What happened
The attack was planned and rehearsed for well over a year (see the 'Jericho Wall' intelligence document referenced in IsraelTimelineSeeder's account of Israel's own failure to act on it), and its scale and coordination distinguish it from earlier, smaller cross-border raids: several thousand Hamas fighters and other Gaza militants breached the border fence simultaneously at more than 30 points, using bulldozers, explosives, paragliders, and boats, and fanned out into more than 20 Israeli communities and a music festival attended by roughly 3,500 people, over a period of several hours before Israeli forces regained control.
The casualty pattern is central to how international bodies have classified the attack. Roughly 1,200 people were killed on 7 October itself, and independent reconstructions by Israeli, international, and some Palestinian researchers agree the substantial majority were civilians, including entire families killed in their homes in kibbutzim such as Be'eri and Kfar Aza, and 364 people killed at the Nova music festival specifically — the deadliest single terrorist attack in Israeli history, and the deadliest single day for Jewish people since the Holocaust.
The sexual-violence findings deserve the same level of specificity the other entries in this file apply to Israel's conduct. The UN Special Representative's team, working from forensic evidence, testimony, and video, found reasonable grounds for rape and gang rape at the Nova festival site, along Route 232, and at Kibbutz Re'im; the Independent International Commission of Inquiry separately confirmed sexual violence at Nova, Route 232, Nahal Oz, and the kibbutzim of Re'im, Nir Oz, and Kfar Aza. Both bodies also found reasonable grounds that sexual violence, including against hostages, continued into captivity. Where the two inquiries diverge from some more sweeping public claims made in the attack's immediate aftermath is specificity: the Commission of Inquiry stated it could not verify certain individual claims — including some reports of genital mutilation — due to a lack of direct access to crime scenes, physical evidence, and living witnesses, and found no evidence that sexual violence had been an explicitly ordered tactic rather than opportunistic violence by individual fighters. That evidentiary caveat does not diminish the confirmed findings at the sites listed above; it is included here because the project's standard is to state the limits of verification rather than let the strongest version of a claim stand unexamined, in either direction.
Approximately 251 hostages — Israeli and foreign nationals, including children and elderly people — were taken into Gaza. Their treatment in captivity is addressed in the following entry.