‘The world will never be the same again’: How October 7 changed Israel, Gaza and Australia

October 6, 2026 — 6:51pm

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Three years after the Hamas gunshots rang out across southern Israel, the world is still living in the October 7 era.

In the lead-up to the attacks, Israelis were mostly consumed by their internal politics – specifically the Netanyahu government’s moves to strip power from the nation’s Supreme Court - rather than external threats. The Palestinian cause had faded from international attention. Just days before the assault, US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan described the Middle East region as quieter than it had been in two decades.

Then came the rampage. To help foreigners understand the scale of such an atrocity in a tiny country of around 10 million people, Israelis often point out that, in per capita terms, the casualty figure of 1200 people killed was 13 times greater than the fatalities of September 11. Two hundred and fifty people – including young children and grandmothers – were taken hostage into Gaza, sparking a mass protest movement to secure their release.

“October 7 was one of those cosmic moments when you realise the world has changed and will never be the same again,” Australian Council of Executive Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin says. “It brutally showed the world that the days of Jewish torment, of women dragged to captivity, of decapitation, pack rape and thrill killing, did not belong to history. They are with us now and probably forever. For those who hate Jews and long craved to see them get what was coming to them, October 7 was euphoric.”

The Israeli state’s failure to prevent, and adequately respond to, the worst terror attack in the nation’s history still rattles its citizens. “The main question we ask, and all of Israel asks all of the time, is: where was the army?” Danny Majzner, whose Australian-Israeli sister Galit Carbone was murdered in a kibbutz near the Gaza border, told this masthead ahead of the first anniversary of the attacks. Such questions remain unanswered two years later.

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© The Sydney Morning Herald