The shadow of October 7 is long. The trauma did not end on that day.
This week, the world learned that Roi Shalev, a 30-year-old survivor of the Nova music festival massacre, has taken his own life in Israel. Two years after Hamas terrorists murdered his girlfriend Mapal Adam before his eyes, wounded him, and killed 1,200 others across southern Israel, Shalev’s body was found in a burned-out car near a beach in Netanya. His final message was simple and haunting: “I can’t go on any more.”
It was not an isolated tragedy. It was the echo of October 7 reverberating two years later — a reminder that the terror unleashed that day continues to claim lives long after the gunfire stopped.
A Second Wave of Victims
For survivors of the Nova massacre, time did not resume on October 8. It froze.
Many live with post-traumatic stress, anxiety, survivor’s guilt, and chronic despair. Some have already succumbed to that pain. Shalev’s mother took her own life shortly after the attacks. Other survivors have followed. Families now speak of a “second wave” of victims — those not killed by Hamas directly, but by the unhealed wounds the terrorists inflicted.
It is easy for the world to mark a date on the calendar — to commemorate the anniversary, to post a hashtag, to move on. But for the living, the massacre continues each night in the mind’s replay.
The World That Moved On
The global public, so quick to consume images of suffering, has largely moved past October 7.
In many places, empathy has even inverted. The victims have been recast as aggressors; their trauma erased beneath a tide of political slogans.
Those who survived Hamas’s atrocities — burned, raped, shot, and kidnapped — now watch as the international narrative turns sympathy toward the perpetrators’ enclave, while their own pain is dismissed as inconvenient.
For Israelis, and for Jews around the world, this inversion compounds the trauma. It is not only the massacre that wounds — it is the world’s willingness to forget, or worse, to justify it.
The Long Tail of Terror
Terrorism does not end with the explosion or the gunshot. Its purpose is psychological — to rupture the sense of safety, to sow fear and despair that outlast the event itself.
That is why Hamas filmed its atrocities: not only to celebrate murder but to ensure its horror would live on in the minds of its victims.
Shalev’s suicide is a grim testament to that success. He survived physically, but Hamas stole his future all the same.
Responsibility and Remembrance
Israel must continue to care for its wounded in body and spirit, ensuring that trauma support is sustained and accessible.
But the wider world also bears a moral responsibility. When international institutions and media outlets sanitise or rationalise Hamas’s crimes, they retraumatize survivors. When activists glorify the murderers or mock the kidnapped, they join the chain of cruelty.
Healing requires truth. Remembrance demands moral clarity.
Beyond Statistics
We count the murdered, the kidnapped, the displaced. Yet the real toll of October 7 cannot be measured in numbers. It lies in the unseen damage — the sleepless nights, the panic attacks, the survivors who feel abandoned, and those who, like Roi Shalev, cannot bear to go on.
Each of them is another reason to remember that peace cannot be built on denial, and that empathy cannot be selective.
The war may end, the hostages may come home, but for thousands of survivors, October 7 has no ceasefire.
