Two Years After an Attack that Shook the Mideast, What are the Consequences?

0:00Today on State of the World, two years after an attack that shook the Middle East, what are the consequences?

0:11You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories, up close where they're happening. It's October 7th, 2025. I'm Greg Dixon. Two years ago, on October 7th, 2023, Hamas-led militants from Gaza streamed across the militarized border with Israel, launching a surprise attack that would be the deadliest day in Israeli history. Israel's ensuing war in Gaza has been the deadliest and most destructive Palestinians have ever endured. After two years, there is a glimmer of hope that negotiations may finally bring an end to this war. On today's episode, we're going to look at the consequences of the last two years of war for Israelis and for Palestinians.

0:59In a few minutes, we hear about one family in Gaza. First, NPR's Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv tells us about the human cost of the war for Israelis. On a street named Gaza lives Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Outside his home stands a man with a megaphone. Bibi and Sarah, he calls out to the Prime Minister and his wife. It's Rome's dad, Ophir Braslavsky. Rome is his 21-year-old son being held hostage in Gaza. As Israel intensified the war this year, families of hostages intensified their war with Netanyahu. I'm not going to let you kill my son and bring him back in a body bag, he says. More Godard lost both her parents on October 7th, and much more.

1:59I lost my trust in the country. My trust in the army. Terrorists entered my house. Tried to open the safe room door. And when they didn't succeed, they set the house on fire. And nobody came.

2:22I know what the feeling of abandonment is. Hours when nobody comes. I'm a brother of my friends. I'm a brother of my parents. Hours when I hear my friends and parents being murdered, she says. Her father's body is still held by militants in Gaza as a bargaining chip in the war. She's mourning her parents and also the road Israel has taken in the last two years. They're acting out of revenge. And not out of values, she says. This is one cost of the prolonged war. Not all Israelis believe in it anymore. Psychiatrist Dr. Oren Tenet from Tel Aviv Medical Center. When a nation goes to war and is not unified in belief that we're doing the right thing, then the propensity for the suffering is much higher.

3:23He's tracked a rise in the use of anti-anxiety medications. The war with Iran this summer was especially traumatizing. Iranian missiles pounded Israeli cities. He's seen an influx of patients. They don't sleep well. They can't concentrate. They feel worried all the time. They don't know if they have a future here. He's also treated young soldiers coming back from Gaza with survivor's guilt, often overseeing their own friends killed by a high rate of friendly fire. So the price of sending people to war is enormous. And I'm not talking about the price of the other side. We have to think of the other side.

4:03The Palestinian side. Dr. Tene has treated many soldiers grappling with what mental health practitioners call moral injury or moral trauma. Many people describe the fact that they have betrayed their values. He says his patients have acknowledged shooting Palestinian civilians. And if you shot a child, the child walks with you. What soldiers see in Gaza, most Israelis do not see. And that's another cost of the war, Israelis' loss of empathy for Palestinian suffering.

4:43At a rally for hostages, Demonstrator Karen Geel says she's sad to see her sympathies change so much in the last two years. Before the war, before October 7th, my thinking was there are families there and there are people who want to live quiet and have their own lives. But today, I don't think that anyone in Gaza is innocent. She's appalled by Israeli accounts of hostages held in families' homes. The military says some were held captive in the home of a Gaza doctor. Is it reasonable that a doctor in Gaza was taking hostages to his home? I cannot believe it happened. So for me, I don't care about the Gaza people.

5:27An Israeli researcher of Middle East politics, Asaf David, is trying to help restore empathy. He's built a following online, translating to Hebrew the Facebook posts of ordinary Palestinians, like this post from a father in Gaza. Roughly it says, this is my picture with my child Mira before the war. I love her very much. I lost her. I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to her and I don't know who buried her. David says these social media posts help Israelis gain awareness. I'm too terrified to think about the long-term costs of this lack of empathy because it feeds on itself. The psychological costs, they affect your soul.

6:19The cost globally to Israel is clear.

6:25Anti-war protests like this one last weekend in Rome are common across Europe. Israeli authorities have tracked a wave of attacks on Jews and Israelis throughout the war. Israel is fending off accusations of genocide and war crimes in international courts. The Israeli government has warned Israelis to lower their profile abroad. But that hasn't stopped them from traveling. We visit the Tel Aviv International Airport, Israeli's gateway to escape the intensity of life at war. We meet a 25-year-old soldier. My name is Alshri Avata. And I'm going to take my journey to Georgia. He served in Gaza in an elite undercover unit.

7:10While the rest of his unit is doing group therapy with a psychologist to process, he skipped out.

