she woke, it was still dark, and the war was still happening, and nothing had changed except everything.
War is the province of chance. In no sphere of human activity is such a margin to be left for this intruder, because none is so much in constant contact with him on all sides. — Carl von Clausewitz
“In war, the result is never final... The defeated state often considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found in political conditions at some later date.” — Carl von Clausewitz
In November 2023, Noa Harari learned what it meant to wait.
She had returned to Tel Aviv after the attack, to the apartment she had shared with a roommate who was now looking at her with the particular mixture of sympathy and discomfort that characterized everyone’s reaction. The apartment felt wrong—too normal, too unchanged, as though the world inside its walls had not received the news that everything outside had been destroyed.
Her parents had wanted her to come home to Ramat Gan, but she couldn’t. Being with them meant being in the house where she and Eitan had grown up, surrounded by photographs and memories that made his absence unbearable. At least in the apartment, he had never lived. At least here, his absence was not a presence.
She tried to work. The music industry had ground to a halt after October 7—no one was booking festivals or tours, no one was thinking about entertainment—but there were administrative tasks, emails to answer, artists to reassure. She sat at her laptop and stared at the screen and felt nothing.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had given her a liaison, a woman named Tamar who was supposed to keep the hostage families informed. Tamar called every few days with updates that contained no information: negotiations were ongoing, efforts were being made, the government was working tirelessly.
“But is he alive?” Noa asked, every time. “Do you know if he’s alive?”
“We don’t have confirmation either way,” Tamar said, every time. “But we have no reason to believe otherwise.”
No reason to believe otherwise. The phrase became a kind of mantra, repeated in her head during the long nights when sleep wouldn’t come. Eitan was alive because there was no reason to believe he wasn’t. The logic was circular, unsatisfying, but it was all she had.
On November 15, she attended her first meeting of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
The Forum had been established in the days after the attack, a grassroots organization of families demanding information and action. They met in a community center in Tel Aviv, dozens of people bound together by the same impossible situation: someone they loved was in Gaza, and they didn’t know if that person was alive or dead.
Noa found a seat near the back and watched as speakers took the microphone one by one. Parents whose children had been taken. Children whose parents were missing. Siblings, spouses, friends—all of them carrying the same weight, the same uncertainty, the same desperate need for news.
A woman named Rachel spoke about her daughter, a soldier who had been captured at the Nahal Oz base. A man named David spoke about his elderly mother, taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz. A young woman spoke about her boyfriend, last seen being dragged toward the fence.
When it was Noa’s turn, she found she could barely speak.
“My brother,” she managed. “Eitan. He was at the festival with me. We got separated. They—” She stopped, swallowed. “They identified him in footage from Gaza. But I don’t know if he’s still...”
She couldn’t finish. A woman beside her—someone’s mother, someone’s aunt—took her hand and squeezed it. The gesture said everything: We understand. We’re all here.
After the meeting, she found herself talking to other family members, exchanging phone numbers, joining WhatsApp groups that buzzed with updates and rumors and desperate hopes. The Forum was planning demonstrations, media campaigns, meetings with government officials. They were not going to let the world forget that 240 people were being held in tunnels beneath Gaza.
“What can I do?” Noa asked Rachel, the woman whose daughter was a soldier.
“Whatever you can. Some of us speak to media. Some organize protests. Some work behind the scenes with the negotiators.” Rachel paused. “The most important thing is to keep the pressure on. The government has other priorities—the war, the politics, everything else. Our job is to make sure the hostages stay at the top of the agenda.”
“And will that bring them home?”
Rachel’s face was unreadable. “I don’t know. But doing nothing definitely won’t.”
On November 22, the government announced a ceasefire.
Four days. That was the initial agreement. Hamas would release fifty hostages—women and children—in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners. The fighting would pause. Humanitarian aid would flow into Gaza. And then... negotiations would continue for more.
Noa spent those days in a state of suspended animation, watching the lists of names as they were released, waiting to see if Eitan’s would be among them. He was not a woman or a child. He was a twenty-seven-year-old man. He was not in the first group.
But the ceasefire was extended. Another two days. Another batch of hostages. And then another extension, and another batch.
The families gathered at the processing center where the released hostages were brought for medical evaluation and debriefing. Noa saw them emerge—thin, dazed, blinking in the light—and she saw the families who ran to embrace them, the tears and the joy and the terrible relief.
She also saw the families who were not reunited. The ones who watched each batch arrive and did not see the face they were looking for. The ones who remained in the waiting area after everyone else had left, still hoping, still uncertain.
On November 30, the ceasefire ended.
One hundred and ten hostages had been released. More than a hundred remained in Gaza. Eitan was among those who remained.
The fighting resumed. The bombs began falling again. And Noa understood that the waiting was not over—that it might never be over, that she might spend the rest of her life in this suspended state, not knowing if her brother was alive or dead, not knowing if he would ever come home.
December was the worst month.
The war intensified. The IDF pushed deeper into Gaza, and with each advance the hostage families were told that military pressure was essential for forcing Hamas to negotiate. But the negotiations seemed to go nowhere. Proposals were exchanged, conditions demanded, offers rejected. The hostages remained in the tunnels.
Noa threw herself into advocacy work. She spoke to journalists, gave interviews, appeared on television panels where she was asked the same questions over and over: How are you coping? What do you want the government to do? Do you think your brother is still alive?
“I believe he’s alive,” she said, because saying anything else felt like betrayal. “I have to believe that. And I want the government to prioritize bringing them home. All of them. Whatever it takes.”
Whatever it takes. The phrase became controversial. Some hostage families wanted the government to pursue a deal at any cost—release prisoners, accept a ceasefire, negotiate directly with Hamas. Others supported the military campaign, believing that pressure on Hamas would eventually force them to release the hostages. The families were not unified. They agreed on the goal but disagreed on the means.
Noa found herself somewhere in the middle. She wanted Eitan home. She also understood why the government couldn’t simply give Hamas everything it demanded. She also resented the government for seeming to prioritize military objectives over the hostages. She held all these positions simultaneously, and none of them offered comfort.
In late December, she received a call from Tamar, her liaison.
“We have information,” Tamar said, her voice careful. “A released hostage reported seeing your brother in captivity.”
Noa’s heart stopped. “When? Where? Is he—”
“She saw him approximately three weeks ago. He appeared to be in reasonable physical condition. They were being held together for a period before she was released.”
“Three weeks ago. That was—”
“Before the ceasefire ended. Yes.”
“And since then?”
“We don’t have information since then. The hostages have been moved, dispersed. Intelligence is limited.”
Noa sat down heavily. Three weeks ago. Reasonable physical condition. Intelligence is limited.
“Thank you,” she said. “For telling me.”
“I know it’s not much. But I thought you would want to know.”
After Tamar hung up, Noa sat for a long time in silence. Three weeks ago, Eitan had been alive. Three weeks ago, someone had seen him. That was something. That was more than she had known yesterday.
But three weeks was a long time in a war. Three weeks was a lifetime.
She called her parents and told them what she had learned. Her mother cried. Her father asked questions that Noa couldn’t answer. They all pretended to be hopeful, and none of them knew if the hope was justified.
That night, Noa dreamed of the festival. Not the chaos, not the running, not the horror of October 7—but the hours before, when the music had been playing and the stars had been bright and Eitan had turned to her with wonder in his eyes and said I get it now.
She woke with his voice in her ears and the absence of him in the room, and she lay in the darkness and waited for morning to come.
In January, she was asked to speak at an international conference on hostage situations.
The conference was in Paris, organized by a coalition of NGOs and government representatives. Hostage families from around the world were invited to share their experiences and advocate for their loved ones. It was the kind of event Noa would never have attended before October 7—international advocacy was not her world—but now it was her world, because her world had been reduced to a single obsessive focus: bringing Eitan home.
She flew to Paris with three other Israeli families. The conference was held in a grand hotel near the Champs-Élysées, and the contrast between the elegant surroundings and the reason for their presence felt obscene.
When it was her turn to speak, she stood at the podium and looked out at the audience—diplomats, journalists, activists, other families—and tried to find words that would convey what she was experiencing.
“My brother’s name is Eitan Harari,” she said. “He is twenty-seven years old. He is a software engineer. He likes hiking and science fiction and terrible puns that make everyone groan. He came to the music festival because I asked him to. And now he’s in a tunnel somewhere beneath Gaza, and I don’t know if he’s alive, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.”
She paused. The room was silent.
“I’m here because I don’t know what else to do. I can’t rescue him. I can’t negotiate his release. I can’t even find out for certain whether he’s still breathing. All I can do is stand here and ask you to remember that he exists. That he’s a person, not a statistic. That somewhere in the darkness, if he’s still alive, he might be hoping that someone is still looking for him.”
Her voice broke on the last words. She stepped back from the podium, and someone else came forward to speak, and Noa sat down and felt the weight of everything she had said and everything she hadn’t been able to say.
After the conference, a French diplomat approached her. He said things that sounded sympathetic. He gave her his card. He promised that his government was doing everything possible to help secure the hostages’ release.
She thanked him and put the card in her pocket and knew that it would change nothing. The hostages would come home through negotiation or rescue or luck, and speeches at conferences would not affect which of those possibilities materialized.
But she had promised Rachel, at that first Forum meeting, that she would do whatever she could. And this—speaking, advocating, keeping the world’s attention on the people who had been taken—was what she could do.
It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. But it was something.
The moral forces in war can no more be ignored than the physical; the two are as inseparable as body and soul. — Carl von Clausewitz
-e
December 2023 - June 2024
“Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.” — Carl von Clausewitz
By January 2024, Dr. Tariq Al-Nasser had been displaced three times.
The first displacement came when Al-Shifa Hospital was ordered evacuated. Israeli forces had surrounded it, claiming Hamas used the facility as a command center. Whether true or not—Tariq did not know, had never asked, did not want to know—the hospital could no longer function as a hospital. The patients who could walk walked. The patients who couldn’t were carried. The doctors and nurses who remained went with them.
Tariq went to a field hospital in Jabalia, set up in what had once been a school. The conditions were impossible: no operating theater, insufficient supplies, too many patients. He worked eighteen-hour shifts, then twenty-hour shifts, then lost track of how many hours he was working because time had ceased to have meaning.
