What Americans think about the war in Gaza, a year after the Oct. 7 attacks

It's been a year since October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack on Israel, killing at least 1,200 Israelis and capturing about 250 hostages - nearly 100 of whom remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 33 who are no longer believed to be alive, according to Israeli officials. Since then, Israel's military response has killed at least 41,000 Gazans, most of them women and children, and Israel has also been engaged in escalating clashes over the past year with Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group backed by Iran.

Most recently, Iranian missile strikes against Israel just last week prompted Israeli airstrikes and an invasion of Lebanon and threatened to plunge the region into a wider war. In light of the latest attacks, President Joe Biden and Harris have condemned Iran and reiterated their support for Israel - once again raising the issue of U.S. involvement in the conflict, a hot-button topic over the past year.

The American public has long been generally supportive of Israel, and was largely in favor of sending U.S. military aid to Israel at the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict, but polling since then suggests that support has fallen as the war drags on - instead, many Americans are worried about the harshness of the Israeli government's response to the attacks, and want the U.S. government to help broker a diplomatic end to the conflict.

Americans still support Israel, but sympathize with Palestine too

Last year, a 538 analysis found that sympathy for Israelis spiked soon after the attacks despite a longer-term trend of increasing sympathy for Palestinians, especially among Democrats and independents. In an average of polls at the time, a solid plurality of around half of Americans said they sympathized more with Israelis than they did with Palestinians (or with both/neither party).

Today, Americans are more split on who they sympathize with. In a AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll from Sept. 12-16, 25 percent leaned more toward Israelis, while 15 percent said they sympathized more with Palestinians, 31 percent answered both equally, and 26 percent said neither.

Part of that change has been driven by an increasing number of Americans who feel that Israel's military actions in the conflict have been too harsh. About a week after the Oct. 7 attack, a YouGov/The Economist poll found that a plurality of 32 percent of Americans thought Israel's response to the attack was "about right" and 22 percent thought it was not harsh enough, while 18 percent thought it was too harsh: