Eitan Halley and his friends were looking forward to the Nova Festival last fall, partly because the tickets were affordable.
“We were all looking for work, so we didn’t really have a lot of money,” says Halley, 28. “When the Nova tickets came out, they were really cheap. We all loved going to parties, and it seemed like the perfect thing to to do just before the (school) year starts.”
Halley and his friends didn’t know the exact location of the festival in advance — part of its mystique — but they planned to drive south to Be’er Shiva, a kibbutz in the area, a few days earlier to stock up on supplies to get.
“I remember driving and looking out the window and seeing Gaza and thinking about my time in the military, and how I was just a few miles away from where I was at the time,” Halley said. “You grow up in Israel and in a way you feel very safe. Even though every year or two you hear sirens and see rockets exploding overhead, you feel like you have a very stable military and government. And then something like this happens.”
When the location of the Nova Festival was announced, the group was enthusiastic. They went to the place, pitched their tents and began to enjoy themselves. There were trance DJs playing and lots of people drinking, dancing and taking drugs. People stayed awake all night as the party crescendoed at dawn.
But the dancing and fun quickly gave way to violence and fear.
On the morning of October 7, Hamas militants broke through the Gaza border fence at 60 different locations. According to Israel, around 1,200 people were killed and more than 251 taken hostage in the Hamas attack.
The attack would provoke an Israeli military response that would… humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Hamas-run enclave so far, according to the Health Ministry. Israeli airstrikes on Gaza are still ongoing.
The first sign people at the Nova Festival got that something was wrong was the lights from a barrage of rocket fire.
“I look up and I see the biggest – the most rockets I’ve ever seen in my life. And I want to remind you that I have been on the Gaza border in other wars, so I have seen rockets go over my head. head, but I’ve never seen it at this volume,” Halley said
The group ran back to their car and drove towards the festival entrance where they always entered. They soon found themselves stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
‘We couldn’t go anywhere. Everyone was in panic. Rockets exploded over our heads. We didn’t understand if we were safe or not, we just knew we had to get out of there. suddenly a man shouts at us: ‘There’s another entrance there.’ So as soon as he said that, we turned our car around and went the other way.”
The group reached the main road and turned right to return to Be’er Shiva, where they had been staying for the past few days. Many others turned left, towards Tel Aviv.
“All the people who chose the left attacked the terrorists, and many of them didn’t make it,” Halley said.
The group rode for a few minutes, rockets whizzing overhead, until they passed a small roadside shelter. A makeshift structure to protect members of the public who could be caught driving during rocket attacks. It had no door that closed, only a wall blocking the entrance from flying debris.
The group stopped and ran inside to find the shelter already crowded. People continued to push in, including Aner Shapira and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, until a final group of three walked in and said they were fleeing terrorists who had shot at their car.
“And at that moment my heart skipped a beat and I realized something bad was about to happen,” Halley said. “I remember a few seconds after that happened, we heard cars stop, a group of people jumped out shouting in Arabic, and they started shooting at the entrance.”
Halley said everyone at the shelter tried to call for help — calling the police and military — but no matter who they spoke to, they couldn’t get 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 don’t get any response,” Halley said.
Then his phone was shot out of his hand and he realized the terrorists were throwing grenades into the shelter.
Shapira, who had entered earlier with Goldberg-Polin, immediately sprang into action, grabbing the live grenades from the floor and throwing them back out through the shelter entrance.
“He was focused. He understood he had a mission and he wasn’t willing to do anything but stay there. He wasn’t going to hide or get away or anything. All he was looking for , was fight, fight. Stay alive,” Halley said.
The grenades kept coming. Shapira caught and threw back around eight o’clock until at one point there was a really big explosion and I flew back. Someone flew at me, and when I finally stood up, I remember Aner was no longer standing. With us, Hersh lost his hand below his elbow, I think,” Halley said.
The attackers threw more grenades, and Halley says he took it upon himself to throw them back until they threw in two at a time and one of them exploded. He was knocked unconscious and eventually woke up to see a masked assailant walking over him in the shelter, carrying an AK-47 and wearing a bandana with the symbol of Hamas.
“I remember you could see his mouth through the mask. He had a little gap and he was smiling, like it was a game they were winning, and I could keep my eyes open for a second before I blacked out again,” Halley said.
The attackers began taking hostages, including Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American who was also among them six hostages killed in September shortly before Israeli forces found them. Goldberg-Polin’s body was found in a tunnel under the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
In the shelter, Halley had survived the grenade blast.
“They checked to see if I was alive. I don’t know how I remember this because I was gone. I was 100% outside. I remember trying to open my eyes to see what was happening but I just couldn’t . and they just passed me,” he said.
The attackers sprayed the remaining bodies with bullets, and when Halley woke up, they had left the shelter.
“I realized I was sitting on a pile of bodies, and I think we were seven survivors. There were two or three more people who were seriously injured. They tried to be as quiet as possible, because they knew that if they made the noise, the terrorists could just walk in and throw another grenade, and then we wouldn’t be able to do anything. And this haunts me to this day,” Halley said. “They couldn’t be quiet anymore and started screaming because they had gunshot wounds or shrapnel wounds from the grenades… At some point they just stopped screaming, and I’m almost certain that at that moment they died or she passed away a little later, and from then on we were there for another six hours.”
Halley and the others were eventually found by the father of a festival goer who had received a frantic call from his son from the shelter. When he got the call, he grabbed a gun and drove to the scene of the accident.
He managed to enlist some army support, and Halley was eventually put into a jeep and driven towards 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 like they had been shot out. Many of the cars had passengers in them, and you could tell they were dead,” Halley said .
Of the more than 3,000 people who attended the Nova Music Festival, 364 were murdered and 44 others were taken back to Gaza as hostages. Hundreds of others were injured and thousands continue to receive psychological counseling. Some have committed suicide.
Halley is one of the survivors with 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 tough.”
“I still have a headache from the explosions and from fainting, I think. Dizziness, nausea, losing my balance I think because of my eardrums. My hearing was damaged. Apparently sleeping is suddenly a lot more difficult,” he said. “I still have shrapnel wounds in most of my body. Sometimes I still feel my skin burning.”
Halley said he tries to avoid things that bring back memories of the attack.
“I haven’t really listened to trance music since October 7, and I don’t really feel like listening to it today,” he said. “One day I hope I can go to parties again, dance again and have fun like I used to.”
Halley is one of many festival-goers who told their survival stories in “We Will Dance Again,” a documentary from See It Now Studios. Stream it now on Paramount+.