October 7 anniversary: The bereaved families still hoping for an end to war three years on

“After three years, my worst fear is that my kids’ memory will fade away,” Sigal Manzuri says, on the eve of the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks that claimed her two daughters’ lives.

“I just ask from others to really please remember that behind every picture they see, every story they hear, there is a soul, there are so many dreams cut short. And just remember them.”

Sigal, a US-Israeli mother and activist from Hod HaSharon in central Israel, today dedicates her time to preserving the memory of her daughters, Norelle, 25, and Roya, 22, who were both killed at the Supernova music festival in 2023.

Some 1,200 people were killed that day as the Palestinian terror group led an armed incursion across the border, rampaging through towns and taking 251 hostages back into Gaza.

Israel’s response was to lay ruin to the Palestinian enclave with a campaign that is estimated to have killed more than 70,000 people.

Sigal, still in Israel, believes it her mission to continue spreading the “light” of her daughters, and to resist what she recognises to be a very bleak alternative.

It was in this spirit that she founded ‘NoRo – Lighting the Way’, a community support group and workshop built around the passions and interests of her daughters and future son-in-law, Amit Cohen, who was also killed in the attacks.

“It’s a huge project and it takes so much from me – and I’m happy that it does,” she tells The Independent, pointing to the travel and exhibitions, and her hopes of bringing the idea to Los Angeles, where the girls were born.

Sigal last saw her daughters on October 6, 2023 as the family gathered for a festive meal to mark the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah. Norelle was engaged to marry Amit the following year. Roya dreamed of helping people with PTSD.

“On the one hand it feels like a decade, and on the other it feels like one very long day,” she says of the time elapsed.

She says that when they did not come home from the festival, the only way to survive was to find a life with meaning: allowing herself to be “guided” by her daughters to go on offering emotional support for other at-risk young adults.

“There is a way of winning this war the conventional way, with fighting and weapons and whatever. But for us, as bereaved families, we don’t fight with weapons. We fight with what we believe in. And we believe in love,” she said.

“This is our way of winning this really, really dark war that we have to deal with … I’m not saying that it’s easy, but this is our way. This is what we chose. This is how we chose to continue.”

With the October 27 elections fast approaching, there are Israelis who believe it is a chance to put the country on a different path.

“I know it’s not going to be smooth, but I feel that this is our chance,” Sigal said of the upcoming election. “We’re going to get a real opportunity to start to heal and to fix what really happened here for so many years, even before October 7.

“We need a new leadership really caring about their people and to try to start a healing process here.”

“This is the biggest challenge of all for us as a nation, in Israel,” she added. “We need to get together to bring our hearts closer again and only after that can we try to move on.”

But despite a US-mediated peace agreement to end the 2023 war, a Pew Research Center survey taken in April found just 17 per cent of Israelis believe peaceful coexistence is possible, with 64 per cent of Jews and 26 per cent of Arabs doubtful.

In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, just 21 per cent of Palestinian adults said they believed peace was possible, while 68 per cent were unconvinced.

Yonatan Zeigen, the son of the late peace activist Vivian Silver, who was killed in the massacre at kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, told The Independent that peace is “always on the horizon”, but will remain as realistic as war without the political will to seize it.

Since then, he has dedicated his life to reconciliation and this year helped found a forward-looking political party on the Left, ‘A Place for Us All’, focused on “ending the occupation, resolving the conflict in general, and civil equality”.

“We see that there is an official ceasefire, but every day people are killed in Gaza and the humanitarian situation on the ground isn’t getting any better,” he added. “Is it worse? I can’t say because I’m not the one experiencing it firsthand, right?”

Yonatan said his party would not be running in the elections due to Israel’s electoral threshold requiring 3.25 per cent of the national vote to win seats. But he believes there is a new space for a hopeful kind of politics.

“There is polarisation in society and there is this dialectical clash between political movements in Israel,” he conceded. “But the point is leadership, is that the people are not being offered any alternative vision to just what exists, to accepting the occupation as a given.”