Each year, Yonatan Shamriz and his family gather to celebrate the birthday of his daughter, who is about to turn four.
As much as he tries to make that day as normal as possible for young Yali, it is hard to avoid what it has become.
Yali was born on October 7, 2021. Two years later, the community where the Shamriz family lived, Kfar Aza, was overrun by Hamas terrorists.
Sixty-two people from the kibbutz were killed that day.
Yonatan's brother Alon was among the Israelis taken hostage. He never made it home, and was instead mistakenly killed by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) in Gaza in December 2023 after escaping Hamas's captivity.
"It was the toughest moment in my life," Yonatan told the ABC.
"My brother did everything, they managed to escape.
"It was so hard to hear that the IDF mistakenly identified them as terrorists."
Two years on from that moment, Yonatan's life is still unsettled.
"I'm still a refugee in my own country — I don't have a house, I live in a trailer in the centre of Israel," he said.
"I'm not in my comfort zone. I don't have a brother."
Despite that trauma, Yonatan has thrown his energy into the organisation Kumu, supporting families affected by the 2023 attacks. It is hosting the country's only official memorial on October 7, in one of Tel Aviv's largest parks.
"You can see in the bereaved families and in the communities that suffer the most, any kind of people that deal with their loss in different ways," he said.
"Some of them are not capable of doing anything. Some of them are flourishing or doing everything in their power to do something.
"I feel that I need to do it. I feel if I sit down and chill, I'm going to sink in a hole."
Deep scars left
Yonatan, like many Israelis, is aware that society has shifted in the two years since Hamas's attacks.
After infiltrating Israel, militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took 250 hostages, triggering the current war in Gaza.
Israel said its goals were to destroy Hamas and bring back the hostages — but over time its conduct has been increasingly criticised.
Since October 2023, more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to health authorities in Gaza, and Israel's actions have been labelled by a UN Independent Commission of Inquiry and other organisations as genocide.
The IDF now controls more than 75 per cent of the strip, and virtually all of its more than 2 million residents have been forced to leave their homes.
While not comparable, the toll of war has weighed heavily inside Israel too.
Many Israelis support the war — but many are also horrified by it. A growing number of Israeli reservists are refusing to serve in Gaza. At various protests this year, thousands have marched in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to call for an end to the war.
Even as the prospect of a peace deal looms, Yonatan said the chapter in Israel's history had left deep scars.
"I think the people of Israel are different from the leadership," he argued.
"Most of the people want a national committee to investigate what happened on October 7, most of the people want an election, most of people want the end of the war and the returning of the hostages.
"And for two years, none of us got it."
A shift to the right
Tomer Persico, a research fellow from the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, argued the political and social landscape in Israel had shifted dramatically during the war.
A researcher in modern Jewish identity, Dr Persico told the ABC the "easiest way" to describe it was a significant shift to the right.
"We're two years into the war that began in an unbelievable trauma to the Israelis, and really to the Jewish people," he said.
"This raises up memories, post-traumatic scars that we all have from the Holocaust, from pogroms, because this is what happened, right? Whole communities were massacred.
"When this trauma sits upon all those memories, it builds up into a reaction that you can understand will be violent, will be vengeful."
The Israeli community, Dr Persico said, had also embraced traditional Jewish religious ideals.
"We've seen a lot of people, a lot of circles, return to traditions, adopt traditional customs, some even turn into orthodox Jews," he said.
"And this is, by the way, parallel to what happened after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, also a great trauma."
'Occupying' Gaza the goal for some leaders
All of that combined has made it easier for "fundamentalists" like the country's far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to expand their influence in government and amongst the population, Dr Persico said.
The two Israeli politicians have been sanctioned by Australia for "extremist rhetoric advocating the forced displacement of Palestinians and the creation of new Israeli settlements".
"They have a vision of occupying the Gaza Strip and settling Jews within the Gaza strip, of ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip from Palestinians," Dr Persico said.
"That's their plan, that's their vision, they believe that God commanded this.
"For that vision, they are willing to lengthen the war, to sacrifice soldiers and to threaten Netanyahu that if he deviates from that plan in any way, they will break up his government."
Dr Persico insisted that while the society had shifted to the right, it did not mean that it was backing the Netanyahu coalition government.
"Paradoxically, you've got a right shift in the populace, and an antagonism towards the most right-wing government ever to reign over Israel," he argued.
"There's a lot of criticism in Israel about what Israel is doing in Gaza right now, about the fact that our Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu is perceived … as trying to evade every single opportunity for a deal with Hamas to get the hostages back and to end this war.
"Were elections to be held today, they would not be able to retain their rule over Israel."
Dr Persico believed there would be a realignment in the future — beyond elections.
"After this war is over, the trauma will abide a little bit, and I think there will be a reckoning," he said.
"I think the Israeli society will go through a time of reflection and a time of regret of what we allowed or what happened in Gaza — what the government did in Gaza.
"And I think people will be ashamed of what happened and I think someone will need to be blamed because that's the way people work."
Rallies have been held every week for two years, demanding the government accept a deal to end the war.
While the prevailing focus of those demonstrations has been the plight of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, there has been a growth in recent months in people voicing concerns about the humanitarian situation in the strip.
Within that group are those genuinely concerned about the suffering of the Palestinian population, and those worried about how it impacts Israel and its international standing.
Most Israelis want to end the war
Two years into the war in Gaza, people across Israel are tired and frustrated.
