'Difficult day': Oct 7 commemorations begin with festival memorial

With candles, prayers and music, commemorations for the October 7 attack began in Israel's Tel Aviv on Sunday at a ceremony to mark the first anniversary of the Hamas onslaught at the Nova music festival.

Picture of those killed appeared on a screen at the entrance to the ceremony, as hundreds gathered to light candles at a makeshift shrine, leave handwritten notes or simply embrace each other.

"Coming to this event one year after this terrible massacre that happened on October 7, it's very touching, it's very breathtaking," said one of the event's organisers Solly Laniado.

"Three days ago, we were not even going to hold the event at all," he said, citing the deluge of rocket warnings and last week's missile attack on Tel Aviv that have left many people on edge and large parts of the usually vibrant city empty.

The anniversary comes with Israel engaged in a fresh war in Lebanon against Hezbollah and preparing to retaliate against Tehran, raising fears of an even wider conflict.

Anticipation is building over how and when Israel will respond to Iran's missile barrage last week, with the uncertainty casting a shadow over the commemoration.

"It's a difficult day," said Omri Sasi, 35, one of the producers of last year's festival who survived the attack.

By his own estimate he lost roughly 50 friends that day, including an uncle, a pregnant cousin and her husband.

- Onslaught of violence -

The two-day festival in the fields around Kibbutz Reim was just beyond the Gaza border in southern Israel and attracted over 3,000 attendees from October 6 and 7.

At least 370 people were killed at the Nova rave in the Negev desert, making it the deadliest location during the October 7 attack.

Footage from the day filmed by Hamas showed the militants gunning down festival goers en masse as they attempted to flee and taking others hostages, with the heavily armed Hamas fighters moving through the area unopposed.

Following the attack, the festival location was left largely untouched with dozens of burnt-out vehicles and abandoned tents, sleeping bags and clothes strewn across the field.

The festival attack was part of an onslaught of violence unleashed by Palestinian Hamas militants that resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on the latest official Israeli figures.

Some 251 people were captured and taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip, of whom 97 are still held captive in the coastal territory, including 37 the Israeli military says are dead.

During a one-week truce in late November, 105 hostages were released in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.

Hours after the October 7 attack, Israel launched a blistering military offensive on Gaza that has reduced large swaths of the territory to rubble, and displaced nearly all of its 2.4 million residents at least once amid an unrelenting humanitarian crisis.

In Gaza, at least 41,870 people have been killed since the start of the Israel offensive, a majority of them civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory.

The figures have been deemed to be reliable by the United Nations.

But as the anniversary arrives, for many it's just the latest marker in a year tarnished by trauma, loss and ongoing war.

"It's not easy to think a lot about it," said Sasi.