The second displacement came in late November, when Israeli ground forces advanced into Jabalia. The field hospital was caught in the combat zone. Again, evacuation. Again, the desperate transport of patients who could not transport themselves. Again, the choice of what to take and what to leave behind.
He went south this time, to Khan Younis, where the International Committee of the Red Cross had established a medical station. The journey took two days—twenty kilometers that should have been an hour’s drive, turned into an odyssey of checkpoints and detours and long waits while bombs fell somewhere nearby.
The third displacement came in February, when Khan Younis itself became a combat zone. This time he went to Rafah, the southernmost city in the Strip, pressed against the Egyptian border. The population there had swelled to impossible density as displaced Gazans from the north crowded into an area never meant to hold them.
Tariq found work in a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders. The conditions were marginally better than the field hospitals—they had some supplies, some equipment, some semblance of organization—but the patient load was overwhelming. Not just trauma from the fighting, but disease outbreaks from the crowded conditions, malnutrition from the interrupted food supply, dehydration from contaminated water.
He treated a child with dysentery one morning and thought of his son Mahmoud. He treated a teenage girl with shrapnel wounds and thought of his daughter Sara. He treated a woman in labor, successful delivery, healthy infant, and thought of Dina, who had never been able to watch him work without wincing at the blood.
They were all dead. He knew they were dead. The strike on the evacuation convoy had been confirmed, the bodies recovered, the burial—such as it was—completed somewhere in Gaza that he would probably never be able to visit. He had received the news and understood its meaning and continued working, because working was the only alternative to feeling, and feeling was impossible.
In March, he met a woman named Fatima.
She was a nurse at the clinic, originally from Gaza City, widowed in the first week of the war when her husband was killed in an airstrike. She had two surviving children—a boy of six and a girl of four—and she worked the same impossible shifts that Tariq worked, for the same reason: because stopping was worse.
They did not become friends, exactly. Friendship required a capacity for connection that neither of them possessed anymore. But they recognized something in each other, a shared quality of numbness that made them able to work together without the social friction that other colleagues seemed to create.
“You don’t talk about your family,” Fatima observed one night, during a brief break between patients.
“No.”
“Neither do I.” She paused. “It doesn’t help.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
They returned to work.
Later, Tariq tried to remember if he had ever told anyone in Rafah about Dina and Sara and Mahmoud. He couldn’t recall doing so. The absence of his family had become a private void, something he carried inside himself that he did not share because sharing would require him to acknowledge it, and acknowledging it would require him to feel it, and feeling it would destroy him.
So he didn’t feel it. He worked instead.
In April, the Israeli military announced plans to enter Rafah.
The announcement was not a surprise. Everyone knew it was coming. Rafah was the last major population center that the IDF had not occupied, and the military logic demanded that they clear it too—searching for tunnels, for Hamas infrastructure, for the hostages who might still be held somewhere in the labyrinth beneath the city.
The question was what would happen to the million-plus people who now lived there.
“Evacuate to the humanitarian zone,” the announcements said. “Al-Mawasi is designated as a safe area.”
Tariq looked at the maps. Al-Mawasi was a strip of coastal land, perhaps fifteen square kilometers. A million people were supposed to fit there. The mathematics were obvious: it was impossible.
But the mathematics had been impossible from the beginning. Gaza itself was impossible—two million people in 365 square kilometers, most of that built-up urban terrain, hemmed in by sea and fence and the politics that had made the Strip a prison long before the current war began. The humanitarian zone was just another impossible compression of human beings into space that could not contain them.
The clinic began planning for evacuation. The Doctors Without Borders coordinators met daily, trying to arrange logistics, trying to coordinate with the other aid organizations, trying to figure out how to move patients and equipment to a new location that might not be any safer than the current one.
Tariq participated in the meetings without feeling invested in them. His role was clear: he would go where the patients went, work where there was work to do. The decisions about where and when were not his to make.
“Do you have any thoughts?” the MSF coordinator asked him after one meeting.
“About what?”
“About the evacuation. The risks. The alternatives.”
Tariq considered the question. “There are no alternatives. The military is coming. We cannot stay. We go to al-Mawasi or we die here.”
“That’s not what I—”
“I know what you meant. You want me to have an opinion about policy, about strategy, about the larger situation. I don’t have opinions about those things anymore. I have patients. When we move, I will treat the patients there. That is my opinion.”
The coordinator looked at him for a long moment. “Are you all right?”
“I am functioning. That is all I can offer.”
In May, they moved to al-Mawasi.
The conditions were worse than anything Tariq had seen. The humanitarian zone was a tent city of impossible density, people living under plastic sheeting, sharing water from tanker trucks that arrived irregularly, eating food that international organizations struggled to deliver through the checkpoints. Sewage was an open problem. Disease was inevitable.
The clinic set up in a donated tent, forty beds crammed into a space meant for twenty. Patients came with the ailments of displacement: dehydration, malnutrition, infectious disease, untreated chronic conditions, trauma from the ongoing airstrikes that found them even here, in the designated safe zone.
Tariq worked. He slept when he could, ate when food was available, drank water carefully rationed because there was never enough. He lost weight he couldn’t afford to lose. He developed a cough that wouldn’t go away. He kept working.
Fatima’s son got sick in June—some kind of intestinal infection, probably from the water—and she stayed home for three days to care for him. When she came back, she looked worse than when she had left.
“He’s better,” she said. “But the daughter is sick now.”
“Will you stay with her?”
“No. I have to work. My mother is watching them.”
They returned to the tent, to the endless stream of patients who needed help that could only partially be given.
That night, for the first time in months, Tariq dreamed of his family.
Not the strike, not the convoy, not the news of their deaths. He dreamed of dinner at home in Sheikh Radwan, the four of them around the small table, Sara talking about her studies, Mahmoud complaining about homework, Dina rolling her eyes at some terrible joke Tariq had made. The ordinary textures of a life that no longer existed.
He woke in the darkness of the tent he shared with other medical staff and lay there listening to their breathing and the sounds of the camp outside and the distant thuds of explosions somewhere in the Strip. The dream had been a gift and a wound simultaneously, a reminder of what he had lost and of the fact that he was still capable of remembering it.
For the first time since he had received the news, he cried.
Not sobs, not wails, just tears running silently down his face in the darkness. He cried for Dina, for Sara, for Mahmoud. He cried for the life he had expected to have and the life he was living instead. He cried for the country he had been born in and the war that was destroying it, and for the children he treated every day who reminded him of his own children, and for the future that had been taken from him along with everyone he loved.
When the tears stopped, he felt something shift inside him. Not better—nothing would ever be better—but different. The numbness that had protected him was cracking, and beneath it was grief so vast that he knew he would never reach the bottom of it.
But he was still here. Still alive. Still capable of treating patients and saving some of them and failing to save others. Still capable of being a doctor, of doing the work that had defined his adult life.
He got up before dawn and went to the clinic tent and began another day.
Blind courage is not enough. The general must assess the situation, and act accordingly. A cool head is indispensable. — Carl von Clausewitz
“Defense is the stronger form of war with the negative aim. Attack is the weaker form with the positive aim... If defense is the stronger form of war, yet has a negative object, it follows that it should be used only so long as weakness compels.” — Carl von Clausewitz
In February 2024, Omer Levy went underground for the first time.
The tunnel entrance was in the basement of what had once been a residential building, now reduced to rubble by the demolition his own unit had conducted three days earlier. The engineers had found the shaft during their standard sweep—a concrete-lined opening, perhaps a meter across, descending into darkness.
“Yahalom is supposed to clear these,” Omer said to Captain Rosenberg. The Yahalom unit was the IDF’s specialist tunnel warfare force, trained and equipped for exactly this kind of operation.
“Yahalom is overstretched. We’re taking overflow.” Rosenberg handed him a headlamp and a breathing mask. “The dogs went first. No booby traps detected in the first fifty meters. We need to assess how far it goes and what’s down there.”
Omer looked at the hole in the ground. He had spent twenty years as a combat engineer, demolishing structures, clearing minefields, building and destroying in the surface world. He had never been trained for this.
“I’ll go,” he said.
The descent was a ladder, rungs set into the concrete wall, dropping perhaps ten meters before leveling out into a horizontal passage. The air was different underground—cooler, damper, with a mineral smell that was not unpleasant but felt fundamentally wrong. The headlamp cast a cone of light that seemed to be swallowed by the darkness ahead.
He moved forward carefully, one hand on the wall, the other gripping his rifle. The passage was narrow—barely wide enough for his shoulders—and low enough that he had to hunch. The walls were rough concrete, hand-poured by the look of it, the work of years of clandestine construction.
Fifty meters. A hundred. The passage branched, and he marked his route with chalk. The IDF had protocols for this, procedures developed over years of counter-tunnel operations. But the protocols assumed Yahalom teams with specialized equipment and extensive training. Omer was improvising.
He found the first chamber at approximately two hundred meters. A room carved from the earth, perhaps four meters square, with sleeping mats on the floor and empty food containers stacked in a corner. Someone had lived here, recently. The mats were still indented with the shapes of bodies.
Omer photographed everything, documented the location, and continued.
The tunnel system was larger than he had expected. Branches led in multiple directions, some ending in collapsed passages or sealed doors, others continuing into darkness that his headlamp couldn’t penetrate. He mapped what he could, marked what he couldn’t reach, and emerged three hours later covered in dust and sweat and something that felt like fear.
“What’s down there?” Rosenberg asked.
“Everything,” Omer said. “It goes everywhere.”
Over the following weeks, he became something he had never expected to be: a tunnel specialist.
Not by training—there was no time for training—but by necessity. His unit was assigned to the sector where the tunnel network was densest, and someone had to go underground. The Yahalom teams couldn’t be everywhere. Reserve units like his were pressed into service, learning on the job, developing techniques through trial and error.
Omer learned that the tunnels had their own geography, their own logic. Main arteries ran north-south, connecting Gaza City to Khan Younis to Rafah. Smaller branches led to specific buildings, to weapons caches, to command posts. Some tunnels were rough and narrow, emergency passages dug in haste. Others were engineering marvels, reinforced with concrete, equipped with electricity and ventilation, capable of housing dozens of fighters for extended periods.
He learned that the tunnels were defended. Booby traps were common: trip wires connected to explosives, pressure plates that triggered IEDs, false passages that led to kill zones. Hamas fighters used the network to move unseen, to emerge behind IDF positions, to disappear after attacks. The underground was their domain, and the IDF was a visitor there, subject to rules that favored the defenders.
He learned that the tunnels contained things he did not want to find. Weapons, yes—rockets and rifles and the tools of war. But also evidence of the hostages: personal effects, photographs, in one case a makeshift cell where someone had clearly been held. The intelligence officers who examined these finds said little, but their faces told a story of horror.
And he learned that the tunnels changed men. Something about the darkness, the confinement, the constant threat of attack from any direction—it wore away at the psyche in ways that surface combat did not. Soldiers who went underground came back different, quieter, prone to nightmares and sudden rages.
Omer felt it happening to him. The tremor in his hands, which had started in December, grew worse. He slept poorly, dreaming of endless corridors that led nowhere. He found himself flinching at shadows, turning suddenly to look behind him, unable to shake the feeling that something was following.
In April, he lost a man.
Private Kobi Stern was twenty years old, a conscript attached to Omer’s unit for a tunnel clearing operation. He was young and eager and hadn’t yet learned the particular fear that the underground demanded.
The tunnel was deeper than most, descending thirty meters before leveling out. Omer’s team had cleared the first two hundred meters without incident when Kobi moved ahead of the formation, drawn by something he thought he saw in the darkness.
The explosion was muffled by the earth around them, but Omer felt it through his feet before he heard it. Dust filled the passage, and then there was silence.
They found Kobi fifty meters ahead, where the booby trap had been waiting. The IED had been buried in the floor, invisible until he stepped on it. He was still alive when they reached him, but his legs were gone below the knees, and the blood loss was catastrophic.
Omer held his hand while the medic worked. Kobi looked at him with eyes that were already fading, and said something that might have been “Tell my mother” or might have been nothing at all. Then he was gone.
They carried his body back through the tunnel and up the ladder into the daylight. The surface world seemed impossibly bright after the darkness below, and Omer stood there blinking, covered in Kobi’s blood, trying to remember how to breathe.
Captain Rosenberg found him an hour later, sitting alone behind a ruined building.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Rosenberg said.
“I know.”
“He moved ahead of the formation. That’s a procedural violation. You couldn’t have—”
“I know.”
Rosenberg was quiet for a moment. “Do you need to talk to someone? Mental health services are available.”
Omer almost laughed. Mental health services. As though there was a therapy for this, a treatment for the accumulation of horror that the war had deposited in him. As though talking to someone could undo the sight of Kobi’s legs lying separate from his body in the darkness of a tunnel.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll be ready for the next operation.”
He wasn’t fine. But he wasn’t ready to admit it, even to himself. The work continued, and as long as there was work, he could keep moving. It was only when the work stopped that the other things caught up with him.
In May, he was rotated home.
The reserve duty had a limit—legally, psychologically—and his time in Gaza had exceeded it. He was given two weeks of leave, sent back to Petah Tikva, to the house and the family he had left behind in October.
Michal met him at the door. She looked at him for a long moment, taking in the weight he had lost, the new lines in his face, the way he stood as though expecting an attack from any direction.
“Welcome home,” she said.
He hugged her, and the sensation was strange—warmth and softness after months of concrete and darkness. His children gathered around him, Yonatan tall and serious at eighteen now, Shira hanging back with adolescent uncertainty, little Noam throwing himself at his father’s legs with uncomplicated joy.
“You’re back,” Noam said. “You’re back, Abba.”
“I’m back.”
But he wasn’t back, not really. He was present in body but absent in some essential way, his mind still in the tunnels, still calculating threats, still flinching at shadows. He caught himself checking corners, listening for sounds that weren’t there, waking in the night with his heart pounding from dreams he couldn’t remember.
Michal noticed. She didn’t say anything for the first few days, giving him space to readjust. But on the fourth night, when he woke gasping from another nightmare and found her already awake beside him, she spoke.
“What happened to you?”
He didn’t know how to answer. What had happened was too large to describe, too complex to reduce to words. The buildings he had demolished. The tunnels he had entered. The boy who had died holding his hand. The accumulation of violence that had become his daily reality for six months.
“War,” he said finally. “War happened.”
“Can you talk about it?”
“I don’t know.” He stared at the ceiling, the familiar ceiling of the bedroom they had shared for fifteen years. “I don’t know if I have the words.”
She took his hand in the darkness. “You don’t have to have words. You just have to be here.”
He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t sure he could be here, that some part of him was still underground, still waiting for the next explosion, still covered in the blood of a twenty-year-old boy who had died because he moved too fast in a tunnel. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t know who he was anymore, that the person who had left in October was not the person who had returned in May.
But he didn’t say any of that. He held her hand and lay in the darkness and tried to remember what it felt like to be a person who lived in the world of houses and families and ordinary concerns.
In two weeks, he would go back. The war wasn’t over. The tunnels weren’t cleared. The work remained to be done.
For now, he lay in his bed and listened to his wife breathe and tried not to think about the darkness waiting for him beneath the earth.
War is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. — Carl von Clausewitz
“Critical analysis is not just an evaluation of the means actually employed, but of all possible means... It must therefore examine these by comparison.” — Carl von Clausewitz
In the spring of 2024, the investigations began.
Yael had expected them, had been waiting for them since the first days after October 7. A failure of this magnitude could not go unexamined. The questions that haunted her in private—how did we not see this coming?—would have to be asked in public, in formal proceedings, by people with the authority to demand answers.
She was summoned to the first internal review in March. A conference room in Tel Aviv, military lawyers and intelligence officers arrayed around a table, a recording device placed prominently in the center. The atmosphere was clinical, professional, the tone of people doing a difficult job with precision.
“Captain Shimoni,” the lead investigator said, a colonel she didn’t recognize. “You submitted multiple reports in the weeks preceding the attack, flagging unusual activity in Hamas communications. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Walk us through those reports.”
She did. The intercepts, the pattern analysis, the escalations through her chain of command. The meetings with Baratz, with General Neumann. The responses she had received: training exercises, Hamas is deterred, the conceptzia stands.
The investigators took notes. They asked follow-up questions. They did not express opinions or reactions. They were building a record, a documentary history of the failure, and her role was to provide data.
“In your professional assessment,” the colonel asked at the end, “did the system function as designed?”
Yael considered her answer carefully. “The system received my reports and processed them according to established procedures. The assessments that resulted were consistent with the prevailing analytical framework.”
“That’s not what I asked. Did the system function as designed?”
“If the system was designed to interpret intelligence through the lens of existing assumptions, then yes. It functioned exactly as designed.” She paused. “Whether it was designed correctly is a different question.”
The colonel nodded slowly. “Thank you, Captain. We may need to speak with you again.”
The investigations multiplied. Internal reviews became external commissions. Politicians demanded accountability. The media published leaks and allegations. The families of the dead called for answers that could never fully be given.
Yael gave testimony multiple times, to multiple bodies, repeating the same story with the same careful precision. She had learned to be exact, to distinguish between what she had known and what she had suspected, between what she had reported and what she had been told in response. The record was the record. She could not change what had happened, but she could ensure that it was documented accurately.
Her colleagues watched her with complicated expressions. Some saw her as a witness to institutional failure, someone whose warnings had been vindicated by catastrophe. Others saw her as a threat, someone whose testimony could end careers and reputations. The atmosphere in Unit 8200 had changed; the confidence that had characterized the organization before October 7 had been replaced by something defensive, uncertain.
Baratz, her section chief, was placed on administrative leave pending the investigation’s conclusion. Yael saw him once, in a hallway, and he looked at her with something that might have been resentment or might have been guilt or might have been nothing at all. They didn’t speak.
General Neumann resigned in April. Her statement was brief: she accepted responsibility for the failures under her command and would cooperate fully with all investigations. Yael watched the announcement on television and thought about the conversation in Neumann’s office, the explanation of the conceptzia, the acknowledgment on October 7 that Yael had been right.
I’m sorry, Neumann had said. But sorry changed nothing.
Through all of this, the war continued.
Yael worked her shifts, processed intelligence, contributed to the ongoing operations in Gaza. The work was different now—not prediction and analysis but tactical support, helping commanders understand enemy positions and capabilities in real time. The failures of October 7 had been failures of strategic assessment; the tactical intelligence was still valuable, still operational, still saving lives.
She told herself that this was enough. That she could contribute to the war effort even if she couldn’t undo the failure that had started it. That the hostages still in Gaza needed every analyst working to locate them, every scrap of intelligence that might lead to their rescue or recovery.
But at night, in her apartment, the questions returned. Not just how did this happen—the investigations were answering that, document by document, testimony by testimony—but what does it mean?
What did it mean to be right when being right didn’t matter? What did it mean to serve an institution that had failed so catastrophically? What did it mean to continue working for a system that might fail again, in different ways, for different reasons, with consequences equally terrible?
She didn’t have answers. She suspected there were no answers, only choices about how to live with uncertainty.
In May, she was approached by a journalist.
His name was Erez Navon, a reporter for a major Israeli newspaper who had been covering the intelligence failures since October. He had obtained her name somehow—leaked from the investigation, probably—and wanted to interview her for a story about the analysts who had seen the attack coming.
“Off the record,” he said when he called. “I’m not looking to burn you. I’m looking to understand what went wrong.”
“I’ve given testimony to the formal investigations. The record is there.”
“The record is bureaucratic. I want the human story. How it felt to watch this happen after you tried to warn them.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Because people need to understand that this wasn’t inevitable. That choices were made, assumptions accepted, warnings ignored. The conceptzia didn’t fall from the sky. People built it. People maintained it. And people could have changed it, if they had listened.”
Yael was silent for a long moment. She thought about the risks—speaking to media while investigations were ongoing could be construed as breach of protocol, could damage her career, could make her enemies in an organization where she still worked. She thought about Baratz on administrative leave, Neumann resigned in disgrace, the cascade of consequences flowing from October 7.
“I can’t speak on the record,” she said finally. “But I can tell you what the record doesn’t contain.”
“What’s that?”
“The feeling. The experience of watching a disaster unfold that you knew was coming but couldn’t prevent. The way the system absorbed warnings without being changed by them. The loneliness of being right when everyone around you was certain you were wrong.”
“Will you tell me that story?”
