As mourners gathered at the site of the Nova music festival to commemorate the victims of Hamas’s attack one year ago, low sobs and murmured prayers were punctuated by the sound of artillery 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.
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 in order 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.
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.”