Cabinet expected to tap Miri Regev to oversee October 7 memorial ceremonies
Hostage families reportedly bristle at plans to invoke captive loved ones at events marking year since attack, telling ministers: ‘We don’t hold memorial days for living people’
The government is expected to place Transportation Minister Miri Regev in charge of the state ceremonies marking one year since the October 7 Hamas attack, Hebrew media reported on Thursday, citing a draft decision prepared in advance of Sunday’s cabinet meeting.
The ceremonies are expected to be held on October 7, 2024, one year since the terror group’s cross-border assault, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
The choice to commemorate the events using a date on the Gregorian calendar is unusual for the State of Israel, which usually marks memorial days on the Jewish calendar.
The draft decision prepared for Sunday’s cabinet meeting, however, notes that “October 7 is engraved in the public consciousness as the day of the awful massacre,” asserting a “one-time” exception.
In March, the cabinet unanimously approved the observance of a national day of remembrance for the attack and the subsequent war, to be held every year on the 24th of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, separately from Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, which is held on the 4th of Iyar.
At the time, the government noted that the first anniversary would instead use the Gregorian date, to avoid the memorial day falling on Shabbat.
Regev, an oftentimes outspoken member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, was also in charge of the state ceremony at the start of Independence Day in May.
That ceremony, held some seven months into the war against Hamas, drew backlash, both for being pre-recorded without a live audience and for focusing almost entirely on themes of wartime heroism — at the expense, critics said, of grief for civilians killed in the Hamas massacre.
The attack, which started an ongoing war in Gaza that has also drawn Israel into exchanges of fire with several other Iranian proxy forces, most notably the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon, took place on the Jewish holiday of Simhat Torah last year, at the end of the high holiday season.
The planning process for the events has already been contentious. In a meeting last week, representatives from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum took issue with a suggestion that their loved one’s names would be included among those memorialized at the ceremony in October, according to a report in the Haaretz newspaper on Thursday.
“We don’t hold memorial days for living people, and we don’t hold ceremonies for them,” said Yehudah Cohen, the father of abducted soldier Nimrod Cohen, according to the newspaper.
Representatives from the Hostages, Missing Persons and Returnees Directorate — originally run by the government but transferred in June to the auspices of the World Zionist Organization, were also present at the meeting last week, Haaretz reported.
“There is no small dissonance between these events [being planned] and the fact of the matter that we still have people [held hostage] in Gaza,” one representative of the directorate reportedly said.
