One year ago, nearly 400 young Israelis were massacred at the site of the Nova music festival during the 7 October Hamas attack. As mourners gathered at the site of the festival to commemorate the victims on Monday, their low sobs and murmured prayers were punctuated by the sound of artillery and machine guns being fired by soldiers into nearby Gaza.
Perhaps no single scene across Israel more expressly exhibited the horrific violence meted out against hundreds of civilians by Hamas, and the subsequent ferocity of the Israeli response against that organisation and millions of people inside of Gaza.
Just days before relatives gathered here, Israel sent tanks back across the border into northern Gaza for the first time in months and distributed leaflets telling the remaining population, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, to evacuate to the south of Gaza to avoid being caught up in a “new phase of the war.”
And on Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in near-messianic terms about a war that he has justified by pointing to the 1,200 victims of the Hamas attack and declared them a justification for an ever-expanding conflict that Israel is fighting on “seven fronts” across the Middle East.
“This is the war of our existence – the ‘war of resurrection’,” he told his Cabinet in a speech. “This is what I would like to officially call the war.”
Relatives gathered around the homemade memorials to the estimated 365 people killed at the festival on that day in 2023, while attack helicopters whirred overhead and occasionally let loose bursts of automatic gunfire toward Gaza, only three miles away from the festival site in Re’im, southern Israel. Police had before the ceremony warned attenders that if they heard a siren, they had just seconds to drop to the ground before a rocket from Hamas could hit.
Hundreds of mourners, many dressed as though they were attending a rave, crossed a dusty field into the straw grass of the festival site. Many wore matching T-shirts bearing the names of the dead, as well as stencilled images of headphones or other club and music paraphernalia.
Izchak was affixing a sticker carrying the name of his cousin Hanan (Hanania) Amar to a bunker bearing memorials to dozens of those killed.
“He didn’t tell any of us he had come to the rave,” Izchak said, wiping away tears. “If he had then we would have all come with him and we would all be with him now. He just wanted to disappear for 24 hours. He had three children and they took him away from them.”
Itiel, 42, said he had been an acquaintance of Matan Elmalem, known by his stage name, DJ Kido, who was killed at the festival. In a memorial, friends had erected a lifesize picture of him standing at the DJ booth he played last year.
Itiel had driven two hours south to attend the memorial ceremony. He carried an Israeli flag over his shoulder and a pistol wedged into the back of his jeans. “Many relatives still come here to try to hug the ground and feel the warmth that remains from their relatives. It’s a pain that will never leave them.”
For months he and his friends had discussed whether they could go to raves ever again. He said they imagined what it would have been like if they had been at the Nova festival, the surreal horror of the mixture of exhaustion and, in some cases, drugs that would have affected them as the attack unfolded. “We asked ourselves if we would have survived,” he said.
At 6.29am at the memorial, a DJ put on the last song to play at the festival, a pulsating trance track called Clear Test Signal (Artifex Remix) by Pixel & Space Cat. A young woman in black put her hands in the air and began to sway back and forth, her head lolling from side to side as she danced. Then she began shrieking, once, twice and then a third time. Finally, she collapsed to the floor.
At the exact same time, the families of the more than 100 hostages who remain in Gaza (a third of them are estimated to have been killed), were marching on Netanyahu’s Jerusalem residence to stand for a two-minute siren, a custom usually held on the two most solemn dates of the Jewish calendar, Holocaust Remembrance and Memorial Day.
That morning, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an Israeli campaign group, announced the death of another hostage held in Gaza.
“My cousin Carmel was kidnapped on 7 October and we learned just one month ago that she was murdered in captivity because the deal that was supposed to save her did not come in time,” Gil Dickmann, a protester who has been among the most vocal advocates of securing a deal, told reporters. “We’re here to say that if we don’t act now and get all the hostages back right now we might lose all of them just like we lost her.”
At Nova, many praised the community of survivors that had sustained them in the year since the attack. “I’m working on bringing the caravan we were hiding in back here and giving hope,” said Rita Yadid, who was at Nova but managed to escape. “Because as much death as there was here, there are people who stayed alive to tell and to share what happened.”
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, was among those at the memorial, comforting families as he set off on a three-day tour of the attack sites.
Noa Tishby, an Israeli activist and actor, said the Nova site was “where the juxtaposition between good and evil is most apparent”. “That’s really close,” she said, as another artillery round was fired off toward Gaza.
Many of the families said they strongly supported the Israeli response in Gaza. Few could predict how or when the war would end. Itiel showed a picture of his three daughters, aged six, nine and 12.
“If I had sons their age, I know they would fight there eventually. This war will take many, many years.”
