The horror of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel shocked the world.
In a coordinated large-scale land, sea and air offensive, Hamas fighters launched a surprise incursion on southern Israeli communities and the Tribe of Nova music festival, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage.
Soon after, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on Hamas, vowing “return fire of a magnitude that the enemy has not known.”
Israeli airstrikes swiftly rained down on Gaza, spurring an unprecedented humanitarian crisis: More than 66,000 are estimated to have been killed in Gaza and 167,000 have been wounded so far, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
President Donald Trump on Monday announced a 20-point plan for peace in Gaza, which was championed by Netanyahu and supported by other world leaders. Yet the proposal stipulates Hamas must disarm and disband in exchange for halting the war, humanitarian aid and a pledge to reconstruct beleaguered Gaza.
Trump set a Sunday deadline for Hamas to agree, threatening more attacks if it fails to do so. Hamas said Friday it accepted some parts of the plan, including giving up power and releasing remaining hostages, but others require further consultations with Palestinians.
As the two-year anniversary of the Israel-Hamas war approaches, its terror and devastation continue to plague those from the Chicago area with close ties to the conflict overseas.
A mother from Highland Park who survived the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres is grateful she and her family are alive but mourns those who were killed. She also expresses alarm at the recent surge in antisemitism internationally.
A southwest suburban man who lived in Gaza as a child said more than 200 of his family members have been killed there since the war’s inception.
A local Palestinian American bakery owner laments the recent spike in Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment here and around the world.
A physician who served on medical missions in Gaza fears its people will suffer physical and psychological effects for generations, even after the war’s conclusion.
The grieving north suburban aunt of an Oct. 7 hostage with Chicago ties slain about a year ago urges the immediate return of 48 hostages still captive in Gaza.
A Glencoe synagogue commemorates those abducted from Israel with an outdoor display of chairs, each containing a poster with the name and photo of a hostage.
“We honor these individuals. We remember the hostages,” a rabbi told the congregation last month on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. “We must never lose hope.”
And they all say they yearn for the bloodshed to stop, with varying thoughts and opinions on Trump’s proposal to end the war.
After Trump’s plan for peace was unveiled, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres urged a permanent ceasefire, humanitarian aid across Gaza and the release of all hostages, adding that he hopes this creates “conditions allowing for the realization of the two-state solution,” according to a statement released by a spokesman Tuesday.
“The United Nations remains steadfast in its commitment to supporting all efforts that promote peace, stability, and a more hopeful future for the people of Palestine and Israel and across the region,” the statement added.
Rocket fire, lingering trauma
Deborah Ben Aderet had grown accustomed to the sound of Hamas rocket fire while living on Kibbutz Zikim, just north of the Gaza Strip.
Born and raised in Highland Park, she moved about 14 years ago to Israel, where she met her husband. They went on to have two daughters and settle in a home on the kibbutz.
“In Chicago growing up, we had snow days,” Ben Aderet said during a recent phone interview with the Tribune. “Here, we have rocket days.”
So when she initially woke to the sound of rocket fire on Oct. 7, 2023, “we thought that Hamas was just sending rockets again.”
But when the sounds intensified, she and her husband rushed to take shelter in their young daughters’ bedroom, which serves as the home’s bomb shelter.
Their kibbutz security sent an alert that there was a Hamas ground infiltration in neighboring communities. They were instructed to turn off the lights, stop the air conditioning and close all blinds, as if no one were home.
At one point, they lost cellphone and internet service.
As the family sheltered, they didn’t immediately know that Hamas had attacked nearby Zikim beach as well as multiple other kibbutzim along the border.
Hamas had arrived at her kibbutz, but its security fended them off in a shootout, she said. No one on her kibbutz was killed. Israeli forces later evacuated her family to a hotel in Jerusalem.
“I’m very grateful that we are all alive and we have all of our body parts,” she said.
People often ask Ben Aderet if she knows someone who was killed that day.
“Everybody’s lost a friend or family member,” she said.
Later that month, she brought her daughters to the United States to temporarily reside in the north suburbs of Chicago. But they returned to Israel about six weeks ago and now live in a moshav, a cooperative agricultural community, about half an hour north of their old home.
She said the decision to go back to Israel was in part motivated by a frightening rise in antisemitism in the war’s wake.
In the United Kingdom on Thursday, a suspect rammed a car into pedestrians outside a Manchester synagogue on the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur and then attacked with a knife. Two men were killed, one who appears to have been accidentally shot by police, law enforcement said.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the “vile” suspect who “attacked Jews because they are Jews.” Authorities called the assault an act of terrorism.
In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League tracked more than 9,000 antisemitic incidents in the United States, marking a 5% increase from 2023 and the highest number since the organization started counting incidents 46 years ago.
Ben Aderet has mixed feelings about Trump’s peace plan.
“First, it’s insane to me that Israel is always expected to, and forced to ‘make deals’ with terrorists whose goal is to wipe us off the map,” she said in an email.
Although she’s skeptical Hamas “will live in peace,” she believes Trump’s proposal might be the best plan as of now.
On the first day of school this year, there was a rocket warning, “and my girls became hysterical,” Ben Aderet recalled.
“The teacher had to call me and say she was here with my shaking daughter,” she said, noting that their trauma is “going to linger.”
She added that “it’s time that my children learn what it is like to live as children should, not under constant rocket fire, or being forced to evacuate from their homes periodically because of relentless terrorist neighbors.”
Destruction, devastation and death
William Asfour spent the first few years of his life in Gaza – going to the beach, playing with cousins and sharing meals with his large extended family.
In 2001, when he was 4, he and his immediate family moved to the United States.