She thought about it. She thought about the families who deserved to know how their loved ones had died. She thought about the soldiers still fighting in Gaza, operating on intelligence that might be flawed in ways no one recognized. She thought about the next attack, the one that hadn’t happened yet, the one that might be prevented if the failures of October 7 were understood and corrected.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”
The story ran in June.
It didn’t name her—Navon kept his word about that—but it described an analyst in Unit 8200 who had flagged Hamas activity for weeks before the attack, who had escalated through proper channels, who had been told repeatedly that the threat was contained. The story painted a picture of an intelligence community so confident in its assumptions that it couldn’t see evidence that contradicted them.
The response was immediate. Some praised the story as necessary accountability. Others attacked it as harmful to national security. The intelligence community closed ranks, defending itself against what it perceived as unfair criticism.
Yael watched from a distance, anonymous, protected by the reporter’s discretion. She had contributed to the public understanding of what had happened, but she had done so invisibly, without taking on the burden of being a named source.
It felt like a compromise. Everything felt like a compromise now.
She continued working. She continued giving testimony. She continued living with the knowledge that she had been right and it hadn’t mattered, that the system had failed and she was still part of it, that the war continued and the hostages remained in Gaza and nothing she did could bring back the dead.
In July, she submitted her resignation.
Not because she had stopped believing in the mission—she still believed in intelligence work, still believed in the importance of knowing what the enemy intended. But because she could no longer function inside an institution she no longer trusted. The conceptzia had been shattered, but nothing had replaced it, and she didn’t know what assumptions were guiding the assessments she was being asked to support.
The resignation was rejected. She was too valuable, her superiors said. Her experience was needed. The war was ongoing and analysts of her caliber couldn’t be spared.
So she stayed. Not because she wanted to, but because the system wouldn’t let her leave.
And the war continued, and the investigations continued, and somewhere in the tunnels beneath Gaza the hostages waited for rescue that might never come.
War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means. — Carl von Clausewitz
-e
August 2024 - January 2025
“If the enemy is to be coerced, you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make. The hardships of the situation must not, of course, be merely transient—at least not in appearance.” — Carl von Clausewitz
In August 2024, Noa Harari counted the days.
Three hundred and seven days since October 7. Three hundred and seven days since she had last seen her brother’s face, distorted through the window of an armored personnel carrier, his lips forming words she would never know. Three hundred and seven days of waking each morning to the same absence, the same uncertainty, the same impossible question: Is he still alive?
She had become, without intending it, a professional mourner. Not mourning exactly—mourning implied certainty, a known loss to grieve—but something adjacent to it, a state of suspended grief that could neither resolve nor release. She woke, she worked (when there was work), she attended Forum meetings, she gave interviews, she demonstrated, she lobbied, she did all the things that hostage families did. And then she went home and lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling and counted the days.
The information from December—that a released hostage had seen Eitan alive—was eight months old now. Eight months. Anything could have happened in eight months. The IDF was still operating in Gaza, still finding tunnels and weapons caches, still occasionally finding evidence of the hostages. Some of that evidence was encouraging: signs of life, personal effects that suggested continued captivity. Some was not.
In July, the military had confirmed the deaths of six hostages killed in an Israeli airstrike. The news had devastated the families, raised questions about the coordination between military operations and hostage rescue efforts. Noa had attended the memorial services, had held the hands of parents who had learned that their children were never coming home. She had wondered, as she always did, whether the next notification would be about Eitan.
“How do you keep going?” Rachel asked her one evening, after a particularly difficult Forum meeting. Rachel, whose daughter was still in Gaza, who had been waiting as long as Noa had been waiting.
“I don’t know,” Noa said. “I don’t think about it that way. I just... do the next thing. Whatever the next thing is.”
“And when there’s no next thing?”
“There’s always a next thing. Another interview. Another demonstration. Another meeting with someone who might be able to help.” She paused. “The alternative is to stop. And I can’t stop. Stopping means accepting that he might never come home. I’m not ready to accept that.”
“Neither am I,” Rachel said. “But sometimes I wonder if we’re doing anything that actually matters. Or if we’re just... keeping busy so we don’t have to feel it.”
Noa didn’t have an answer to that. She suspected both things were true.
In October, Yahya Sinwar was killed.
The news arrived like all news arrived now—through her phone, through the endless scroll of updates and alerts that tracked the war’s progress. Israeli forces had located and killed the leader of Hamas, the architect of October 7, the man who had ordered the attacks that had taken Eitan and two hundred others into captivity.
The reaction was complex. Some celebrated: justice had been served, the mastermind had paid for his crimes. Others worried: with Sinwar dead, who would negotiate for the hostages? Hamas’s leadership was in disarray. The organizational chaos might make a deal more difficult, not less.
Noa felt nothing recognizable. Not satisfaction, not fear, not hope. Sinwar’s death was another data point, another turn in a war that had become an abstraction overlaying her concrete grief. The man who had destroyed her life was dead, and her life remained destroyed, and Eitan remained in a tunnel somewhere beneath Gaza, and nothing had fundamentally changed.
“Does this help?” a journalist asked her, seeking the hostage family perspective.
“I don’t know yet,” she said honestly. “Ask me when my brother is home.”
November brought the American election.
Noa had never paid much attention to American politics before—Israel had its own political dramas, more than enough to occupy anyone’s attention—but now America mattered. America was the mediator, the pressure point, the ally whose influence might make the difference between a deal and continued stalemate.
The new president-elect, Donald Trump, had made statements about the hostages, had promised to prioritize their release, had issued threats about consequences if they weren’t freed before his inauguration. The hostage families parsed every word, trying to determine whether the rhetoric was meaningful or performative.
“He says there will be ‘hell to pay,’” one of the Forum organizers reported at a meeting. “If the hostages aren’t released by January 20.”
“What does that mean?” someone asked.
“No one knows. But maybe it creates pressure. Maybe Hamas believes he means it.”
Noa listened without participating. She had learned to be skeptical of promises, of statements, of the political theater that surrounded the hostages without necessarily advancing their release. Politicians said things. Sometimes the things they said led to action. Usually they didn’t.
But something did seem to be shifting. The negotiations that had stalled for months were reportedly resuming. Qatar and Egypt were more active, more engaged. There were rumors of a new framework, a phased approach that might break the deadlock.
She allowed herself to feel, for the first time in months, something that might have been hope.
December was the hardest month.
The anniversary of the first ceasefire approached—one year since those seven days of hostage releases, since Noa had watched others reunited with their families while Eitan remained in Gaza. The memory was painful: the processing center, the faces emerging from captivity, the parents who wept with joy, the siblings who couldn’t stop embracing. And then the families who waited, and waited, and waited, and finally went home with empty hands.
The Forum organized a vigil for the one-year anniversary of the ceasefire’s end. Candles and photographs, speeches and songs, a gathering of the wounded and the waiting. Noa stood in the crowd and held a photograph of Eitan—his official work photo, the one his company had released to media—and felt the weight of twelve months settling on her shoulders.
Twelve months. A year of her life consumed by this single obsessive focus. A year of not knowing, not grieving, not moving forward or moving back. A year suspended in amber, watching the world continue while she remained frozen.
Around her, other families held their own photographs, their own candles. Some of the faces in the photographs she knew now—she had memorized the names and stories of all the hostages, had met their families at countless meetings, had shared in their particular brand of collective suffering. Some of the photographs showed people who had been confirmed dead, whose families had moved from uncertain waiting to certain grief. Some showed people who might still be alive, whose families remained in the same limbo Noa inhabited.
A speaker took the microphone. “We are here because we refuse to forget. We are here because they are still waiting for us, as we are waiting for them. We are here because hope is not a feeling—it is a choice. And we choose hope.”
Noa wasn’t sure she believed that anymore. Hope as a choice implied that you could simply decide to feel it, that the emotion was subject to will. But her hope had worn thin over the months, eroded by the accumulation of disappointments, by the deaths confirmed and the deals that fell through and the endless grinding continuation of a war that seemed to have no end.
What she felt now was something harder than hope: determination. She would continue because continuing was the only option. She would advocate and demonstrate and lobby and speak because those were the actions available to her. Not because she believed they would necessarily bring Eitan home, but because doing nothing was unthinkable.
The candles flickered in the December wind. The photographs stared out at the crowd, frozen faces from a world that had ended on October 7. Somewhere, in the darkness beneath Gaza, her brother might be looking up at the same sky, might be thinking of the same stars, might be hoping that someone was still looking for him.
I’m still here, she thought at him, as though the thought could travel through earth and concrete and distance. I’m still here. I haven’t forgotten. I won’t stop.
The vigil ended. The crowd dispersed. Noa went home to her empty apartment and began counting the days again.
In the last week of December, the negotiations accelerated.
The details leaked out gradually, through sources in Doha and Cairo and Washington. A framework was taking shape. Three phases, beginning with women and elderly hostages, progressing to soldiers and young men. A ceasefire, an exchange of prisoners, a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from populated areas.
Noa read every report, analyzed every rumor, tried to determine where Eitan would fall in the framework. He was twenty-eight now—his birthday had passed in captivity, unceleBrated—a young man, not a child, not elderly, not a soldier. He would be in the later phases, if the later phases ever materialized.
If the deal happened. If it held. If Hamas released the hostages they had promised to release. If the ceasefire didn’t collapse as it had collapsed before.
Too many ifs. She had learned not to trust ifs.
But when the news came, in the second week of January, that a deal had been reached—that a ceasefire would begin on January 19, that 33 hostages would be released in the first phase, that her brother might finally be coming home—she allowed herself to feel something she had almost forgotten how to feel.
Not hope, exactly. Hope was too fragile, too easily shattered.
Something more like the possibility of hope. A door that might open. A future that might exist.
She called her parents, and they cried together over the phone, and she stayed up all night reading the details of the agreement, trying to understand what it meant, trying to prepare herself for whatever came next.
In 472 days, everything might change.
Or nothing might change at all.
She would know soon.
The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose. — Carl von Clausewitz
“The maximum exertion of strength is not always compatible with the maximum likelihood of success... One sometimes sees that instead of trying to overcome the enemy, generals endeavor to outmaneuver him by skillful combinations, or try to overcome him, so to speak, with superior chess moves.” — Carl von Clausewitz
By the autumn of 2024, Dr. Tariq Al-Nasser had treated approximately four thousand patients.
