Live updates: Israel marks three-year anniversary of Oct. 7 attack

Memorials are being held at homes, roadsides, kibbutzim and a music festival site.

Loved ones of the lost and kidnapped gather at the site of the Nova music festival. Leon Neal / Getty Images

Israel’s National Security Council has warned Israelis living abroad to exercise “heightened vigilance” amid an “increased risk of attempted attacks against Israelis and Jews abroad,” on the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks.

In a statement issued by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, the public was urged to “refrain from posting details about travel plans abroad on social media in advance” as well as “posting content on social media that indicates service in the security forces.”

Travelers were also urged to avoid traveling to Jordan, Qatar, Somaliland, and Egypt and “minimize speaking Hebrew in crowded areas.”

The extraordinary thing about her son was that he was “totally ordinary,” the mother of an Israeli American Hersh Goldberg-Polin told NBC News.

Three years after he was taken from the Nova music festival in southern Israel, Rachel Goldberg-Polin said there was “always a temptation, especially when young people are killed in tragic ways, to mythologize them or lionize them.”

But for her Hersh “was the perfect match,” she said.

Hersh was among six hostages held by Hamas whose bodies were recovered in a tunnel under Gaza’s southern city of Rafah in September 2024. Born in the U.S. he moved to Israel with his family when he was seven.

“I think what’s extraordinary about Hersh is that he is totally ordinary,” Goldberg-Polin said, adding that he was “filled with beauty and filled with flaws.”

Rachel Goldberg in 2024. Vanessa Leroy / NBC News

Israel marked the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks with a nationwide moment of silence at 6:29 a.m. local time (11:29 p.m. Tuesday ET), the exact time the Hamas assault began in 2023.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog and first lady Michal Herzog lighting a memorial candle at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem this morning. Office of President Herzog

At the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, President Isaac Herzog and first lady Michal Herzog lit a memorial candle to open the day’s commemorative events.