The last seconds of Bernard Cowan’s life were captured by the body camera of one of the gunmen who killed him. Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas gunmen were moving through Kibbutz Sufa, less than two miles from Gaza. Cowan, 57, a British-Israeli grandfather, had left the family’s safe room; his brother later said he was claustrophobic.
His wife, Margaret, remained inside. One of the gunmen spotted Cowan sitting inside the house, raised his rifle and fired twice through the window. The camera continued recording as the attackers moved through the kibbutz, shooting at homes and the tires of an ambulance.
In another house, it captured something quieter: a telephone still ringing on a kitchen table. Cowan was one of roughly 1,200 people killed in the October 7 attacks in Israel. That number, horrific and tragic though it is, may also obscure what such an atrocity truly means to a country of Israel’s size.
America has just marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11, in which 2,977 people were killed by 19 hijackers. An attack on America equivalent to October 7 would have killed about 40,000 people. The comparison highlights a sense of proportion that raw casualty figures can’t explain: Hamas inflicted a national trauma on a scale that made an overwhelming Israeli response not just probable, but politically and psychologically foreseeable.
Whereas most interpretations of October 7 focus on what Hamas hoped to achieve through the attack itself—hostages, prisoners, regional war, the end of Israeli-Saudi normalization—Dov Waxman, a scholar of Israel and U.S.-Israel relations at UCLA, says that Hamas may also have calculated that Israel’s response itself would advance its aims. A much weaker force could not defeat the stronger power directly, but might induce it to respond in ways that would change the political environment. Three years later, that has become the paradox of October 7.
Hamas did not destroy Israel. However, much of Hamas’ senior leadership has since been killed. Its military capabilities were severely damaged.
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