Israel, 7. Oktober

Compelling and moving, Israeli journalist Lee Yaron recounts the final hours of the people murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023. This is the chronicle of a day that will go down in the history of Israel, the Middle East, and the entire world, serving as a literary monument to the victims.

On the Sabbath of October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a large-scale attack on Israel: civilians were kidnapped, tortured, massacred, and burned. Lee Yaron reconstructs the day of the catastrophe in 12 chapters, each recounting a single location of the attack. From the music festival "Tribe of Nova" to a Bedouin village and the kibbutz Kfar Aza, Lee Yaron takes us to the sites of mourning to capture the unprecedented violence unleashed that day.

To do this, she allows the victims themselves to speak—through dramatic dialogues, we learn of their fear, hope, and courage. For her book, Lee Yaron interviewed family members of the victims and survivors of the attacks, and she also had access to transcripts of phone calls and messages that sometimes preceded the deaths of these individuals by mere seconds. Based on this, she paints striking portraits of the murdered women, men, and children to preserve their memory.

The afterword by writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen places the attack in a historical context, explaining why there is a line from the Holocaust to October 7, 2023, and why the assault was an attack against Jews worldwide.