It was 6:29 a.m. when the blasting music stopped without warning. The brief silence that followed was pierced by the screams of a woman somewhere in the crowd in this remote site in the Negev Desert.
The woman and hundreds of others were reliving in real time the moment terrorists stormed the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel, marking the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks in which Hamas and other militant groups killed 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250 others, taking them back into Gaza.
The brutality of the attack on the festival shocked the world. As revelers danced and partied in the desert, scores of Hamas terrorists stormed the site, blocked off escape routes, and embarked on a killing spree. They ambushed groups trying to hide and murdered people as they tried to escape. They shot victims at point blank range in their cars and fired machine guns and anti-tank weapons indiscriminately at those who tried to flee on foot.
Over the past year, the site of the massacre – a remote location just a few miles from the Gaza perimeter – has been turned into a memorial.
Instead of the vast open space, there are now hundreds of near identical cenotaphs, each featuring the name and a picture of a victim.
The one commemorating Amit Itzhak David shows a young man with a big smile. To mark the anniversary of his death, his family huddled around the memorial on Monday, hugging each other and David’s picture.
The 23-year-old was killed here last year, shortly after returning from a trip to South America, where he had been celebrating the end of his compulsory military service.
Nor far away, Anat Magnezi, the mother of Amit Magnezi, was kneeling on the floor next to his photograph, sobbing. A music lover and a former junior wrestler, Amit too was murdered at the site.
The Nova Music Festival massacre was by far the deadliest of the October 7 attacks, accounting for nearly a third of the victims. There were so many dead and kidnapped that it took Israeli authorities months to determine how many people had been killed there.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Sunday that 347 people, most of them young, died at the site and some 40 others were kidnapped.
Gabriel Barel’s mother, three brothers, and a best friend from the army all turned up in matching tops featuring his photograph. Barel’s brother Yeoda said the family initially believed he might have survived the attack and been taken to Gaza.
But a few weeks later their hopes were crushed when Barel’s body was found. After shooting Barel dead, his attackers had set his car on fire. His remains were so badly burnt it took many weeks for him to be identified.
Witnesses to the massacre say other victims were raped and subjected to sexual violence by Hamas. Hamas has denied the accusations, but the evidence of sexual violence comes from different sources — survivors who witnessed the events, first responders, medical and forensic experts. The United Nations and the International Criminal Court have offered evidence that Hamas attackers committed sexual crimes.
War rages on
Monday marked the first anniversary of the Hamas terror attacks, and a year since Israel began its war against the militant group in Gaza.
More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since then. The war has sparked a major humanitarian disaster, displacing nearly all of the strip’s 2.2 million residents.
As people gathered across Israel, the reminders that the war in Gaza is still raging kept coming. Throughout the morning, loud booms of outgoing fire reverberated throughout southern Israel as the IDF hit targets in the Gaza strip.
Israel has said its goal in Gaza is to eliminate Hamas and bring back the remaining hostages, but neither has been achieved. Indeed, as the anniversary events got under way, several rockets were fired from Gaza towards Israel, injuring two people.
While increasingly rare, rocket launches such as these show that even after a year of intense war, militants in Gaza are still able to strike Israel.
During a memorial service in kibbutz Nir Oz, the smoke trail of the rockets fired from Gaza was clearly visible in the sky. The agricultural commune of 400 people was another site targeted during the October 7 attacks; one in four of its residents were murdered or kidnapped.
Yehud was a volunteer medic at Nir Oz and when he realized the kibbutz was under attack and there were wounded, he rushed out to provide help. He was killed, but his remains were not found and identified until June. Yehud’s pregnant wife Sigal and three children survived the massacre. His fourth child was born just nine days later.
Yehud’s sister Arbel was kidnapped and taken to Gaza with her boyfriend Ariel Cunio, alongside Cunio’s brother David, David’s wife Sharon Alony Cunio, and their three-year-old twin daughters.
Alony Cunio and the two girls were released during a ceasefire deal agreed in November, but the rest of the group remains in captivity.
“Dolev’s sister is still in Gaza. She’s one of the four or five civilian women still there alive. The most important thing now is to bring her and the rest of them back,” he said.
Lifshitz grew up in the kibbutz and while he left at 16, he still has deep links there. His grandparents Oded and Yocheved were kidnapped from their homes in the kibbutz during the attack.
Yocheved Lifshitz, who was 85 when kidnapped, spent more than two weeks in captivity. She was released alongside her neighbor and friend Nurit Cooper, 79, but both her and Cooper’s husbands were kept in Gaza.
Nurit Cooper and her family were told in June that Amiram Cooper, her 84-year-old husband and one of the founders of the kibbutz, was no longer alive. His body is still in Gaza.
Last October, Moshe’s grandmother Adina Moshe watched Hamas fighters storm her home and murder her husband David before kidnapping her and taking her to Gaza. She was released as part of a ceasefire deal in November last year.
Sitting by David’s grave during the memorial ceremony on Monday, Adina was sobbing, her body slumped as if crushed by the horrors of the past year. Her daughter Maya Shoshani Moshe hurried to her side, trying to comfort her before bursting into tears herself.
Moshe has previously spoken publicly about her ordeal in Gaza and has in the past made an emotional plea directly to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bring the remaining hostages back.
“Again, I am asking you, Mr. Netanyahu, everything is in your hands, you’re the one who can do it, and I’m extremely scared, that if you continue along this path…there won’t be any more hostages to release,” she said in February after Netanyahu rejected the terms of a ceasefire and hostage deal put forward by Hamas.
She expressed the views of many Israelis who are furious with Netanyahu. Mass protests against the prime minister and his government have once again become a common occurrence across the country and the anger burst into the public view on several occasions during the memorial events on Monday.
Early in the day, family members of the hostages marched to Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem, blasting a siren for two minutes outside his front door.
Netanyahu did not make an appearance at the event, or any other gatherings aside from a small ceremony in Jerusalem.
When hundreds of people gathered in Tel Aviv on Monday evening to commemorate the victims of the attacks, politics was meant to be off limits. But it soon became clear that for many of the family members who were speaking at the event, politics is too intertwined with the fate of their loved ones.
Jonathan Shimriz, the brother of Alon Shimriz who was taken hostage and later killed in Gaza during a failed rescue operation, called for a state inquiry into the handling of the hostage crisis.
“There is no personal example, no vision, no leadership, no accountability,” he told the crowd.
