Is anyone hurt?
The voice in the film clip, belonging to one of the first police officers to arrive at the Nova festival in southern Israel on October 7, is strained. No answer.
The camera pans over beer taps and refrigerators with Coca-Cola logos. The police officer takes a deep breath. Behind the bar, bodies are scattered: limbs bent at unnatural angles, torn party clothes stained with blood.
Give us a sign of life, the police officer pleads.
No answer.
In one of the coolers, 24-year-old Elinor Gambarian sits silently. She has been sitting there for hours – the oxygen is almost gone, she faints and comes to, but dares not reveal herself. In a video message, she whispers goodbye to her eight-year-old son – "Oshri, Mom loves you".
The boyfriend was killed
In another clip, Noam Ben David films herself with her head resting on a cornflake box. Together with a group of festival-goers, she crouches in a dumpster when the hiding place is suddenly surrounded by terrorists who open fire. She sees her boyfriend being shot dead, but dares not move. When the terrorists leave, 12 of the 16 people in the dumpster are dead.
In other clips from the attack, young people stand tightly packed in dark bomb shelters after fleeing the festival area. They hiss when Arabic is heard outside. In the clips, the attackers are heard celebrating as they shoot people, egging each other on: "here's another dog, kill it".
In the bomb shelters – small doorless concrete blocks 1.5 by 1.5 meters – it's hard to breathe. 30-40 people are crammed into spaces designed for a maximum of ten. The terrorists laugh as they throw in hand grenades, one after another. Boom. Boom. Boom. They celebrate, "allahu akbar".
Covered in dead bodies
Inside, Danielle Sasi lies bloody on the floor, clutching the hand of the person lying on top of her. It smells strongly of metal. "Thank you for protecting me", she whispers to the dead body that stopped bullets and shrapnel from reaching her.
In another bomb shelter, a terrorist throws in a hand grenade, a young man picks it up and throws it back. In a recording from a car camera, it can be seen exploding outside the concrete structure. It's a macabre game of ping-pong that can only end one way: the eighth grenade explodes in Aner Shapira's hand and kills him.
In a clip from the same bomb shelter, a man realizes he's sitting on a pile of dead bodies. "I've lost my hand", someone exclaims in disbelief. It's Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who is soon dragged out of the bomb shelter and loaded onto a pickup truck headed for Gaza. He is held captive for nearly eleven months before being murdered.
A year later, about 20 of the festival-goers at Nova are still in Gaza. No one knows if they're still alive.
On Saturday, October 7, 2023, the terrorist-stamped Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel. Around 2,500 armed Hamas militiamen broke through the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel in a coordinated manner. Thousands of rockets were fired simultaneously at Israel.
More than 1,100 people, the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians, were killed in Israel. Massacres were carried out in kibbutzim and at the Nova music festival, which was held near the border.
Nearly 250 people, including several children, were taken hostage and brought to Gaza by Hamas.
The day after the deadliest attack on Israel in the country's history, the Israeli government formally declared war on Hamas. In extensive and sustained bombings, entire areas of the Gaza Strip have since been reduced to ruins. Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas.
Currently, around 100 of the hostages are believed to be still in Hamas captivity, since some have been released and others killed.
More than 40,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the October 7 attack, according to the Hamas-controlled health department. The majority of them are said to be civilians. Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza has simultaneously pushed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
