There were around 3,000 people at the festival. Over 260 of them died, slaughtered to death. Some kidnapped. I guess almost 10% of the whole event was just erased. My name is Yonatan D. I’m 28. I’m an Italian-American citizen, and I live in Israel. I survived the horrifying terror attack at the music festival. 

Credit: Kan11

We were all looking forward to this festival, the Nova Festival. My friend and I and all our group were dancing in the dance floor. Suddenly, 6.30 [am], we just saw rockets. Dozens of rockets on top of our heads. We weren’t surprised. This is something that has happened in the past. Rockets being launched to Israel. We knew the drill. We waited for this traffic to end because there were 3,000 people trying to get out. So we took the other way, the south road. 

“I see this woman doing a U-turn. First thing we see is her hitting the car in front of us, her door was opening and there’s blood on the floor and you just see her knee that was shot, that was bleeding”

Suddenly I see this woman doing a U-turn. First thing we see is her hitting the car in front of us, her door was opening and there’s blood on the floor and you just see her knee that was shot, that was bleeding. We tried to find something to block her wound, block all the blood that was coming out. Tried to close it with our shirts, bring her water. They were shooting around us and we just heard dozens of gunshots. 

In the meantime she was just dying in front of our eyes. And we left our car there. We left everything there. Dozens of people around this woman already. So we just thought that more people are just going to get hurt if we keep staying here. We went to the river east from our location. We were hiding and just waiting for things to end. But slowly, slowly, we were hearing more gunfire and heavy gunfire and bullets on top of our head.

I was screaming, everyone just lay down, put your head down, just keep moving forward, keep moving east, away from the compound, away from the event. We just kept walking, and unfortunately, there were people that stayed there. These people were, I guess, just not lucky. 

So we were walking for hours and hours. It was so hot outside, of course, after a long night of not sleeping, we’re all exhausted. We didn’t have any water, no food. While we were walking, there were dozens of missiles at the top of our head. After walking for more than four hours, we finally got to the outskirts of the closest village called Patish. We saw people waiting for us with cars, calling us in Hebrew and just waving. We were all just running to them, not knowing where we were going, but we knew we’re going somewhere safe. The whole village volunteered picking us up with their cars and they brought us to the community center of the village. 

“If we didn’t see that gunshot of the injured woman in the beginning, we wouldn’t  have thought that this would be such a big and horrifying event”

There were hundreds of people from the event, people crying they can’t find their friends, they didn’t hear anything from them. After speaking with the other survivors we understood that they were really lucky because the ones that left first are the ones that interacted with the terrorists from one side, from the north side, and the people that were leaving last, like me and my friend, We were the ones that interacted terrorists from the south part. But if we didn’t see that gunshot of the injured woman in the beginning, we wouldn’t have thought that this would be such a big and horrifying event.

Yonatan D.

Credit: Kan11

This story was first published on october7.org.