“I never knew that would be my last time in Gaza,” said Asfour, who lives in the southwest suburbs. “I’m separated from my family. A lot of them have been killed. Many of them are suffering tremendously because of the Israeli siege and the genocide in Gaza.” (Israel has rejected accusations of genocide, saying its war against Hamas has been in self-defense.)
Asfour recounted the story of his cousin Mohammed Asfour, who went to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis to check on an injured relative in November 2023. When the cousin returned home, Asfour said, he found his house reduced to rubble from Israeli airstrikes and almost his entire family dead.
“He saw his father’s head without the body,” Asfour said. “He saw his wife and children in pieces, including a 3-month baby girl.”
The cousin and his only surviving child, a 9-year-old daughter named Haneen, later fled to Egypt.
Asfour, who says he has had more than 200 relatives killed since the war began, visited them there last year. He recalled the young girl told him, ‘I wish I’d died with my mother and siblings.’”
“Imagine a 9-year-old girl telling you that,” Asfour said.
The scale and scope of suffering is hard to conceive, said Dr. John Kahler, co-founder of the Rolling Meadows-based nonprofit MedGlobal, who has gone on two medical missions to Gaza since the war began.
“Think about not having taken a shower since November 2023. Think about not having any good change of clothes that have been washed since 2023,” he said. “Smell it. Hear it. Feel it. Think about never having a good night sleep. This is the level of stress this community is under.”
A MedGlobal report in August found nearly 17% of children under 5 in Gaza were experiencing acute malnutrition. While Israel’s government has denied that there’s a starvation crisis in Gaza, Trump has acknowledged “real starvation” there.
Kahler said it’s hard for him to see a positive outcome given the devastation.
“Gaza itself has been destroyed,” he said. “If there’s an attempt to rebuild that by Palestinians for Palestinians, good. But it’s a 20-year project.”
Tax dollars and elections
Asfour said he feels “survivor’s guilt” at living in safety here while the United States has approved billions of dollars in military assistance for Israel over nearly the past two years.
“It feels like my tax dollars are going to kill my people and my family,” he said.
He’d contemplated moving abroad during the trip when he visited his cousin. While overseas, he watched reports of the August Democratic National Convention in Chicago where no pro-Palestinian voice was given a platform, angering him and many other Muslim and Arab Americans.
This played a pivotal role in the 2024 presidential election, with many of these voters casting a ballot for Trump, backing an independent candidate or abstaining.
Asfour said he voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
“It was a protest vote,” he said. “That was the only choice I could have made.”
He decided to come back to the United States “to be an advocate, to spread awareness and to combat Islamophobia,” which has skyrocketed amid the war.
The climate hit a nadir locally in mid-October 2023 when a Palestinian American boy, 6-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi, was fatally stabbed in his Plainfield Township home. Authorities charged the attack as a hate crime.
In April, Asfour began working for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Chicago. The national organization’s 2025 Civil Rights Report cited more than 8,600 complaints of Islamophobia, anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian incidents in 2024, the highest number since the report began in 1996.
Asfour often patrons Seedo’s Levantine Bakery in downtown Chicago for food with roots in his ancestral homeland.
The bakery’s owner, Palestinian American Mutaz Abdullah of Orland Park, recalled heated debate last year in his southwest suburb over a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
The controversy culminated with then-Mayor Keith Pekau suggesting Arab Americans who support the measure could “go to another country” if they disagree with U.S. policy. Pekau lost his bid for a third term in April to challenger Jim Dodge.
Orland Park passed a ceasefire resolution in September.
“The Palestinian community and Muslim community came together,” Abdullah said. “I believe change is on the horizon.”
As for Trump’s peace plan, Asfour said an “immediate ceasefire is crucial” but added that “Israel needs to end its military occupation.” Both Asfour and Abdullah called for Palestinian statehood and self-governance.
Late last month, multiple Western nations announced or confirmed recognition of Palestinian statehood, in defiance of Israel and the United States.
“This affects my people,” Abdullah said. “Give us our own state and let us start to govern ourselves.”
‘Never be the same’
For Rabbi Steven Stark Lowenstein, on Oct. 7, 2023, “the world came tumbling down.”
On the Jewish holiday Simchat Torah, news came trickling in chronicling the severity of the attacks, which would mark the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
“Israel would never be the same,” recalled Lowenstein of Am Shalom, a reform Jewish congregation in Glencoe.
Soon after, his synagogue set out 251 chairs on the lawn “in honor of the hostages” taken captive, Lowenstein said.
“If someone was freed, we would put a ribbon around their chair and there was great exuberance,” he said.
Those abducted included Judith Raanan of Evanston and her teenage daughter Natalie, who were released later that month.
If a hostage was killed, “we removed their chair but we put it around the flagpole with a black ribbon around it, because we were so devastated,” the rabbi said.
Lowenstein said the congregation was particularly despondent when removing the chair that belonged to Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the son of Chicago natives who was kidnapped at the Nova music festival.
During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, his parents made an emotional, high-profile appeal for release of all the hostages, while the crowd chanted “bring them home.”
Later that month, their son was found slain in a tunnel in southern Gaza.
“It came as a shock,” said his aunt, Abby Polin of the north suburbs. “We always had this thought that he would come home.”
There are still 48 chairs outside Am Shalom awaiting the return of the remaining hostages.
“The hostages need to go home to their families, whether for rehabilitation or for proper burials,” Abby Polin said.
On Tuesday, the two-year anniversary of the attacks, Am Shalom plans to break ground on a memorial garden with bricks inscribed with the names of each of the hostages, to permanently commemorate them.
The rabbi said Trump’s plan for peace leaves him optimistic.
“Anything that can be done to bring the hostages home and end this war I am fully behind,” he said. “We need to be more than close. We need all sides to agree for it to finally happen.”
The Associated Press contributed.
