JERUSALEM: Following the launch of a major Israeli ground offensive in Gaza City on Tuesday, here is a snapshot of the Gaza war, sparked by Palestinian militant group Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed nearly 65,000 Palestinians, mainly civilians, according to health ministry figures from the Hamas-run territory that the United Nations considers reliable.
- Hamas attacks -
At dawn on Saturday, October 7, 2023, during the Jewish festival of Simhat Torah, hundreds of Hamas fighters infiltrate Israel from the Gaza Strip under a hail of rockets.
At least 1,219 people, mainly civilians, are killed on the Israeli side in attacks on kibbutzim and a rave music festival, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
The attackers take 251 hostages back to Gaza, some of them already dead.
Israel’s domestic intelligence agency the Shin Bet, as well as the army, later acknowledged their failure in preventing the attack. The Shin Bet said there had been an overarching assessment that Hamas was more focused on “inciting violence” in the occupied West Bank.
It said that “a policy of quiet had enabled Hamas to undergo massive military buildup.”
- Hostages -
One hundred and forty-one of the hostages taken during the attack — including eight who were dead — were released in November 2023 and in early 2025, during the war’s two ceasefires. In return Israel freed more than 2,000 Palestinian prisoners.
Some hostages have been brought back, both alive and dead, by the Israeli army over the course of the war. As of September 16, 2025, 47 hostages remained in Gaza, of whom at least 25 are believed to be dead.
Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad in August broadcast videos showing two hostages in a weakened state, one apparently digging his own grave.
The plight of the hostages, who were mainly civilians of all ages, came to be symbolized by the Bibas family.
Only the father was released alive — his wife and their two small sons, abducted at the ages of eight-and-a-half months and four years old, were killed in captivity in Gaza.
- Humanitarian crisis -
The air and ground campaign launched by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, vowing to destroy Hamas and bring home all the hostages, has left tens of thousands of Gazan civilians dead, sometimes whole families.
The United Nations said the war had brought a level of destruction unprecedented in recent history, with at least 78 percent of buildings damaged or destroyed, including hospitals and schools.
Most of the Palestinian territory’s more than two million inhabitants have been displaced, many of them more than once.
Humanitarian aid trickles in, though the Israeli authorities completely blocked the arrival of supplies for 11 weeks starting in March 2025, only easing the blockade in late May.
After months of warnings, a UN-backed report in August declared a state of famine in part of the territory, a finding disputed by Israel, which accuses Hamas of looting aid.
On Tuesday, United Nations investigators accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza. Israel has slammed that UN probe as “distorted and false.”
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
- Conflict spreads -
Hamas is backed by Iran, and has received the support of allied armed groups around the region.
From the outset, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah began firing rockets across the border at Israel.
Israel responded with months of air strikes, with the exchange of fire ultimately culminating in two months of open war and a ground incursion into Lebanon that a fragile ceasefire sought to end in November of 2024.
In solidarity with the Palestinians, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have been targeting shipping off Yemen, and have carried out repeated missile and drone attacks on Israel, which has hit back with several air strikes.
Israel also fought a 12-day war against its arch-foe Iran in mid-June, attacking the country’s military and nuclear sites and killing top commanders and scientists, as well as civilians.
Tehran responded with ballistic missile attacks targeting Israeli cities, killing more than two dozen people.
Iran had directly attacked Israel twice in 2024, launching waves of drones and missiles at its territory in retaliation for a deadly attack on a Damascus consular building blamed on Israel, and the killing of Hamas and Hezbollah chiefs.
- Battle for territory -
In August, the Israeli government approved an operation aimed at seizing the territory’s central refugee camps and Gaza City in the north, the Strip’s largest urban center.
Israel has said Gaza City is home to Hamas’s last stronghold, and that the operation will allow it to establish security control of the whole territory and free the last remaining hostages.
The operation, for which Israel has called up 60,000 reservists, has drawn international and domestic criticism over fears it could worsen the already dire humanitarian situation and put the hostages’ lives at risk.
But a week after carrying out an unprecedented strike in Qatar targeting Hamas officials, the Israeli army before dawn on Tuesday launched a major ground offensive in Gaza City after Washington voiced its staunch support for wiping out Hamas.