7:30We leave the airport and pass stickers on the walls, many bearing the smiling faces of young Israeli soldiers killed in the war. One stands out with a quote from a mother's eulogy to her soldier's son. It says, Our story will have a good ending. Once the war does end, Israelis will begin to reckon with the costs they've paid over the last two years. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Tel Aviv.

8:13More than 67 ,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to officials there. That's a number that is hard to comprehend, a story of loss that is impossible to tell. So NPR's Ayah Batraoui and Anas Baba instead tell us the story of one Palestinian family in Gaza and their experience. Nidal Dalul describes the moment when he first became a father and laid eyes on his daughter. Dalul says it was dawn on Sunday, January 2, 2021, when the nurses brought her to him. She came after several rounds of IVF, two days of labor, and weighing 7.7 pounds.

8:59She was finally in his arms, white like milk, he says. He named her Nur, which means light in Arabic. The light, he says, of the heavens and earth.

9:15Dalul is in his mid-30s with thinning hair and a sturdy build. His life before the war was marked by lows more than highs. He dropped out of school by third grade and earned a few hundred dollars a month working odd jobs as an adult, a typical life of poverty in Gaza. When he married his wife, they lived in a room in his parents' home in Gaza City. Noor's birth gave Dalul's life meaning and purpose, he says. He recalls whispering the Muslim call to prayer into her ear after she was born.

10:00She was a daddy's girl, showering him with kisses, helping him forget his troubles.

10:12Dalul says Noor stole his heart and became his world.

10:26In home videos like this, he films Noor with her straight black hair and wide eyes, dancing and singing, showered with the attention of the only child. When war broke out, Noor was just shy of two years old. In the months that followed, the family faced starvation in the north, displacement, and Dalun says he survived Israeli attacks, trying to get flour off aid trucks. The family lived through 716 days of the war until September 22nd. That's when an Israeli airstrike targeted Nur's grandfather's home in an apartment block in Gaza City. And that's when NPR met Dalul. Here's NPR's reporter, Anas Baba, describing the encounter.

11:11When I walked into the hospital, I saw all these bodies on the ground. It was an airstrike and we rushed to the hospital. I saw a man between all of the people. He was laying in the ground at the hospital, cuddling his own daughter, I believe. She was covered in blood, flies all over her. The doctors, they told me that they were trying to convince him to let her go. And he refused for almost three hours. He couldn't let her go.

11:48The airstrike killed Noor just one week before President Trump announced his plan for ending the war. NPR obtained video of the immediate aftermath of the attack.

12:06In it, Dalul is trying to reach his daughter from under the rubble.

12:18He and his wife scream out her name. They walk over rubble, under fallen concrete slabs, and into fires to reach the four-year-old. But this is the moment they find her, dead in the back of an ambulance.

12:41On the day she was killed, Noor was with her grandfather at his home in Gaza City. That afternoon, he was told by neighbors the Israeli army was about to bomb a building next to his. The military had ordered that building evacuated. But the building where Noor was, was also struck without warning.

13:07Noor's mother, Merva Tassanayn, lists the family members she lost that day. Her father, her brother, his wife, their kids, her sister, and her daughter Noor. They were among 11 people the health ministry says were killed in that midday attack. Israel's military says it was targeting a Hamas facility, but did not specify if they were referring to the building with the clinic or the apartment block. The military told NPR that prior to the strike, precautionary measures were taken to mitigate harm to civilians. Nur is among approximately 20 ,000 children, Gaza's health ministry says, have been killed in Israeli bombings and gunfire in the last two years of war.

13:49UNICEF says an average of 28 children have been killed in Gaza every day, the equivalent, they say, of an entire classroom. An independent UN inquiry has determined Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, which Israel denies. But Hassanin says families, like her brothers, have been eradicated, and that this is a genocide.

14:19Gaza's health ministry says 2 ,700 nuclear families have been killed in the war. Another 6 ,000 families have just one survivor. Without Noor, this family is hollowed. The couple now lives in a makeshift tent after finding their way south.

14:44Hassanin says she can't believe her daughter is gone. Dalul says the hardest feeling as a father is not being able to give your child food, money, or safety.

14:57They are like others in Gaza who may survive this war, but whose hearts have been buried. He can't find the words.

15:11It's indescribable, he says. Aya Batrawi and Pierre News Dubai with Anas Baba in Gaza City.

15:26You can find our coverage from all sides of this war over the last two years from our remarkable team in Tel Aviv, Gaza, the West Bank, Dubai, Amman, Beirut, Cairo, and elsewhere. That's at npr.org slash Middle East.

15:44And that's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening. Thank you.