October: Palestinian fighters carry out an attack on communities across southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 251 Israeli and foreign captives, according to Israeli figures. In the following weeks, Hamas releases two Israeli-American captives and two elderly captives, and Israeli forces recover an Israeli soldier taken captive during the attack.
On the shores of the Dead Sea, about 1,500 Israeli and Palestinian women had gathered, holding hands and calling for an end to what they called a vicious cycle of bloodshed. It was an October evening in 2023 and they had travelled from villages, settlements and refugee camps around the region for a mass peace rally jointly organised by the Israeli movement Women Wage Peace and the Palestinian group Women of the Sun.
But we want our hostages back, and we don't want them back in, you know, ones and twos, and take the next two years to do it. We were the ones that got the hostages. And I always said, I told Steve, I told Marco, I was always saying the last hostages are going to be the toughest ones. But you can't honor them by doing anything like you suggest.
What happenedI have seen the tapesbabies that are four months old, just chopped up into pieces, Trump said, interrupting Peston. And you've seen the tape and I've seen it. You're a professional and so am I. And people forget about October seventh. I can't forget about it. So I want it to end. But I want the hostages back. I don't want the hostages used as human shields, which is what Hamas is threatening to do, Trump said.