He no longer kept precise count—the numbers had ceased to have meaning somewhere around month six—but the medical records existed, meticulously maintained despite everything, and they documented the scope of what he had done. Shrapnel wounds and amputations, burns and infections, malnutrition and dehydration, the endless parade of bodies broken by a war that showed no sign of ending.
The clinic in al-Mawasi had become something like home, which was to say it was the place where he slept and worked and existed, even if the word home no longer applied to anything in his life. He had a cot in the corner of the medical supply tent, surrounded by boxes of bandages and IV fluids that were always running low. He ate when food was available, slept when exhaustion overwhelmed him, worked the rest of the time.
Fatima was still there. Her children had recovered from their illnesses—the resilience of youth, the capacity to survive what adults could not—and she had resumed her shifts at the clinic, working alongside Tariq in the particular silence they had developed. They did not discuss their losses. They did not discuss their feelings. They worked, and the work was enough.
In September, the aid blockade tightened.
It had never been adequate—the trucks that passed through the crossings never carried enough to feed a million displaced people—but it had been something. Now even that something was reduced, throttled by military operations and bureaucratic obstacles and the deliberate policy of deprivation that seemed designed to make life in Gaza impossible.
The clinic ran out of antibiotics first. Then analgesics. Then the IV fluids that kept dehydrated patients alive. Tariq learned to improvise, to substitute, to make do with what was available. He learned that saline could be manufactured from salt and boiled water, that wounds could be cleaned with diluted alcohol, that patients could survive without the medications he had been trained to consider essential.
Some patients survived. Many did not. The mathematics of triage, which he had thought he understood after fifteen years of emergency medicine, revealed new dimensions in conditions of scarcity.
“We’re becoming veterinarians,” Fatima said one night, after they had lost three patients to infections that antibiotics would have cured. “Working with nothing. Treating symptoms because we can’t treat causes.”
“We’re doing what we can,” Tariq said. “That’s all we’ve ever done.”
“It’s not enough.”
“No. It’s not.”
They returned to work.
In October, the airstrikes intensified in the north.
Tariq heard the reports from colleagues who had stayed in Gaza City, from the few communication channels that still functioned. The Israelis were implementing something new, a campaign to clear the northern Strip entirely, forcing the remaining population southward through evacuation orders and military pressure.
The details were fragmentary—communications were unreliable, information was scarce—but the pattern was clear. The war that had begun as a response to October 7 was becoming something else, a systematic transformation of Gaza’s geography. The buffer zones expanding. The population compressed. The infrastructure destroyed beyond any possibility of rebuilding.
“Do you think we’ll ever go back?” a patient asked him, a man from Beit Hanoun who had been displaced three times before arriving in Mawasi.
Tariq didn’t know how to answer. Beit Hanoun was in the expanded buffer zone now, razed to rubble, uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. The man’s home, his neighborhood, his entire world—none of it existed anymore.
“Perhaps,” he said, because that was what doctors said to patients. “Perhaps someday.”
The man looked at him with eyes that had seen too much. “You don’t believe that.”
“I believe in treating the patient in front of me. That’s what I can control.”
In November, Fatima’s mother died.
The death was not dramatic—no airstrike, no violence, just an elderly woman whose body had given out after months of deprivation and stress. Heart failure, probably, though Tariq couldn’t be certain without diagnostic equipment he no longer had access to. She died in her sleep, in the tent where she had been caring for her grandchildren while Fatima worked.
Fatima received the news during a shift and continued working. Tariq watched her face as she processed the information: a flicker of something, quickly suppressed, and then the professional mask resumed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Thank you.” She was setting up an IV for a child with severe dehydration. “My sisters will handle the burial. I’ll see her tonight.”
“You can leave now. I can cover—”
“No.” Her voice was flat, final. “I’ll finish my shift.”
She finished her shift. She went to her mother’s burial. She returned the next morning and worked another shift. The grief, like all their griefs, was packed away somewhere internal, inaccessible, preserved for some future time when feeling it might be possible.
Tariq understood. He had done the same with Dina and Sara and Mahmoud. The grief was there, would always be there, but there was no time for it now, no space, no permission. Survival demanded everything.
In December, the rumors began.
A ceasefire was being negotiated. A deal was taking shape. The Americans were pushing, the Qataris were mediating, the Egyptians were preparing to process whatever exchange might occur. After fifteen months of war, there might finally be an ending.
Tariq listened to the rumors without reacting. He had heard similar rumors before—in November 2023, before the first brief ceasefire; in the spring, when negotiations seemed close to breakthrough; in the summer, when hope flickered and died. Rumors were a currency in wartime, traded and exchanged and ultimately worthless.
But this time felt different. The international pressure was more intense. The American president-elect was making threats. The military situation, whatever the Israelis claimed about victory, seemed to have reached a kind of equilibrium. Perhaps both sides had finally exhausted themselves enough to stop.
“Do you think it’s real?” Fatima asked him one evening.
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
“What happens if it is? If there’s actually peace?”
Tariq considered the question. Peace. The word felt foreign, a concept from a previous life. What would peace mean in a Gaza that had been transformed into rubble and displacement, where half the housing stock was destroyed and the hospitals barely functioned and the population had been traumatized beyond any easy recovery?
“We keep working,” he said finally. “There will still be patients. There will still be need.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. I can’t think that far ahead.”
“Neither can I,” Fatima said. “But sometimes I try.”
On January 15, 2025, the ceasefire was announced.
Tariq heard the news from a radio that someone had managed to keep working, a small battery-powered device that brought voices from the outside world into the isolated reality of the camp. A deal had been reached. The fighting would stop. Hostages would be released. Prisoners would be exchanged. The war, or at least this phase of the war, was ending.
Around him, people reacted in ways he couldn’t quite parse. Some wept with relief. Some remained silent, uncertain whether to believe. Some expressed anger—at the deal, at the timing, at the months of dying that had preceded it. The emotions were too various and too raw to fit any simple narrative.
Tariq felt something he couldn’t name. Not joy—joy was impossible after everything. Not relief exactly—relief implied that the suffering was over, and he knew the suffering would continue in different forms. Something more like the sensation of a long-held breath finally released, a tension in his chest that he hadn’t known he was carrying until it began to ease.
The ceasefire would take effect on January 19. Four days to prepare. Four days to transition from war to whatever came after.
He looked around the clinic, at the patients who still needed care, at the supplies that were still inadequate, at the staff who had been running on fumes for months. The work would continue. The peace—if it was peace—would simply change the context in which the work occurred.
That night, he allowed himself to think about the future.
Not distant future—he couldn’t imagine that—but immediate future. Tomorrow. Next week. The things that might become possible when bombs were not falling and convoys could move freely and the world could remember that Gaza contained human beings who deserved to live.
He thought about rebuilding. Not just buildings, though those would need to be rebuilt. Rebuilding the medical system, the training of new doctors to replace those who had been killed, the establishment of facilities that could actually treat patients instead of just trying to keep them alive. There would be work for the rest of his life, if he lived that long.
He thought about Fatima, and the two children who called her mother, and the strange bond that had formed between them in the crucible of the war. Not romance—neither of them had the capacity for romance anymore—but something adjacent to it. Partnership. Companionship in suffering. The recognition of shared survival.
He thought about Dina and Sara and Mahmoud, buried somewhere he might never be able to visit, their graves unmarked or destroyed in the bombardment. He thought about the grief he had postponed, the tears he had not allowed himself to cry, the mourning that remained undone.
Perhaps, if peace held, there would be time for that too.
Perhaps there would be time for everything he had pushed aside in order to survive.
He lay on his cot in the supply tent and listened to the sounds of the camp—the generators humming, the children crying, the endless movement of a displaced population trying to exist—and waited for the morning when the ceasefire would begin.
War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of other means. — Carl von Clausewitz
“In war, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts... The conduct of war resembles the workings of an intricate machine with tremendous friction, so that combinations which are easily planned on paper can be executed only with great effort.” — Carl von Clausewitz
Omer Levy returned to Gaza in December 2024.
He had hoped not to return. His deployment in the spring had been traumatic enough—the tunnels, Kobi Stern, the accumulation of violence that he still carried—and the months at home had not been sufficient to process it. But the war continued, and reserve duty was reserve duty, and when the call came again he answered it because that was what he had always done.
The Gaza he entered in December was different from the Gaza he had left in May.
The destruction was more complete. Where buildings had stood, there was now only rubble. Where rubble had been, there was now only cleared earth—the buffer zones expanded, the landscape transformed into something that resembled the surface of a dead planet. His unit was deployed to a sector in central Gaza, tasked with securing corridors that connected the expanded Israeli positions.
“We’re not clearing anymore,” Captain Rosenberg told them during the briefing. “We’re holding. The politicians are negotiating. Our job is to maintain pressure while they talk.”
Maintaining pressure meant patrolling the corridors, manning the checkpoints, responding to the occasional rocket or mortar that Hamas fighters still managed to launch from somewhere in the ruins. It was less intense than the spring operations—fewer tunnels to enter, fewer buildings to demolish—but the tension was constant, the sense of threat pervasive.
Omer found that he had developed new reflexes since his last deployment. He scanned rooftops automatically, calculated fields of fire without thinking, positioned himself for cover even in moments that seemed safe. The war had rewired him, installed protocols that operated beneath conscious awareness.
At night, in the prefab shelter where his unit slept, he lay awake and listened to the sounds of distant artillery. He thought about Michal, about his children, about the life that waited for him in Petah Tikva. He thought about Kobi Stern’s mother, whom he had visited after returning from his spring deployment, sitting in her living room while she asked questions he couldn’t answer about her son’s final moments.
The questions had followed him here. They would follow him everywhere.
In early January, the negotiations accelerated.
Everyone knew something was happening. The officers briefed them on operational considerations, on the possibility of a ceasefire, on the protocols for withdrawal if an agreement was reached. The soldiers discussed it among themselves, parsing rumors and reports, trying to understand what it might mean.
“If they make a deal, we just leave?” one of the younger soldiers asked.
“We’ll withdraw to designated positions,” Rosenberg said. “Buffer zones will be maintained. It’s not like we’re going home immediately.”
“But the fighting stops?”
“The fighting stops. At least for Phase One.”
