Three words told the story. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign had billed this afternoon’s event in Philadelphia as a “much-anticipated announcement.” Of course, that specific phrase may have been more true than intended.Ever since Kennedy entered the Democratic presidential primary race in the spring, observers had been anticipating that he’d one day announce his honest intentions as a 2024 candidate.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Israel is at war, and has ordered a complete siege of Gaza after Hamas’s surprise attack on Saturday. Hamas is holding at least 150 hostages, and more than 900 Israelis and more than 600 Palestinians have been killed.

More accounts are emerging of kidnappings, rapes, and torture committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians. So far, at least 150 Israelis, most of them apparently civilians, were kidnapped by Hamas gunmen and stolen across Israel’s border with Gaza. Among the kidnapped are elderly women and small children. Human-rights groups are tracking these kidnappings as evidence of war crimes.

On Saturday night, I was seated on the first El Al plane to fly from the United States to Israel since Hamas had attacked my country. Many airlines had canceled flights to and from Israel, but El Al had refused to grant the terrorists that victory. Though we took off after midnight, sleep was impossible. My mind writhed thinking of the reports of unbearable Israeli casualties, the images of the captured and the dead, and the prospect of wider war.

The October 7 attacks on Israel by the Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are being compared to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. In fact, with more than 600 Israelis dead at the time of this writing, the proportional death toll is several times higher than that of 9/11, and the factor of surprise is arguably greater than at Pearl Harbor.But 9/11 and Pearl Harbor weren’t just tragic attacks. They were casus belli for seismic wars.

I will never forget that mild, golden early-October day almost exactly 50 years ago: the jarring sound of the sirens that tore into the otherworldly silence of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement; the ultra-Orthodox men, still wrapped in their snow-white High Holiday robes and fringed prayer shawls, riding on army jeeps that drove them to their volunteer positions in hospitals and military morgues—an inconceivable sight.

The Hamas attack against Israel is not only a massive Israeli intelligence and military (as well as a U.S. intelligence) failure, but also a dramatic success for Iran’s axis of resistance from Yemen to Gaza. The highly choreographed, multipronged, day-long operation and incursion into Israel itself, involving the use of motorized paragliders and drones and the taking of hostages, required months of planning and training that only Iran and Hezbollah could have provided.

Yesterday, Hamas launched a multifront attack that shocked Israel, infiltrating the Gaza border by land, sea, and air. The attack took place on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, nearly 50 years to the day after an Arab coalition’s surprise attack on Israel—the last assault of this scale—spurred the Yom Kippur War in 1973.More than 600 Israelis have been killed, according to local reports.