A survivor’s reflection on Oct. 7 

By Natalie Sanandaji 
Real Clear Wire

As we marked the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7 earlier this month, it’s hard to believe how much my life has changed since that horrible day.

I was in Israel for a friend’s wedding and extended my trip to attend the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im. After my friends and I danced for a bit, we decided to get some rest before the sunrise music set.

We woke up at dawn to rockets flying overhead from nearby Gaza. And from then on, the horror of what was transpiring became terrifyingly clear. We heard the first gunshots, and we ran for our lives. For the next several hours, death waited at every turn. Fortunately for my friends and me, we eventually saw a truck passing by being driven by a local man, Moshe Sati, who was risking his life to bring strangers to safety, and we were able to escape.

But tragically, 364 festival-goers were not. Hamas members hunted them down and brutally murdered them. Forty others were abducted, paraded through the streets of Gaza before being herded into underground tunnels. Many of them remain there, a year later.

In total, Hamas killed more than 1,200 people on that dreadful morning and kidnapped 251 more. The hostages have been subject to physical, sexual, and psychological torment for the entirety of their captivity. Just recently, six hostages, including American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, were executed by Hamas in cold blood.

It seems that all too many people have forgotten what Hamas is and what its goals are.

Hamas is a genocidal organization, dedicated not “only” to the destruction of Israel, the world’s sole Jewish state, but to the wholesale mass murder of the Jewish people. It is right there in the group’s founding charter, much of whose hateful, conspiratorial language is ripped directly from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Nazi propaganda.

Hamas demonstrated pure evil that day, and promised to commit such massacres “over and over.”

And yet we continue to see the flag of Hamas proudly waved in the streets of New York City, Washington, D.C., Toronto, and other cities in the West. When the news came out this week that Israel had killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief and mastermind behind the Oct. 7 attack, social media was filled with posts hailing him as a martyr.

The images of innocent Jews being mercilessly butchered in their own homes, shockingly, did not lead to more sympathy for the Jews and a recognition of the hatred we face; rather, it resulted in the worst outbreak of antisemitism since 1945.

And the global explosion of hatred began not when Israeli forces entered Gaza in response to the massacre, but immediately after the slaughter. Israelis and Jews around the world were given no time to grieve.

Hamas does not want peace.

And, ultimately, Hamas’ paymasters in Tehran do not want peace either. Hamas is trained, armed, and financed by Iran. The attacks would not have been possible without Iranian support. Hamas fighters would not be nearly as formidable without Iranian investment.

Many people in the U.S. believe that this war has no impact on them. But if you enjoy your rights as a U.S. citizen to basic freedoms such as free speech and religion, then you should understand that this war has everything to do with you.

The reality is that Israel’s necessary and moral defensive war against Hamas is also a war against the Iranian regime.

Iran’s malicious influence can be seen in Lebanon, where Hezbollah effectively holds an entire country hostage to its (meaning Iran’s) whims; in Gaza and the West Bank; in Yemen, from where the Houthis (whose slogan is “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam”) attack international shipping lanes and fire ballistic missiles at Israeli population centers; and in Iraq and Syria, where Shiite militias periodically attack American soldiers.

We do not want war; we want peace. We pray for it.

There appears to be zero realization or acknowledgment that Israel has repeatedly agreed to various ceasefire proposals, while it has been Hamas that has repeatedly rejected them.

Peace cannot mean conceding to Hamas, which would only mean more war later. Peace requires the defeat of Hamas and the return of the hostages. It means ending a war that Israel did not ask for.

We don’t want more death. We celebrate life.

And it is precisely that – our love of life – that will get us through these dark times.

Natalie Sanandaji is a survivor of the Oct. 7 Nova music festival massacre and a public affairs officer with the Combat Antisemitism Movement.