Tali Kizhner stood before a mural painted on a bomb shelter, where her son sought refuge before Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, killed him. Nearby sits another story: a Palestinian child waving a white flag in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, last year, calling for an end to the war. On the attack’s third anniversary, two commentaries in The National asked whether either family can expect anything different from what came before.
The Hamas-led assault killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostage into Gaza. The ensuing war devastated the territory, killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, and made displacement, hunger and fear part of children’s daily lives, wrote Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative for Gaza under the Board of Peace. Mladenov, who also directs the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi, published his commentary, “Gaza and the choice ahead,” on Oct. 7, 2026.
Grief Without Nationality
Mladenov described the morning of the attack in plain, domestic terms. Parents held safe-room doors shut while their children hid. Young people fled a music festival and attackers hunted them across open fields. The assault, he wrote, shattered Israeli security assumptions and left wounds that remain open.
He refused to rank the mourning. “Grief has no nationality,” he wrote: a mother in Nir Oz and a mother in Khan Younis may never meet, and may hold radically different views about the conflict and its causes, but neither needs a lesson in loss. Anniversaries prompt remembrance, he said, but rarely reflection. The old arguments return. The underlying questions stay unanswered.
Three Possible Futures
Mladenov laid out three paths. The first is the familiar cycle: Hamas rebuilds its military capabilities, Israel prepares for another confrontation, and a ceasefire follows another round of violence without changing the conditions that produced it. The second looks calmer but isn’t. Humanitarian aid tries to stand in for governance, reconstruction crawls or doesn’t happen, and the world loses interest. Political vacuums rarely stay empty, he warned, and despair can help recruit people to extremism.
The third path is harder, and he called it the only one offering a genuine way forward. It rests on verified weapons decommissioning, deradicalisation, accountable Palestinian civilian governance, phased Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction. A framework the parties accepted a year ago points in that direction. Turning commitments into reality, rather than agreeing on a destination, is the difficulty, Mladenov wrote.
Gaza’s future, he said, should be decided by accountable Palestinian civilian institutions, not competing armed factions. Under US President Donald Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, lawful structures answerable to a civilian transitional authority would manage security. Reconstruction requires weapons to be permanently decommissioned and military infrastructure dismantled, he argued, so investors, donors and families can trust that war isn’t merely being postponed.
Occupation and the Limits of Security
A separate editorial in The National, published on Oct. 7, 2026, took a harder look at the political roots. It said the attacks didn’t begin the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They came from a besieged and impoverished Gaza Strip and exposed what the editorial called the flawed assumption that occupation could be managed rather than ended.
The editorial condemned Hamas’s crimes against civilians. It also said the attacks left Palestinians in Gaza defenceless against Israel’s retaliation and politically strengthened Israel’s nationalist extremes. Families of Israelis killed or kidnapped marked the anniversary. So did families of thousands of Palestinians killed, and many more injured and displaced in the Israeli offensive.
The violence, the editorial noted, has spread. Israel has launched or supported military action against targets linked to Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and attacked Hamas figures based in Qatar in September last year. Three years of conflict haven’t brought lasting security. The geography of violence has simply expanded.
Voices and Responsibilities
Mladenov addressed Palestinians directly. He acknowledged their anger over Gaza’s destruction and their suspicion of international initiatives. Then he asked whether armed factions had brought them closer to statehood, prosperity or freedom. Societies grow stronger, he wrote, when schools educate children, hospitals care for patients and accountable governments provide services. Change can’t be imposed from outside, he said. It has to come through education, functioning institutions, economic opportunity and a political horizon that gives young people an alternative to militancy.
He turned to Israelis too. He said he understood why withdrawal or transitional administration might evoke past failures. But walls, buffer zones and repeated military operations can’t provide lasting security if Gaza stays unstable and controlled by armed factions. “A strategy built entirely around managing the next war is not, in the long run, a strategy for peace,” he wrote.
Regional partners and the wider international community also have obligations, Mladenov said: credible security guarantees, support for reconstruction, and Palestinian transitional institutions equipped to succeed. The framework exists, partners are engaged, technical expertise is available and money can be mobilized. What’s uncertain is political will. Implementing the plan, endorsed by U.N. Security Council resolution 2803, will demand courage and commitment after international attention moves elsewhere.
The editorial pointed to Israel’s coming election as a chance to debate what a genuinely secure Israel looks like in 10, 20 or 30 years. The realistic route, it argued, runs through political negotiations, not endless war, and Palestinian elections are increasingly necessary.
Why This Matters:
Three years on, both commentaries land on the same uncomfortable point: managing Gaza isn’t the same as resolving it. Israeli families still mourn those killed on Oct. 7, and Palestinian families in Gaza live with displacement, hunger and loss. Neither group benefits from a ceasefire that leaves the underlying conditions untouched. The frameworks exist on paper, and the Security Council has endorsed one. What’s missing, by Mladenov’s own account, is the political will to carry it out once cameras leave. That gap between commitment and enforcement is where civilians on both sides keep paying. As Mladenov put it, “while the dead deserve remembrance, the living deserve a future.”