Eitan Halley and his friends looked forward to the Nova Festival last fall, in part because the tickets were affordable.
“We were all looking for work, so we didn’t really have a lot of money,” Halley, 28, said. “The second the Nova tickets came out, they were really cheap. We all loved going to parties, and it seemed like a perfect thing to do right before the [school] the year has begun.”
Halley and his friends did not know in advance the exact location of the festival – which is part of its mystery – but they planned to travel south to Be’er Shiva, a nearby kibbutz, a few days later. early to stock up.
“I remember driving, looking out the window, seeing Gaza and thinking about my time in the army and how I stood guard just a few miles from where I was right now,” Halley said. “You grow up in Israel and you feel, in a way, very safe. Even though every year or two you hear sirens and see rockets exploding overhead, you feel like you’re ‘have a very stable army and government and then this kind of thing happens.’
When the Nova Festival location was announced, the band was excited. They went to the site, set up their tents and started having fun. There were trance DJs playing and lots of people drinking, dancing and doing drugs. People stayed up all night, the party crescendoing as the sun rose.
But dancing and fun quickly gave way to violence and fear.
On the morning of October 7, Hamas militants crossed the Gaza border fence in 60 different locations. Israel says some 1,200 people were murdered and more than 251 taken hostage in the Hamas attack, according to Israel.
The attack would trigger an Israeli military response that provoked a humanitarian disaster in Gaza which has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians so far, according to the Hamas-run enclave’s health ministry. Israeli airstrikes on Gaza continue.
The first sign people at the Nova Festival had that something was wrong was the lights of a barrage of rocket fire.
“I look up and I see the biggest rockets, the most I’ve ever seen in my life. And I want to remind you guys that I was at the Gaza border during other wars, so I’ve seen rockets pass overhead, but I’ve never seen it at this volume,” Halley said.
The group ran back to their car and began heading towards the festival entrance they had entered through. They quickly found themselves stuck in a traffic jam.
“There was nowhere to move. Everyone was panicking. Rockets were exploding above our heads. We didn’t understand if we were safe or not, we just knew we had to get out of there. And everything all of a sudden, a guy shouts to us, “There’s another entrance over there, so we, the second he said that, we turn our car around and we start driving.” in the other direction.”
See now Studios/Paramount
The group reached the main road and turned right to return to Be’er Shiva, where they were staying for the past two days. Many others turned left, heading toward Tel Aviv.
“Everyone who took a left hit the terrorists, and a lot of them didn’t make it,” Halley said.
The group drove for a few minutes, with rockets whizzing overhead, until they passed a small roadside shelter. A makeshift structure intended to protect members of the public who might be caught driving during rocket attacks, it had no closing door, just a wall that blocked the entry of flying debris.
The group stopped and ran inside to find the shelter already crowded. People continued to crowd in, including Aner Shapira and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, until a final group of three people entered and said they had fled from the terrorists who were shooting at their car.
“And at that moment my heart jumped and I realized something bad was about to happen,” Halley said. “I remember a few seconds after that we heard cars stopping, a group of people getting out shouting in Arabic and they started shooting at the entrance.”
Halley said everyone in the shelter tried to call for help – calling the police, the military – but no matter who they talked to, they couldn’t find anyone to come to their aid.
“I talk to them and tell them they’re shooting at us and they’re going to try to kidnap us or kill us, and we get no reaction,” Halley said.
Then his phone was knocked out of his hands and he realized that the terrorists were throwing grenades into the shelter.
Shapira, who had entered earlier with Goldberg-Polin, immediately sprung into action, picking up the live grenades from the ground and throwing them back through the shelter entrance.
“He was focused. He understood that he had a mission and he wasn’t prepared to do anything other than stand there. He wasn’t trying to hide or run away or anything. Everything what he was looking for was to fight, to stay alive,” Halley said.
The grenades continued to arrive. Shapira caught him and sent him back around eight o’clock until at one point there was a really big explosion and I went back. Someone flew at me and when I finally got up, I remember Aner was no longer standing. “With us, Hersh lost his hand, I think, right below his elbow,” Halley said.
The attackers threw more grenades, and Halley said he kept throwing them back until they threw two at once and one exploded. He lost consciousness, then woke up to see a masked attacker walking towards him inside the shelter, carrying an AK-47 and a bandana with the Hamas symbol.
“I remember you could see his mouth through the mask. He had a little opening and he was smiling, like it was a game they had won, and I was able to keep my eyes open for a second before I passed out.” Halley said.
The attackers began taking hostages, including Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American who was among the six hostages killed in September shortly before Israeli forces found them. Goldberg-Polin’s body was found in a tunnel under the southern Gaza town of Rafah.
In the shelter, Halley had survived the grenade explosion.
“They checked to see if I was still alive. I don’t know how I remember it because I was absent. I was 100% absent. I remember trying to open my eyes to see what was happening and I just couldn’t, and they just passed me,” he said.
The attackers fired bullets at the remaining bodies and when Halley woke up, they had left the shelter.
“I realized I was sitting in a pile of bodies and I think there were seven of us survivors. There were two or three other people who were seriously injured. They were trying to be as quiet as possible, because they knew that if they made any noise, the terrorists could just come in and throw another grenade and we wouldn’t be able to do anything and that haunts me to this day,” Halley said. “They couldn’t be quiet anymore and they started shouting, because they had been injured by bullets or grenade fragments… At one point, they just stopped shouting, and I’m pretty sure they died at that time or died shortly after, and from then on we stayed there for another six hours.
Halley and the others were eventually found by the father of a festival-goer who had received a frantic phone call from his son from inside the shelter. Upon receiving the call, he grabbed a pistol and went to the scene.
He managed to enlist the support of the army and Halley was eventually put in a jeep and driven to Be’er Shiva.
“I remember seeing on the side of the road, I don’t even know how many, but so many cars that looked destroyed. A lot of cars had passengers inside who you could see were dead ” says Halley.
Of the more than 3,000 people who came to the Nova Music Festival, 364 were murdered and 44 others were taken back to Gaza as hostages. Hundreds more have been injured and thousands are still receiving psychological help. Some committed suicide.
Halley is one of the survivors who bears both physical and psychological scars.
“I can find myself crying in the middle of the day for no reason,” he said. “It’s very, very hard.”
“I still have headaches from the explosions and fainting, I think. Dizziness, nausea, losing my balance, I think, from my eardrums. My hearing was damaged. Obviously, sleep is suddenly much more difficult,” he said. “I still have shrapnel in most of my body. I can still feel, sometimes, my skin burning.”
See now Studios/Paramount
Halley said he tries to avoid things that trigger memories of the attack.
“I haven’t really listened to trance music since October 7, and I don’t really want to listen to it today either,” he said. “One day I hope I can go back to parties, dancing and having fun like I used to.”
Halley is one of many festival-goers who shared their stories of survival in “We Will Dance Again,” a documentary from See It Now Studios. Stream it now on Paramount+.
