On the morning of October 7, 2023, as Jews around the world prepared to celebrate the festival of Simchat Torah, Hamas terrorists launched a coordinated assault on southern Israel. What followed was not a military operation against soldiers. It was a deliberate, sadistic campaign of mass murder, sexual violence, kidnapping, and mutilation directed at civilians—families in their homes, young people at a music festival, children in their beds.

This essay is drawn from my contemporaneous diary entries during and in the months and years that followed the October 7 attack.

In those posts, which later became the basis of a meticulous historical book series, I returned again and again to the events of that shocking, traumatizing day. 

My writings do not pretend to offer a complete forensic history. They are the reflections of a witness who refused to look away: at the rape of women, the murder of little girls, the taking of hostages, the prolonged hours in which the killing continued uninterrupted, and the subsequent moral collapse of large parts of the world that denied, minimized, or even celebrated the atrocities.

The diary entries insist on one simple, unyielding demand: that the truth of what was done to the victims not be buried under politics, propaganda, or selective outrage. “We will go on,” I wrote, “but we will never forget.”

This essay briefly gathers those themes into a continuous narrative. It is offered in the same spirit—as a record, a refusal to forget, and a demand that the world confront what happened on October 7 without euphemism or excuse.

I. The Day Itself

October 7 began with the sound of rockets and the breach of the border fence. Within hours, armed men from Hamas and other Palestinian groups had poured into Israeli communities and the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im. What they did next was not the fog of war. It was methodical cruelty.

Civilians were hunted in their safe rooms. Parents were murdered in front of their children. Children were murdered in front of their parents. Young women at the festival were raped, mutilated, and killed. Bodies were burned, some while still alive. The attackers filmed themselves. They took trophies. They celebrated.

In the diaries, I return repeatedly to a single, devastating observation: that the world, which claims to stand against the trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and children, largely fell silent—or worse—when the victims were Israeli Jews. “Of all the really sad and upsetting things about October 7,” I wrote, “the one that will never leave my mind is that the world actually denied—or worse, justified—the mass rape and murder of Israeli women. I can’t even fathom that level of evil. I can’t fathom that a world horrified at child trafficking says nothing as little girls are horribly attacked and murdered. Innocent children!”

The documentary Screams Before Silence, which collected survivor and first-responder testimony about the systematic sexual violence, became a necessary corrective. The diary notes its availability and the moral necessity of watching it. The violence against women was not incidental. It was a central feature of the attack—an assault on the Jewish family and on the idea that Jewish women and girls could live in safety in their own land.

II: The Stand-Down and the Unanswered Hours

One of the most persistent questions in the diaries is not only what Hamas did, but why they were allowed to do it for so long. Reports of a multi-hour delay in the Israeli response—sometimes described as a seven-hour stand-down—appear again and again. I refused to treat this as a minor operational failure.

“It’s impossible,” I wrote, “that the terrorists from Hamas and the civilians from Gaza had a blank check to commit mass rape, murder, and brutally dismember Israeli women. They had this unchecked freedom for many hours, and yet nobody intervened. It raises questions: Was there someone on the inside who knew what was going to happen and allowed it? … Until we uncover who was truly responsible, the matter remains unresolved.”

Elsewhere I insist that half-truths are no truth at all. Investigations that ignore the ignored warnings, the weakened monitoring, the festival’s last-minute approvals, and the delayed military response cannot claim to be complete. The diaries treat the failure to prevent and to respond as part of the moral catastrophe of the day itself. The victims paid for those hours with their lives and their bodies.

III. Hostages and the Continuing Crimes

October 7 did not end when the last terrorist was driven back across the border. Hostages—men, women, children, and the elderly—were dragged into Gaza. Their captivity became a continuing crime. The diaries record my reaction to videos of teenage hostages, the cynical negotiations, and the refusal of Hamas to release them without extracting political and strategic gains.

The taking of hostages was not a side effect. It was intentional. It was designed to terrorize an entire population and to create leverage. Every day the hostages remained in tunnels or apartments under Hamas control was another day the original atrocity continued. The diaries treat their ongoing suffering as inseparable from the original massacre.

IV. The World’s Response

Within days, and in some places within hours, the massacre was reframed. Protests erupted on campuses and in Western cities that treated the attackers as resistance and the victims as legitimate targets. The diaries record my bewilderment and anger at this inversion. I note the silence of many who claim to speak for women’s rights. I note the eagerness of some to believe Hamas casualty figures while dismissing Israeli evidence of rape and murder. I note the readiness of protesters to chant for the destruction of the Jewish state while the bodies were still being identified. “Many are afraid to speak up against Hamas,” I observed—not because they approve of the atrocities, but because the social and physical costs of condemnation have been made deliberately high.

The diaries reject the idea that context excuses the deliberate murder of civilians, the rape of women, or the burning of children. Context does not turn a GoPro recording of a massacre into an act of liberation. The refusal to name the crime for what it was became, in my view, a second assault on the victims.

V. Trauma and Memory

For Jews, October 7 joined a long and terrible chain of memory. The diaries emphasize that the attack struck not only at bodies but at the Jewish family itself—at the possibility of ordinary life, of safety in one’s own home, of a festival night that ends in music rather than fire. Jewish men, the author notes, carried a particular trauma: the knowledge that they had been unable to protect the women and children of their people from systematic sexual violence and slaughter.

“There is no way we can return to the state before October 7,” I wrote. The day is permanent. The question is only whether the world will remember it accurately or allow it to be rewritten into something more convenient.

The diaries return, year after year, to the same refusal. On the anniversary, in discussions of new reports, in reactions to videos of hostages still held, the same sentence appears: “I will never forget October 7.” It is not a slogan. It is a commitment.

VI. What Must Be Faced

The diaries do not offer easy consolations. They demand investigation of the warnings that were ignored and the hours that were lost. They demand that the sexual violence be named without euphemism. They demand that the hostages not be forgotten while negotiations drag on. They demand that those who celebrated or excused the massacre be confronted with the reality of what they cheered.

Above all, they demand that the victims—the women raped and murdered, the children burned or shot, the families erased in their own homes—remain at the center of the story. Not as symbols. As human beings who were deliberately destroyed.

October 7 was an act of pure evil carried out by men who filmed their own crimes and gloried in them. Any account that softens that fact, that trades it for political advantage, or that treats Jewish suffering as less real than other suffering, participates in a second erasure. The diaries refuse that erasure. This book, drawn from them, does the same.

Epilogue: A Commitment

We will go on. That is not in doubt. The question is whether we will go on in truth or in comfortable amnesia.

The diary entries that form the basis of this book were written in real time, under the pressure of unfolding events and the shock of a world that, in large part, preferred not to see. They are imperfect, personal, and sometimes angry. They are also clear. The mass rape happened. The murders of children happened. The hostages were taken. The hours of unanswered screams happened. The subsequent denial happened.

To remember October 7 is not to thirst for endless war. It is to refuse the lie that Jewish blood is cheap and Jewish women are fair game. It is to insist that the deliberate destruction of civilians—filmed, celebrated, and then excused—remains a crime no matter who commits it and no matter what banner they fly.