2023 Israel–Hamas war

The 2023 Israel-Hamas war began on the 7th of October 2023, when Hamas-led militants launched a barrage of over 5,000 rockets from Gaza and some 3,000 fighters breached the border into southern Israel. In a single morning roughly 1,400 people, most of them civilians, were killed, including 260 at a music festival in Re'im, and more than 200 were taken hostage. At least 44 nations characterised the incursion as a terrorist attack. Israel's retaliation was immediate and massive: airstrikes, a full blockade cutting food, water, electricity and fuel, and a ground invasion of Gaza launched on the 28th of October. By the end of that month more than 8,500 Palestinians had been killed, many of them children, and roughly a million people were displaced. Human rights bodies and UN rapporteurs accused both sides of war crimes.

The event chart sets the Sun and the Ascendant in Libra, Venus's sign of the Scale, the archetype of justice and balance, here brutally inverted. The Moon lies in Cancer, sign of home, homeland and the mother, cast into the tenth house before the eyes of the world. A chart describes a moment's astronomical backdrop; it in no way explains or excuses the killing of civilians.