Phase One. Omer had learned the terminology: a six-week ceasefire, hostage releases, prisoner exchanges, negotiations for what came next. It sounded clean on paper, a structured process with defined steps. Reality, he knew, was never that clean.
On January 15, the agreement was announced.
Omer heard it through the radio in the command post, the voice of a news anchor describing the terms with the particular gravity that characterized major announcements. A ceasefire would begin on January 19. Thirty-three hostages would be released in the first phase. The war—or this version of the war—was ending.
The reaction among his unit was muted. They had been in Gaza too long, had seen too much, to greet any news with enthusiasm. There was relief, certainly—the fighting would stop, the immediate danger would recede—but it was the relief of exhaustion rather than celebration. They had survived. That was enough.
On January 19, the ceasefire took effect.
Omer’s unit was among those designated to remain in Gaza, manning positions in the buffer zone while the first phase of the agreement unfolded. They watched as humanitarian convoys began moving through the crossings, as displaced Palestinians began the long walk back toward the ruins of their homes in the north, as the mechanisms of peace—tentative, fragile—began to operate.
It felt strange to be in Gaza without fighting. The silence was almost physical, an absence that pressed against his ears after months of explosions and gunfire. He stood at his post and looked out at the landscape of destruction and felt something shift inside him.
This is what we did.
The thought came unbidden, unwelcome. He had been able to avoid it during the operations, when the work was constant and the justifications were ready. Hamas had started this. Hamas used tunnels and human shields. The buildings they demolished were legitimate military targets. The destruction was necessary.
But standing in the silence, looking at the rubble that stretched to every horizon, the justifications felt thin. He thought about the families who had lived in those buildings. He thought about the children who had played on those streets. He thought about the world that had existed here before October 7, a world that was now gone, reduced to debris and memory.
Was it worth it?
He didn’t know. He would probably never know. The question was too large, too entangled with politics and history and considerations that exceeded his understanding. He was a reservist, a combat engineer, a man who followed orders and did his job. The decisions about whether the job should have been done were made by others.
But he was the one who would carry it. The tremor in his hands. The dreams that woke him sweating. The memories of Kobi Stern and the tunnels and the countless buildings that had fallen at his command. He would carry all of it, for the rest of his life, and no ceasefire could make it stop.
In late January, he was rotated home.
The drive back to Israel felt surreal, the landscape shifting from destruction to normalcy in the span of an hour. The crossings, the checkpoints, the gradual return of civilian infrastructure—houses that were intact, roads that were maintained, people who went about their business as though the war was something that happened somewhere else.
Michal met him at the base, her face carefully composed, her eyes searching his for signs of the damage she already knew was there.
“Welcome home,” she said.
“Thank you.”
They drove back to Petah Tikva in silence. There was too much to say and no way to say it. The children greeted him with varying degrees of enthusiasm—Noam overjoyed, Shira cautiously affectionate, Yonatan distant and complicated. Yonatan was in the army now, had completed his basic training while Omer was in Gaza, would soon be deployed to his own unit with his own missions.
The cycle continuing. The next generation stepping into the machine.
That night, Omer sat on the balcony of his home and looked out at the lights of the city. Ordinary lights, ordinary lives, the peaceful bustle of a society that had continued functioning while he was underground in tunnels and standing in rubble.
Michal joined him after the children were asleep.
“How are you?” she asked.
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“That’s an answer.”
He nodded. She sat beside him, close but not touching, giving him space.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Eventually. Not tonight.”
“Okay.” She was quiet for a moment. “The news says the hostages are being released. The first group came out yesterday.”
“I saw.”
“Some of them were held in the tunnels. In places you might have been.”
Omer thought about the tunnels, about the chambers he had found, about the evidence of hostages that intelligence officers had taken away for analysis. He thought about the families who were being reunited, and the families who were still waiting, and the families who would learn that their loved ones had died in captivity.
“I hope they all come home,” he said.
“So do I.”
They sat together in the darkness, not speaking, watching the lights of a city that had continued while the war raged to the south. The ceasefire was holding. The hostages were being released. The war, or this phase of the war, was ending.
But it would never really end, not for the people who had fought it, not for the people who had survived it, not for the people who had lost everything in it. The peace was just a pause, a moment to catch breath before whatever came next.
Omer thought about the future. He thought about returning to his work as a contractor, rebuilding houses for people who didn’t know what it felt like to demolish them. He thought about his children, growing up in a country that might or might not be at war when they reached his age. He thought about the endless cycle of violence and response that characterized this place, this conflict, this wound that never seemed to heal.
And he thought about the question that had come to him in Gaza, standing in the silence of the ceasefire, looking at the destruction they had wrought:
Was it worth it?
He still didn’t know. He suspected he would never know.
But he was home. His family was safe. The fighting had stopped.
For now, that would have to be enough.
War is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst. — Carl von Clausewitz
-e
January - October 2025
“The aggressor is always peace-loving; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed. To prevent his doing so, one must be willing to make war and be prepared for it.” — Carl von Clausewitz
On February 27, 2025, Noa Harari received the call she had been waiting five hundred and nine days to receive.
Her phone rang at 7:14 in the morning, the screen showing a number she recognized: Tamar, her liaison from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For five hundred and nine days, that number had meant uncertainty—updates that contained no real information, assurances that changed nothing. But today, something in the timing told her this was different.
“Noa.” Tamar’s voice was unsteady, stripped of its usual professional composure. “He’s on the list. Eitan is on the list for tomorrow’s release.”
The world stopped. Noa found that she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, couldn’t process the words that were still echoing in her ears. He’s on the list. Eitan is on the list.
“Are you certain?”
“Hamas confirmed it an hour ago. Twelve hostages in tomorrow’s exchange, and Eitan Harari is one of them.”
“He’s alive.”
“He’s alive. He’s coming home.”
Noa sat down heavily, her legs giving way. The apartment around her—the same apartment where she had waited and grieved and not-grieved for seventeen months—seemed to dissolve, replaced by something new, something she had forgotten how to feel.
“Noa? Are you there?”
“I’m here.” Her voice sounded strange, distant. “What happens now?”
“The exchange is scheduled for noon tomorrow. The hostages will be processed at Kerem Shalom, then transferred to a medical facility for evaluation. Family reunification will follow, probably within hours. I’ll call you with the location as soon as we have confirmation.”
“Thank you. Thank you, Tamar.”
“Thank me when he’s home.”
She called her parents. Her mother answered on the first ring—she had been sleeping with the phone beside her pillow for seventeen months—and Noa spoke the words she had imagined speaking so many times that they felt rehearsed.
“He’s coming home. Eitan is coming home tomorrow.”
The sound her mother made was something between a scream and a sob, a noise that contained all the months of waiting and fear and desperate hope. Her father took the phone, his voice cracking, asking questions that Noa answered as best she could. Yes, tomorrow. Yes, confirmed. Yes, alive.
Yes, alive.
The words felt impossible, a sentence from a language she had forgotten how to speak. For so long, she had lived with uncertainty, with the phrase no reason to believe otherwise that offered neither hope nor despair. Now there was certainty, and the certainty was almost harder to bear than the uncertainty had been.
She called Rachel, whose daughter had been released in Phase One. She called the other families from the Forum, the ones who were still waiting, the ones who had already received news—good and bad. She told them Eitan was coming home, and they celebrated with her, and some of them cried because their own loved ones were still in Gaza, and the mixture of joy and grief was so complex that Noa couldn’t separate her own emotions from theirs.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. She lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about what tomorrow would bring. Eitan would be different—everyone who came back was different—but he would be alive, he would be here, she would be able to see him and touch him and know that the seventeen months of waiting had not been for nothing.
She thought about the vigil in December, when she had told herself that hope was not a feeling but a choice. She had not believed it then. She believed it now.
The exchange happened at noon, as scheduled.
Noa watched it on television, surrounded by her parents in their living room in Ramat Gan. The cameras showed the crossing point, the vehicles arriving, the figures emerging—thin and pale, blinking in the sunlight, each one a universe of suffering contained in a human body.
She looked for Eitan’s face among them. The footage was grainy, the figures distant, but she studied each one with the desperate attention she had developed over months of searching through images and videos and scraps of information.
And then she saw him.
He was thinner than she remembered—much thinner, the bones of his face visible beneath skin that had lost its color. He walked with a slight limp, favoring his left leg, and his eyes had a quality she couldn’t name, a blankness that was not the same as the wonder that had characterized him before. But it was him. It was Eitan. He was alive.
“There,” she said, pointing at the screen. “There he is.”
Her parents crowded around her, all of them crying now, watching the figure on the screen move slowly toward the Israeli side of the crossing. He was supported by a medic on one side, his steps careful and uncertain, but he was moving, he was breathing, he was coming home.
They reunited at the hospital in Be’er Sheva, four hours after the exchange.
Noa had been warned that the initial meeting would be brief—the medical staff needed to complete their evaluation, the hostages needed time to adjust—but when she saw Eitan in the hallway, being wheeled toward his room in a wheelchair, all the warnings dissolved into irrelevance.
“Eitan.”
He looked up at her, and for a moment she wasn’t sure he recognized her. His eyes moved across her face with the careful attention of someone who had forgotten what familiar faces looked like. Then something shifted, and his expression cracked, and he said her name in a voice that sounded like it had been scraped raw.
“Noa.”
She knelt beside the wheelchair and took his hand—his hand that was so thin she could feel every bone—and she held it and didn’t let go. Her parents were there too, surrounding him, all of them speaking and crying and touching him as though they needed to confirm he was real.
“I’m sorry,” Eitan said, and Noa didn’t know what he was apologizing for—for being taken, for surviving, for the changes that seventeen months in captivity had wrought—but she shook her head and told him there was nothing to be sorry for.
“You’re here. That’s all that matters.”
“I’m here,” he repeated, as though testing the truth of the statement. “I’m here.”
The medical staff intervened, gently but firmly, explaining that Eitan needed rest and evaluation and time. Noa let go of his hand reluctantly, watching as they wheeled him away toward his room. She would see him again—tomorrow, the next day, every day for the rest of their lives—but the separation still felt wrong, after so many months of enforced separation.
Her parents held her while she cried, and she wasn’t sure if she was crying from joy or grief or some combination too complex to name.
The days that followed were a process of discovery.
