A pogrom, a pushback, a region transformed: 600 days since October 7
Six hundred days on, those questions still defy comprehension. And those failures—including the inability to bring all the hostages home—shape how many Israelis view the war.
Wednesday marks the 600th day of the Israel-Hamas War. Six hundred days since Hamas acted on a jihadist fantasy to destroy the Jewish state, breached a border unfathomably easy to penetrate, and carried out a pogrom that would have made the Crusaders, Cossacks, and Nazis proud.
No less.
October 7 was a blood-soaked letter from the Jewish past, a past many mistakenly believed had been relegated to history with the establishment of the State of Israel. They were wrong.
October 7 was a catastrophe that remains incomprehensible. How did the country allow an organization with genocidal designs to metastasize into a full-blown terrorist army?
How did a state with Israel's vaunted intelligence capabilities fail to detect thousands of terrorists assembling to storm the border? How were key warning signals missed?
Even worse, and more unfathomable, how did intelligence exist, yet go unacted upon? Why was the military, especially the air force, so slow to respond?
Six hundred days on, those questions still defy comprehension. And those failures, including the inability to bring all the hostages home, shape how many Israelis view the war.
There are echoes here of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the public memory, that war is largely seen as a calamity. And it was, if judged by its opening: intelligence lapses, unpreparedness, underestimation of the enemy, ignored warnings, early battlefield disasters, and high casualties.
But that wasn't the full story. By the time a ceasefire was declared, Israeli forces stood within striking distance of both Damascus and Cairo, with Egypt's Third Army completely surrounded in the Sinai.
That war effectively ended the era of conventional Arab-Israeli wars. Arab leaders learned a hard truth: They could not defeat Israel through conventional military force. Yet the trauma of the war's beginning – the losses, the shock – still defines it in the Israeli psyche.
Psychologists often talk about something called 'a negativity bias,' the human tendency to fixate on the bad and overlook the good. If a singer performs and 10 people praise her, while one critic says she was off-key, it's the criticism that often lingers.
And what is true for the individual is also true for nations.
October 7 was a day of horror. A pogrom. But it was followed by October 8, the day after. And then, the world witnessed something it hadn't seen before: the Jewish reaction to the pogrom. It was called Operation Swords of Iron, and it was angry, fierce, and relentless. And in the 600 days since, it has reshaped not only Israel but the entire Middle East in ways not seen since 1967.
From a purely security standpoint, the war has produced significant gains. But many refuse or are unable to acknowledge them because of the pain and suffering endured: the devastation of October 7, the tremendous losses, and the fact that of the 251 hostages taken, 58 remain in captivity, including 20 believed to be alive. Their families are still living a nightmare.
Some may ask: How can anyone speak of success when Hamas still holds hostages and Israel's failures enabled that horrific day? Because it is possible to hold multiple, and even contradictory, truths at once.
Yes, October 7 was a failure of biblical proportions. Yes, Israel has not fully achieved all its war aims. But that is not all that has happened. Alongside the failures during the war, some of them glaring, there have also been major accomplishments that have changed the regional landscape.
And on this 600th day of the war, those achievements deserve to be acknowledged as well.
Netanyahu's promise of an 'absolute victory' has yet to materialize. But if one of the war's three central goals—alongside destroying Hamas and returning the hostages—was to ensure Gaza no longer posed a serious threat to Israel, that goal is well on its way to being met.
Hamas, as a functioning military formation, has been decimated. According to estimates from the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), more than 20,000 terrorists have been killed.
Most of Hamas's senior leadership has been eliminated, with Israeli observers openly wondering who—if anyone—is now in charge and making the decisions.
Hamas's rocket arsenal, which terrorized the South for two decades, has been drastically depleted. Its weapons production infrastructure has been severely damaged. And while assessments vary about the extent of damage to Hamas's vast tunnel system, it is no longer what it was on October 7.
Much of the coastal enclave is a devastated moonscape that will take years, if not decades, to rebuild. This has extracted a high price from Israeli soldiers and Gazan civilians. But militarily, the threat Gaza once posed has been neutralized.
Yes, Hamas is still recruiting, but the new fighters are mostly young, poorly trained, and motivated by a paycheck that's increasingly unreliable. They are a shadow of the well-trained Nukhba force that breached the border that dark October morning.
A different reality has emerged in Gaza—a safer reality for Israel.
In the West Bank, too, the IDF has made major strides.
Some 950 Palestinians have been killed there, the vast majority terrorist operatives. According to INSS figures, another 15,000 have been arrested there since October 7, providing the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) with a far clearer intelligence picture.
Since October 7, Israel has operated in the West Bank on a scale unseen since the Second Intifada. It has entered areas like the Jenin refugee camp that were once deemed 'off-limits' and delivered a severe blow to the terrorist infrastructure there.
That doesn't mean the threat is gone. Iran continues trying to smuggle weapons and money into the area. But the gains are real and significant.
Then there is Lebanon, which was, before last summer, the Kingdom of Hezbollah. Today, it is something else. Thanks to Israel's military campaign – exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, assassinations of Hezbollah commanders, precision strikes on missile stockpiles, and years of intelligence gathering – Hezbollah has lost its iron grip on the country.
This doesn't mean it won't try to bounce back; it will. But for now, Lebanon is no longer fully in the hands of Iran's proxy militia. That changes the strategic map for the better – for Israel and the entire region.
Syria, even more so than Lebanon, is a different country than it was 600 days ago, thanks in large part to the actions that Israel took against Hezbollah and its actions to destroy the bulk of ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad's military as his regime was collapsing.
The fall of Assad has removed the cornerstone of Iran's 'axis of resistance,' and the pipeline through which Iran moved arms to Hezbollah has been plugged up.
True, no one knows exactly in which direction Ahmed al-Sharaa, Assad's successor and a former jihadist, will lead the country. Will it be down the extreme Islamic path or toward moderation?
Israel needs to prepare for both scenarios, as well as a third: Syria descends into sectarian chaos, and Turkey and Iran move into the vacuum.
Regardless, Syria is no longer the conventional military threat it once was or a possible Iranian springboard for an attack on Israel. That, too, is part of the post-October 7 legacy.
And finally, there is Iran.
Thanks to Hamas's October 7 attack, Iran is arguably at its weakest point since the Iran-Iraq War in the mid-1980s. The 'axis of resistance' it poured billions into – Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria – has been severely degraded. The Houthis still stand, but they pose nowhere near the threat the other three once did.
More than that, Iran's two attacks on Israel last year showed that the best they could deliver against the Jewish state was no match for Israel's air defenses, aided by the US and its allies. The best Tehran had made little more than a dent. At the same time, Israel's counterattacks reportedly took out Iran's air defense system and have left the Islamic Republic badly exposed.
Those, too, are Israeli accomplishments in this war.
So, on this 600th day, it is right and necessary to grieve the hostages still in captivity, to mourn the fallen, and to rage at the failures that led to October 7. The pain is real, and the cost is immense.
But it is also necessary to recognize what has been achieved since. Israel has inflicted serious, unprecedented damage on the axis of forces arrayed against it. It has reasserted military dominance, regained deterrence, changed strategic assumptions, and, in important ways, redrawn the regional map.
Those gains have come at a heavy price, and they do not erase the losses nor minimize the grief. But they do matter. And they will shape the region for years to come.
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