Families of victims of the October 7 massacre gathered in Tel Aviv on Tuesday to unveil a dossier examining 15 years of Israeli policy toward Hamas, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and successive governments of pursuing a failed strategy that ultimately helped enable the deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history.
The families, who also protested what they described as the exploitation of the massacre during the election campaign, presented what they called the “7/10 File,” a compilation based on publicly available information concerning Israeli policy toward Hamas in the years before the attack.
Shelly Meshel-Yogev, whose daughter Libi Cohen Meguri was murdered at the Nova music festival, said the material presented by the families could no longer be ignored. “The failed doctrine put Libi in the ground,” she said. “For 15 years, the State of Israel was led directly into the hell of October 7,” she added. Addressing Netanyahu, she said: “Prime minister, you said you would answer the difficult questions at the end of the war, but if you had only listened, my Libi would be beside me.”
“Why do I have a grave to cry over instead of a happy daughter?” she said. “No screenwriter could have written such a cruel reality for a mother who hears her daughter say, ‘Mom, they’re coming to shoot me again.’ I didn’t know longing could hurt this much.”
“How can the greatest disaster of our lives not have been investigated?” she asked. “Those responsible continue with their lives, and we do not.”
‘I’m terrified’
Among the most harrowing moments at the news conference came when Natalia Casarotti played the final recorded call made by her son Keshet, who was murdered near Mefalsim Junction while fleeing the Nova festival.
In the recording, Keshet can be heard speaking to an emergency dispatcher. “Where is the ambulance I ordered? There are several vehicles here that need an ambulance. They had an accident,” he says. “I’m in the attack of my life. I’m terrified. I can’t move.”
“I can see 11 or 12 vehicles. I’m in pain. I can see people moving, but also people...” the recording cuts off. “I was at the party. I don’t know where I am.”
His mother described seeing her son after he was killed. “I see Keshet under the bridge, his blond hair scattered across his face, one bullet in his head and one in his heart,” she said. “I knew I lived in a functioning country, a moral country, one that takes care of its citizens. I was wrong.”
With Yom Kippur approaching, Casarotti called on Israel’s leaders to conduct a reckoning over the policies that preceded October 7.
“Do some soul-searching over the money to Hamas, over the decisions, the warnings, the failure, over the 1,200 people murdered,” she said. “I buried my child, and I am begging for a state commission of inquiry.”
Einav Zangauker presents the ‘7/10 File’
(Photo: Moti Kimchi)
Gil Dickmann
(Photo: Moti Kimchi)
The families described their dossier as an examination of what they called “the State of Israel’s strategic failure against Hamas over the past 15 years.”
Unlike a report released last month by the October Council, a separate group of bereaved and hostage families that warned that conditions in Israel in 2026 resembled those before the Hamas attack, the new document focuses on publicly available information about Israeli policy toward Hamas throughout that period.
The families said the evidence showed that October 7 could not be explained by a single decision or isolated intelligence or military failure. “The evidence in the ‘7/10 File’ shows that the massacre was not an event caused by one decision or one specific failure,” they said, “but the result of years of policy that allowed Hamas to carry out the deadliest terror attack the State of Israel has ever known.”
Einav Zangauker, one of the most prominent relatives of hostages taken on October 7, accused political figures of attempting to evade responsibility since the attack. “Since that cursed day, a campaign to escape responsibility has been underway here,” she said. “This relentless campaign includes lies, conspiracies, division, incitement and poison against the IDF.”
“But we refuse to fall for the spin,” she added. “We demand that people talk about what happened here over 15 years.”
Zangauker said the dossier details decisions and policies adopted by what she called “governments of the failed doctrine” in the years before the attack. “Prime Minister Netanyahu, you said that after the war the time would come for the difficult questions,” she said. “That time has come.”
Gil Dickmann, whose cousin Carmel Gat was abducted from Kibbutz Be’eri and later murdered in captivity, also accused Netanyahu of ignoring years of warning signs. “They didn’t wake Netanyahu on October 7? The 7/10 File contains a thousand alarm clocks,” Dickmann said. “Netanyahu, you kept sleeping with your eyes open.”
He accused what he called the government’s “poison machine” of trying to minimize a failure that had developed over a decade and a half. “We will not let you bury the failure like you erased 46 hostages who were murdered,” he said. “We will not let you lie that you brought everyone home. We will stand before you like the mark of Cain on your forehead.”
Naomi Or Ofek, 16, a relative of Dror and Yonat Or, who were murdered on October 7, and of children from the Or family who were abducted to Gaza, said her generation deserved a different standard of leadership. “I am 16, and there is nowhere else in the world where someone my age should have to stand here and say what I am about to say,” she said.
“October 7 is the natural result of a course that has continued since I was born, a course that raised an entire generation under it. They are not entitled to the benefit of the doubt. There are clear people responsible, and they are evading responsibility.”
“In two years I will enlist to defend the country, and I demand that those entrusted with making decisions be people worthy of doing so,” she added. “Our generation deserves better.”
Families accuse Netanyahu allies of shifting blame
According to the families’ dossier, Netanyahu’s closest political circle began what they described as an effort shortly after October 7 to shape public perceptions and shift responsibility for the massacre away from the prime minister.
The families alleged that Netanyahu deliberately delayed an investigation into the massacre and that messages from his political environment sought to place responsibility primarily on the security establishment, the Supreme Court and anti-government protesters.
They also accused Netanyahu of promoting conspiracy theories. The allegations were presented by the families as their conclusions from the public record.
For them, however, the central argument of the “7/10 File” is broader than responsibility for decisions made in the hours immediately before the Hamas assault.
Their case is that October 7 must be examined as the culmination of years of policy toward Hamas, and that an investigation limited to the operational failures of that morning would leave unanswered the larger question of how Israel arrived there in the first place.