Noa learned what Eitan had endured: the tunnels, the darkness, the constant fear. She learned about the other hostages he had been held with, some of whom had been released with him, some of whom were still in Gaza, some of whom had died. She learned about the conditions—the food that was barely food, the water that made them sick, the wounds that went untreated and the infections that followed.
She learned that he had been moved frequently, never staying in one location for long, passed between Hamas units like a valuable package. She learned that he had been used for propaganda videos, forced to read statements he didn’t believe, threatened with execution if he didn’t cooperate. She learned that he had seen other hostages die, had held one of them—a man from Be’eri—while he died from an untreated injury.
And she learned that the Eitan who had been taken was not the same as the Eitan who had returned.
“I can’t sleep,” he told her, a week after his release. They were sitting in his parents’ garden, in the warm winter sunshine, and he was looking at nothing in particular. “I close my eyes and I’m back there. In the tunnels. In the dark.”
“That’s normal,” she said, though she knew normal was not the right word. “It will get better.”
“Will it?”
She didn’t know. She had read about the returning hostages, about the psychological trauma that followed them out of captivity, about the long and uncertain process of recovery. Some of them were doing well, adapting, rebuilding. Others were struggling, trapped in the aftermath of what they had experienced. Eitan would be somewhere on that spectrum, and she couldn’t predict where.
“I’m here,” she said, because that was all she could offer. “Whatever you need, however long it takes. I’m here.”
He looked at her then, and for a moment she saw something of the old Eitan—the wonder, the openness, the capacity for connection that had characterized him before. It flickered and faded, replaced by the blankness that had become his default expression, but it had been there. That was something.
“At the festival,” he said slowly, “I told you I understood something. What connection meant. What transcendence felt like.”
“I remember.”
“I thought about that a lot, in the tunnels. That feeling. Trying to hold onto it.” He paused. “I couldn’t. It went away, eventually. Everything went away except the fear.”
“It might come back.”
“Maybe.” He looked away, at the garden, at the sky, at the ordinary world that he was still learning to inhabit again. “Or maybe it’s gone for good. Maybe that’s the cost.”
Noa didn’t have an answer. She sat beside him in the sunshine and held space for his grief and her relief and all the complicated emotions that existed between them. The war was ending—Phase Two was underway, more hostages being released, the negotiations continuing—but the aftermath was just beginning.
For seventeen months, she had focused on one thing: bringing Eitan home. Now he was home, and she had to learn what that meant, and what it would cost, and whether the person who had returned was the same person who had been taken.
She suspected the answer was no. She suspected they would both have to learn to live with that.
Every war is rich in unique episodes. Each is an uncharted sea, full of reefs. The commander may suspect the reefs’ existence without ever having seen them; now he has to steer past them in the dark. — Carl von Clausewitz
“Theory exists so that one need not start afresh each time sorting out the material and plowing through it, but will find it ready to hand and in good order. It is meant to educate the mind of the future commander, or, more accurately, to guide him in his self-education.” — Carl von Clausewitz
In April 2025, the final investigation report was released.
Yael read it in her apartment in Be’er Sheva, downloaded from a secure server, four hundred pages of findings and conclusions that documented, in meticulous detail, the failure she had witnessed from the inside. The conceptzia. The ignored warnings. The institutional blindness that had allowed October 7 to happen.
Her name appeared in several places—redacted in the public version, but visible in the classified original. Captain Y.S., an intelligence analyst who had flagged unusual activity in the weeks before the attack. Captain Y.S., whose reports had been assessed and dismissed according to standard procedures. Captain Y.S., who had been right when everyone else was wrong.
The report did not use those words, of course. It spoke of “systemic failures” and “analytical frameworks” and “the need for improved integration of threat assessments.” It distributed blame broadly, implicating the entire intelligence community rather than any single individual. It recommended reforms, restructuring, new protocols that would supposedly prevent a similar failure in the future.
Yael read all of it. She read the sections about the conceptzia, about how assumptions had hardened into certainty over years of relative quiet. She read about the Jericho Walls document, the Hamas attack plan that had been known since 2018 and dismissed as aspirational. She read about the spotters at Nahal Oz who had reported suspicious activity and been ignored, about the signals intelligence that had been collected and misinterpreted, about the entire apparatus of knowing that had somehow failed to know.
When she finished, she sat in silence for a long time.
The report was thorough. It was accurate. It documented exactly what had happened and why. And it changed nothing, because the dead were still dead and the hostages had still suffered and the war had still been fought and no amount of documentation could undo any of it.
She had stayed in Unit 8200, despite herself.
Her resignation had been rejected, and she had not fought it. Part of her wanted to leave—the institution that had failed so catastrophically did not deserve her loyalty—but another part understood that leaving would not accomplish anything. The work still needed to be done. The threats still existed. Someone had to watch the screens and analyze the patterns and try to prevent the next disaster, even knowing that prevention was never guaranteed.
The war had changed the unit. The confidence that had characterized it before October 7 had been replaced by something more cautious, more humble. People questioned assumptions now. Reports were taken more seriously. The conceptzia, as a framework, had been officially discarded, replaced by a doctrine that emphasized uncertainty and the possibility of surprise.
Whether that would last, Yael didn’t know. Institutional memory was short. In five years, in ten years, new officers would arrive who had not lived through October 7, who would develop new assumptions and new certainties. The cycle would continue, as it always continued, because that was the nature of institutions and the nature of intelligence work and the nature of war itself.
But for now, she did her job. She analyzed threats. She wrote reports. She attended briefings and contributed to assessments and tried to make the system work a little better than it had worked before.
It wasn’t redemption. There was no redemption for what had happened. But it was something.
In May, she received a letter.
It was from the mother of a soldier who had been killed on October 7, one of the spotters at Nahal Oz who had tried to raise the alarm. The mother had learned, somehow—through the investigations, through leaked documents, through the informal networks that connected families of the fallen—that Yael had also tried to warn the system.
I know you did everything you could, the mother wrote. I know the system failed, not you. I wanted you to know that I don’t blame you, and that I’m grateful someone was paying attention, even if no one listened.
Yael read the letter several times, each time feeling something shift inside her. For eighteen months, she had carried the guilt of being right—the unbearable weight of having seen the disaster coming and been unable to prevent it. The letter didn’t erase that guilt, couldn’t erase it, but it offered something else: recognition. Acknowledgment that her efforts had mattered, even if they hadn’t been enough.
She wrote back to the mother, a long letter that tried to express what she had experienced and what she had learned. She wrote about the system and its failures, about the frustration of watching warnings disappear into bureaucratic processes, about the impossible question of what she could have done differently. She wrote about the guilt and the grief and the determination to continue despite both.
The mother wrote back, and a correspondence began that would continue for months. Two women connected by tragedy, trying to make sense of something that could never fully make sense. It wasn’t healing—healing was too simple a word for what they were doing—but it was a form of witness. They bore testimony to each other, and the testimony was a kind of truth.
In July, the final phase of the hostage releases was completed.
The last group emerged from Gaza, thin and damaged and alive. The families who had been waiting—some for nearly two years—finally had their loved ones home. The negotiations that had consumed so much political energy for so long had finally reached their conclusion.
Yael watched the coverage with the complicated emotions that had become familiar since October 7. Relief that the hostages were home. Anger at what they had endured. Grief for those who had not survived, whose bodies had been returned but who would never return. And beneath it all, the persistent question that had haunted her from the beginning: What was it all for?
The war had ended—officially ended, with a peace agreement signed in October 2025 that established new arrangements for Gaza’s governance and Israel’s security. The destruction had been catastrophic: tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands displaced, the infrastructure of an entire territory reduced to rubble. The political situation remained uncertain, the underlying conflicts unresolved, the possibility of future violence always present.
Had it been worth it? The question that Omer had asked, standing in the ruins of Gaza. The question that haunted everyone who had participated in the war, everyone who had survived it, everyone who had lost someone to it.
Yael didn’t know the answer. She suspected there was no answer, only perspectives that differed based on where you stood and what you had lost. From the perspective of the hostages and their families, the war had been necessary to create the pressure that brought them home. From the perspective of Gaza’s civilians, the war had been a catastrophe that destroyed their lives and killed their families. From the perspective of the intelligence community, the war had been a failure that should never have happened, a consequence of their own blindness.
All of these perspectives were true simultaneously. That was the nature of war: it contained contradictions that could not be resolved, truths that could not be reconciled, costs that could never be fully calculated.
In September, Yael gave her final testimony.
The commission had completed its work, the report had been released, but there was one more hearing—a closed session where key witnesses were asked to reflect on lessons learned. Yael had been invited to speak, to offer her perspective as someone who had been inside the system when it failed.
She sat in the hearing room, facing the commissioners, and spoke for two hours. She spoke about the conceptzia and how it had blinded the system to evidence. She spoke about the structural incentives that discouraged dissent. She spoke about the gap between knowing something and being able to act on that knowledge.
And she spoke about what she had learned, what the failure had taught her about the nature of intelligence work and the nature of war.
“We want certainty,” she said. “That’s the fundamental problem. We want to know what’s going to happen, to be confident in our assessments, to give commanders and policymakers the information they need to make decisions. But war is not certain. War is the province of uncertainty, as Clausewitz wrote. The fog never clears completely.”
“So what’s the solution?” one of the commissioners asked.
“I don’t think there’s a solution,” Yael said. “There’s only the recognition that we might be wrong. That our assumptions might be flawed. That the enemy might do something we didn’t expect. We have to build systems that account for that uncertainty, that question their own conclusions, that remain open to evidence that contradicts what we believe.”
“Will that prevent another October 7?”
She was quiet for a moment. “No. Nothing can guarantee prevention. But it might improve our chances. It might make us less blind, less certain, less trapped by our own assumptions.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
“No,” Yael agreed. “It’s not. But it’s honest. And I think honesty is more valuable than false reassurance.”
The commissioners thanked her for her testimony. She left the hearing room and walked out into the autumn sunshine, the light falling on her face, the ordinary world continuing its ordinary business around her.
She had done what she could. She had warned and testified and continued working. She had carried the weight of being right when being right didn’t matter. And now she would continue—continue working, continue watching, continue trying to prevent disasters that might or might not be preventable.
It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. But it was what she had to offer, and she would offer it for as long as she could.
