At 6:30 a.m. Monday, the music stopped again in the park outside the small town of Re’im. A year ago, at this time, Hamas militants arrived at the site where the Nova electronic music festival was being held. Hundreds of young Israelis and other nationalities were dancing all night Friday when the sound of rockets fired from Gaza interrupted the party.
At first, no one imagined that a brutal assault by dozens of armed men would follow. In areas near the Gaza Strip, they were accustomed to projectile launches, sirens warning of their arrival and taking shelter in shelters. But on October 7, a year ago, the experiment and the shelter next to the parking lot, now covered with photos and names of the approximately 390 dead, were of no use. To this day, there is still no certainty about how many people were murdered and how many are still alive in the hands of their captors.
“He’s my grandson, he came here to dance and they killed him. “It’s very sad,” Yonathan Mordechai’s grandmother told elDiario.es in tears. “They killed him and kidnapped him, they didn’t leave him here. We have no body, we have nowhere to cry,” he adds. The old woman says that he was her eldest grandson, then aged 21, and that he had come at the festival with two friends from Tel Aviv this weekend.
“They left the other two and my grandson was taken away,” Stella said, explaining that when they didn’t find his body, they thought he had been kidnapped. Two months later, the authorities informed them of Yonathan’s death. “I don’t know if they’re going to bring us his bones, if they’re going to bring him back to us. If the army brings him, we will bury him and we will know where to come and cry.
Many of the victims’ relatives mourned their loved ones today in the place where they died, where there is a photo of each of them, as well as the items that the families left over the last twelve months. These are not tombstones, but there are candles and flowers, objects of the deceased and the flag of Israel on each of these altars.
Fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors returned today to remember the day young people died or went missing a year ago and observed a minute of silence after the music stopped. At that time, Israeli President Isaac Herzog hugged some relatives and once again denounced the Hamas attack, in which more than 1,200 people died in total and 250 were kidnapped. About a hundred remain captive to this day.
Families also brought a picnic to spend several hours at the Nova festival site: a park with large eucalyptus trees, little grass and a lot of earth, the same one that covers the photos and objects of homage that are found over a wide area. The strong security presence and the constant flight of military helicopters do not seem to bother loved ones in these painful moments. They were also not surprised by the explosions coming from the Gaza Strip and which intensified during the ceremony.
Before dawn, planes could be heard bombing the Gaza Strip and the army reported in a statement that it had hit Hamas’ rocket launch positions and underground infrastructure; In addition, he assured that the Islamist group had “the intention of firing projectiles against Israeli territory” and that the army “immediately thwarted this threat”. Despite this, several rockets were launched throughout the morning from Gaza against central and southern Israel, triggering air raid sirens.
After the minute of silence, after 6:30 a.m., the artillery fire was heard more frequently and closer, reminding how close Gaza is to Re’im and, at the same time, how far away the victims are . two camps a year later, with conflicting stories and positions on what happened on October 7 and the war that Israel subsequently unleashed and for which the attorney general of the International Criminal Court has requested international arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. Israel’s collective punishment against Gaza has already left nearly 42,000 dead.