Polling released by the Israel Democracy Institute last week, ahead of the October 7 anniversary, showed 66 per cent of Israelis believed it was time to end the war.
Beyond that, 64 per cent of those surveyed said Mr Netanyahu needed to take responsibility for the deadly attacks and resign.
Views were split as to whether Israel was in a better security situation, while most conceded Israel's international standing had deteriorated dramatically.
Despite the United States remaining Israel's most significant backer, the views of American Jews also appear to have shifted.
Sixty-one per cent of those surveyed by the Washington Post newspaper believed Israel had committed war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, and 32 per cent believed the US was too supportive of Israel's conduct.
Even with that concession, 76 per cent of respondents said Israel's ongoing existence was vital for the long term future of the Jewish people.
Comparing the attitudes of Israelis about the war in Gaza to the recent 12-day war with Iran is telling.
During the June war, where Israel launched strikes on Iranian nuclear and military targets and faced a barrage of hundreds missiles in retaliation, many Israelis speaking to the ABC at the time believed the military offensive was justified.
Iran was frequently described as an "existential threat" to Israel which needed to be tackled, while the war in Gaza was seen as having dragged on too long.
The conflict also appears to have affected Israel's migration and population growth.
Data presented to Israel's parliament, the Knesset, showed 82,700 Israelis left the country in 2024 — a 50 per cent increase from the previous year.
Almost half of those who left were born overseas, and had moved to Israel at some point.
Despite the exodus, overall the country's population increased in 2023.
'People are tired'
The streets of Jerusalem are much quieter than they were prior to October 7, 2023 — tourists still flock to the Holy City, but in nowhere near the numbers they did before the war.
While foreigners, a major source of income for the city, are staying away, some business owners believe locals are also much more reserved than they once were.
"People are tired, people don't believe now in the situation, that it's going to be good," Meir Micha said.
He has been running his restaurant in the centre of Jerusalem's commercial district for more than 50 years.
"I see the customers, they don't smile as before, they don't talk about the football games, they come only to feed themselves," Mr Micha said.
"In the war, everybody wants peace in the end — it depends how do you find the peace? Nobody can want to fight all his life."
Eli Katz was among those enjoying a bowl of hummus at Mr Micha's restaurant.
"The war is 50 miles away from us, bombs going off and buildings getting demolished, and then … I'm sitting in a restaurant, a cafe, eating," he said.
"It's a very, very confusing thing, but I think at this point, most people want the war to be over."
Mr Katz said the international community's response to the war in Gaza, and Israel's conduct, was influencing the atmosphere across the country.
"Recognising Palestine or walking out [of Netanyahu's speech at the UN], I think it just brings the opposite effect — it makes everybody more stubborn," he said.
"In the end, instead of saying we have friends and we can cooperate and … we can stop the war because people will help us, I think that the general feeling is that we're on our own so we can't trust anybody, so we've got to keep fighting."
From 'united' to 'split'
Down the street, hairdresser Effi Hazuot was watching right-wing Israeli TV network Channel 14 in his salon. The nationalist channel, which has even criticised some IDF generals for not being right-wing enough, rarely shows the humanitarian impact of the war in Gaza. It is one of Israel's most-watched news sources.
"At the beginning of the war, the Israeli public was very united," Mr Hazuot said.
"But then as the war carried on, month after month, it's already two years, there is a split between like right and left.
"And now the left, the people in Israel, are very extreme — they want to end this war at any cost, they don't care even if we don't win the war, and that's unfortunately very sad."
He insisted the war should continue until Israel "destroy Hamas".
"You can leave the people who live there — no problem," he said.
"But this organisation, they are murderers."
Mr Hazuot believed international criticism of Israel was a political stunt to distract from their domestic problems such as immigration, and he disputed the overwhelming majority of humanitarian organisations warning of widespread hunger in Gaza.
"The world says that people in Gaza, they are starving — nobody starves over there," he argued.
"I have a friend, he's in Gaza, he is a [military] commander, and I asked him about it.
"He said it's a lot of liars."
That assertion is despite the UN and a multitude of other agencies warning of a severe hunger crisis.
'A rift in the nation'
At the nearby markets, Miri Ben Amram defended the IDF and her country's leader.
"We have the best army in the world, and a prime minister, the best diplomat in the world," she said.
"Netanyahu is number one.
"We want peace, I want peace, only peace."
Despite that assertion Ms Ben Amram, who lost a son serving in the IDF a few years ago, conceded the war had divided the country.
"There is a rift in the nation … we want to unite but it is impossible," she said.
"The political parties, the politics, they have ruined everything, and the world does not view us positively.
"But look what they did to us [on October 7], it's a massacre, it's the second holocaust, it's not easy.
"[The world is] emphasising that we are doing a genocide, and it is not true — it is them who are killing us, they are terrorising us."
That is a view shared among many Israelis, who see the world as having turned away from their suffering after two years of war.
But winning back international support is something which people such as Yonatan Shamriz argue is difficult to achieve.
"With the current leadership, I think it's impossible," he said.
"I think that the only people that really make any advocacy in the international media are civilians like me.
"Most of the countries that were allies of Israel are recognising the Palestinian state — so they get to butcher us and they get the present of a Palestinian state.
"It's very, very frustrating that the Israel leadership is not listening to the Israeli people and not doing anything to advocate Israeli interests in the world."
