Like America has Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Israel has the Yom Kippur War and Oct. 7, devastating sneak attacks that changed everything. A year ago, when Hamas launched its savage onslaught against on Israel, murdering, destroying and raping, a war was begun and that war still burns in Israel, Gaza and beyond. Its victims have been Israelis and Palestinians and now Lebanese, Jews and Arabs, including women and children and the aged. War is hell and not just for the combatants, be they IDF soldiers or terrorists of Hamas or Hezbollah. It is the civilians who also suffer greatly from the fighting. Whether they are killed intentionally as Hamas aimed for on Oct. 7, or as what military professionals coldly call “collateral damage,” the death of innocents in the line of fire are to be especially mourned. A year ago yesterday, on Oct. 6, there was a ceasefire in effect that Hamas spectacularly broke with the support of their patron Iran to stop the growing peace movement between Israel and the Arab states. The Abraham Accords was a major achievement by Donald Trump to win peace deals between Jerusalem and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan. It was one of the few Trump initiatives that Joe Biden celebrated and he was building on it to add Saudi Arabia to the circle of peace. All that was frozen when Hamas stormed out of Gaza, murdering 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping another 251 to drag them back to Gaza. It has been a full year in horrid captivity in the tunnels of Gaza for the remaining 101 hostages, including Americans, assuming they are still alive. They must not be forgotten. They must be released. They never should have been seized. As expected by all, Israel struck back with ferocity. The war in Gaza has largely ended Hamas as a fighting and governing force, but it has also devastated the territory. The Hamas leadership has all but been wiped out, along with most of their fighting battalions. Yet thousands of civilian Gazans have also died. That too, was part of the Hamas plan, to place of blood of Palestinians on Israel, with specious and outrageous charges of genocide leveled against Israel. The war caused an eruption of antisemitism across this country and the world, even where there are few if any Jews. Protests against war morphed into protests against the existence of a Jewish state. On college campuses, assaults, threats and harassment of Jews rose and college presidents at Penn and Harvard and Columbia who failed to protect Jewish students from vicious hatred and fear and intimidation rightly lost their jobs. In Israel, still unexamined is the failure of the Israeli intelligence and defense establishments to detect and blunt the Hamas attack. And Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who was wrongly pushing his proposed anti-democratic changes to the Israeli judicial system before the war, still faces corruption allegations. A year ago tomorrow, Oct. 8, Hezbollah launched its own attack on Israel from Lebanon and other Iranian proxies like the Houthis in Yemen and various terror groups in Iraq and Syria have also joined the fray. Israel has made excellent progress decapitating and degrading Hezbollah with the clever exploding pagers and walkie-talkies and targeted strikes, setting back Iran’s most powerful proxy and exposing the weakness of Iran itself. Hopefully, the sun is setting on Iran and its terror allies and the peace they oppose will come to the region.