The knowledge needed by a commander is distinguished by the fact that it can be attained only by a special talent, through the medium of reflection, study, and thought: an intellectual instinct which extracts the essence from the phenomena of life. — Carl von Clausewitz
“War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a remarkable trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.” — Carl von Clausewitz
On October 14, 2025, the peace agreement was signed in Cairo.
Dr. Tariq Al-Nasser watched the ceremony on a small television in the clinic tent, surrounded by the patients and colleagues who had become his world. The dignitaries shook hands, the cameras flashed, the speeches promised a new era of stability and reconstruction. Hamas had agreed to relinquish governance of Gaza. A new administrative authority would take over, backed by international support. The war was officially over.
Around him, people reacted in different ways. Some wept with relief. Some stared in silence, unable to process what they were seeing. Some laughed, a bitter sound that contained all the skepticism that two years of destruction had engendered.
Tariq felt nothing that he could name.
The war was over, but the aftermath stretched before him like an ocean. The tent city of al-Mawasi still held hundreds of thousands of displaced people. The hospitals were still overwhelmed with patients. The infrastructure of Gaza—water, power, sewage, roads—remained devastated. The dead were still dead, including his wife and children, whose graves he still had not been able to visit.
Peace. The word felt abstract, a concept from a language he no longer spoke fluently.
“What happens now?” Fatima asked, standing beside him.
“We keep working,” he said, the same answer he had given months ago. “There will be patients. There will be need.”
“For how long?”
“For as long as it takes.”
She nodded slowly. Her children were outside, playing with other children in the dirt between the tents. They had survived. That was something—perhaps the only thing that mattered.
“I was thinking,” she said, “about what you told me. About your family.”
He stiffened. He had told her very little, only fragments, only what he could speak without breaking.
“I think,” she continued, “that someday you should tell me more. When you’re ready. If you want to.”
He looked at her—this woman who had lost her husband and her mother, who had worked beside him through the worst months of the war, who understood without needing to be told what he carried inside him.
“Someday,” he said. “Yes. Someday I will.”
The television showed the dignitaries shaking hands again, replay after replay. Outside the tent, Gaza continued to exist in the only way it knew how: broken, surviving, waiting for whatever came next.
Noa Harari was in Tel Aviv when the agreement was signed.
She watched it with Eitan, in their parents’ apartment, the two of them sitting on the couch where they had sat as children watching cartoons and soccer matches. The world had changed since then—the world was always changing—but this room, at least, remained familiar.
Eitan had improved, slowly. The nightmares were less frequent. The blankness in his eyes had begun to lift, revealing glimpses of the person he had been before. He was in therapy, working through the trauma, learning to exist in a world that no longer felt safe.
“It’s over,” their mother said, watching the screen. “It’s finally over.”
Noa wasn’t sure that was true. The war was over, but Eitan was still waking in the night, still flinching at loud sounds, still carrying the tunnels inside him. The peace agreement didn’t erase what had happened. Nothing could erase what had happened.
But she had learned to live with that. In the months since Eitan’s return, she had discovered that recovery was not a destination but a process, not an ending but a continuation. There would never be a moment when everything was fine. There would only be days that were better and days that were worse, and the work of moving through them one by one.
“What are you thinking about?” Eitan asked.
“The festival,” she said. “That night. Before everything changed.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I try not to think about it.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He paused. “I think about it too, sometimes. What it felt like. The music, the stars, that feeling of connection.” He looked at her. “I told you in the hospital that it went away. The feeling. That it was gone.”
“I remember.”
“I think I was wrong.” His voice was uncertain, exploratory. “It’s not gone. It’s just... harder to find. Buried under everything else. But sometimes, when things are quiet, I can almost feel it again.”
Noa reached over and took his hand. It felt less fragile than it had in the hospital, less skeletal. He was gaining weight, regaining strength, becoming more himself with each passing week.
“Then we’ll find it,” she said. “Together. However long it takes.”
The television showed the signing ceremony again, the promises of a new beginning. Outside, Tel Aviv continued its noisy, chaotic existence, a city that had learned to live with the constant possibility of violence. The war was over. Life continued.
Omer Levy was at work when the agreement was signed.
He had returned to his job as a contractor, building and renovating houses in the suburbs of Petah Tikva. The work was familiar, physical, a way of using his hands that didn’t involve destruction. He found comfort in it, in the simple satisfaction of creating something rather than demolishing it.
His phone buzzed with the news—texts from Michal, from friends, from fellow reservists who had served with him in Gaza. The peace agreement. The end of the war. The promises of normalization and reconstruction and all the things that politicians promised when cameras were pointed at them.
He read the messages but didn’t respond.
The war was over, but the war was not over. It was inside him now, woven into his nervous system, present in the tremor that still affected his hands and the dreams that still woke him in the night. He had learned to manage it—therapy helped, medication helped, the routines of daily life helped—but it was always there, a weight that he carried beneath everything else.
Yonatan was stationed in the north now, part of a unit monitoring the Lebanese border. The cycle continuing, as Omer had known it would continue. His son was learning the things that soldiers learned, carrying the weapons that soldiers carried, becoming part of the machine that had consumed so much of Omer’s own life.
He had tried to talk to Yonatan about what he had experienced in Gaza. The tunnels, the demolitions, Kobi Stern dying in his arms. But the words had come out wrong, or hadn’t come out at all, and Yonatan had listened with the polite distance of a young man who didn’t yet understand what his father was trying to tell him.
Maybe that was okay. Maybe understanding had to come from experience, not from words. Maybe Yonatan would learn his own lessons, carry his own weight, become his own kind of survivor.
Omer put down his phone and returned to work. The house he was building was for a young family, a couple with two children who wanted more space. They had no idea who he was, what he had done, what he had seen. They only knew that he was the contractor who would turn their plans into reality.
He liked that anonymity. He liked being someone who built rather than someone who destroyed.
The peace agreement changed nothing about the work in front of him. He would finish this house, start another one, continue the process of construction that had defined his civilian life. And at night, he would go home to Michal, to his children, to the life he had built over twenty years of marriage and fatherhood.
The war was over. The work continued.
Yael Shimoni was in her apartment when the agreement was signed.
She had taken the day off—the investigation commission had finally concluded, and she had allowed herself a rare day of rest. She watched the ceremony on her laptop, drinking coffee, noting the diplomatic choreography that had produced this moment.
The peace agreement was, from an intelligence perspective, exactly what she would have predicted: a compromise that satisfied no one fully, that left the fundamental issues unresolved, that created stability without creating resolution. The underlying conflicts remained. The historical grievances remained. The possibility of future violence remained.
But that was the nature of political settlements. They didn’t solve problems; they managed them. They bought time, created space for other processes, allowed life to continue in the absence of perfect solutions.
The mother of the soldier from Nahal Oz had written to her again last week. The correspondence had become a lifeline for both of them, a way of processing what had happened that formal investigations could not provide. They wrote about grief and guilt, about memory and meaning, about the impossible task of making sense of catastrophe.
We are witnesses, the mother had written. Our job is not to explain or justify or judge. Our job is to remember, and to make sure others remember too.
Yael had thought about that a lot. Witness. The word carried weight, implied responsibility. To be a witness was to see something and to testify to what you had seen, to carry the truth of an experience into a future where it might otherwise be forgotten.
She had been a witness to the failure that preceded October 7. She had been a witness to the war that followed. She would continue to be a witness to whatever came next.
The peace agreement scrolled across her screen—articles signed, hands shaken, speeches delivered. It was a good agreement, or at least a necessary one. It would create space for reconstruction, for healing, for all the slow processes that followed catastrophe. Whether it would hold, whether it would lead to lasting peace, no one could say.
That was the nature of the future: unknowable, uncertain, full of possibilities both hopeful and terrible.
Yael finished her coffee and closed her laptop. Tomorrow she would return to work, to the endless task of watching and analyzing and trying to understand. The job she had questioned and rejected and finally accepted, because it was the job that needed to be done.
The war was over. The fog was lifting.
But it would never lift entirely. There would always be uncertainty, always be the possibility of surprise, always be the gap between what we know and what we need to know. That was the lesson of October 7, the lesson of every war, the lesson that Clausewitz had tried to teach: in war, the simple becomes difficult, and the difficult becomes impossible, and we do our best despite knowing that our best may not be enough.
She thought about the others—the doctor in Gaza, the reservist in Petah Tikva, the hostage who had been returned—and wondered what they were thinking, what they were feeling, whether they too were trying to make sense of what they had survived.
They would never meet, probably. Their paths had crossed through the war but would likely never cross again. Yet they were connected, bound together by the experience of having lived through something that most people would only ever read about.
Witnesses, all of them. Carrying the weight of what they had seen.
The day ended, as all days ended, with the sun going down.
In Gaza, Dr. Tariq Al-Nasser worked his final shift of the day, treating patients who would recover and patients who would not, doing what he had always done because it was all he knew how to do.
In Tel Aviv, Noa Harari sat with her brother and talked about small things, the kind of conversation that required no weight, that was simply the sound of two people existing together.
In Petah Tikva, Omer Levy had dinner with his family, and afterward helped his youngest son with homework, and felt, for a moment, something like peace.
In Be’er Sheva, Yael Shimoni walked through her neighborhood as the stars came out, thinking about nothing in particular, letting her mind be empty.
Four lives, touched and transformed by war. Four stories, incomplete and ongoing. Four witnesses to something that would be remembered differently by different people, analyzed and debated and contested for generations to come.
The peace agreement would hold or it would not. The reconstruction would succeed or it would fail. The future would bring new challenges, new conflicts, new opportunities for both hope and despair.
But for tonight, at least, the fighting had stopped. For tonight, at least, no bombs were falling and no rockets were flying and no one was dying in the particular ways that war demanded.
For tonight, there was silence.
And in the silence, life continued—damaged and resilient, grieving and hopeful, uncertain and determined—as it had always continued, as it would always continue, as long as there were people willing to carry the weight of what they had survived and move forward into whatever came next.
War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale... Its aim is to compel our opponent to fulfill our will... War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.
But force is only the means; the object is to impose our will on the enemy.
Now, philanthropists may easily imagine there is a skillful method of disarming and overcoming an enemy without causing great bloodshed, and that this is the proper tendency of the Art of War... This is an error which must be extirpated.
War is the continuation of politics by other means.
— Carl von Clausewitz, On War
THE END
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.