By Maayan Lubell and Emily Rose
TEL AVIV, Oct 5 (Reuters) – One was inspired by her son’s last stand trying to fight off attackers rampaging through a kibbutz. Another by her son’s final words as militants tossed grenades into a bomb shelter packed with fleeing revellers from a music festival. A third by the brothers he campaigned to bring home from captivity in Gaza.
Three years since Hamas’ October 7 attack, at least nine Israelis from families directly caught up in the deadliest day in the country’s history are running for parliament in an election this month. They represent parties running the gamut of political views, but all say they aim to heal Israel’s wounds.
The militants who burst into southern Israel in 2023 killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages to Gaza. Michal Hirsch Negri’s son, Roee, died fighting Hamas attackers in Kibbutz Be’eri, where 1 in 10 residents were killed.
Soon after the surprise attack began, Roee, newly married and on a career path in high-tech, scrambled comrades in his reserve counter-terrorism military unit, who later recounted their last moments with him.
“He told them: ‘We are not looking at the bodies. We are here to save people. We are here to save our country.’ And this is a sentence that is engraved in my heart,” said his mother.
Hirsch Negri, 60, is running in Together, led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and part of an alliance of left, right and centre parties aiming to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist-religious coalition.
“Everyone knows what’s bad. Everyone knows what is broken. Talking about how bad it is or how bad the government is won’t get us anywhere. My Roee, he always looked at the situation, analysed it and said, okay, now what can we do to fix it?”
‘ON A MISSION’
One of her running mates is Noam Tibon, 64, a former general whose son was trapped with his young family in their home on Nahal Oz, another kibbutz attacked by Hamas. Tibon and his wife set out from Tel Aviv to rescue their son, battling en route with Hamas militants and evacuating wounded to hospital.
“October 7 was the biggest failure in our history and I saw it with my own eyes,” he said. Netanyahu has rejected blame for the security breach and resisted calls for an independent investigation.
Sharon Sharabi, 51, running in the right-wing Israel Our Home party, says he witnessed Israel’s leadership failings when he campaigned for a deal to free Gaza hostages, including his brothers Yossi and Eli, both seized by Hamas from Be’eri.
Yossi did not survive captivity. Eli, whose wife and two teenage daughters were slain in the kibbutz, was released in early 2025 after almost 500 days.
“I understood that even after the hostages come back, that I can’t stand aside and let mediocre people keep running the country,” Sharabi said. “I understood that I have to leave my life behind, to go on a mission to remedy, to return the state of Israel to its true values.”
Not all see removing the coalition as the path forward. Talik Gvili, whose police officer son Ran was the last Israeli hostage whose remains were recovered from Gaza, was personally chosen by Netanyahu as a candidate on his party’s slate.
“I am continuing the mission Rani was on. He went to defend Israel,” she said in a party campaign video. “I want a strong leader, someone I can count on,” she said of Netanyahu. “He promised to bring Rani home and he did. He promised to make a change in the Middle East and he did.”
‘CONTINUE AFTER ME’
But most of the candidates from October 7 families support parties aligned against Netanyahu, driven by what they see as failings on that day and since.
Shira Shapiro, 51, is running as a candidate for Yashar, a new opposition centrist party led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot whose own soldier son was killed in Gaza.
Shapiro said she and other parents of October 7 victims “are trying to take this pain and give it meaning, to grow from it. This is also what we need to do on a national level.”
Her eldest son Aner, a 22-year-old off-duty soldier and musician, had attended the Nova music festival attacked on October 7 and took cover with 26 others in a roadside bomb shelter.
As the Hamas men lobbed grenades into the packed shelter, Aner tossed them out. His last moments were caught in dashcam footage, an audio recording made by one of the victims before she was killed and a photo taken by a survivor.
Aner told the others that if he is hurt, they must continue.
“I hear his voice say ‘continue after me’, he meant continue throwing the grenades but I hear his voice saying ‘continue after me’,” said Shapiro. “And I have to continue after him. And that’s why I’m here.”
(Additional reporting by Andreea Popescu; Writing by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Rami Ayyub and Peter Graff)
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