Israeli who escaped Hamas attack on Nova Music Festival struggles a year later with physical and mental scars

Eitan Halley and his friends were looking forward to the Nova Festival last fall, in part because the tickets were affordable.

“We were all looking for jobs, so we didn’t really have a bunch of money,” said Halley, 28. “The second the Nova tickets came out, they were really cheap. We all liked going to parties, and it seemed like a perfect thing to do right before the [school] year started.”

Halley and his friends didn’t know the exact location of the festival ahead of time — part of its mystique — but they planned to drive south to Be’er Shiva, a kibbutz in the general area, a few days early to get supplies. 

“I remember driving and looking out the window and seeing Gaza and just thinking about my time in the army, and how I used to just guard a couple of kilometers away from where I was at the moment,” 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 you see rockets exploding over your head, you feel like you have a very stable army and government. And then this kind of thing happens.”

When the Nova Festival location was announced, the group was excited. They went to the site, set up their tents, and started enjoying themselves. There were trance DJs playing, and lots of people drinking, dancing and doing drugs. People stayed up all night, with the party set to crescendo at sunrise.

But the dancing and fun gave way quickly to violence and fear.

On the morning of Oct. 7, Hamas militants broke through the border fence of Gaza at 60 different locations. Israel says some 1,200 people were murdered and more than 251 taken hostage in the Hamas assault, according to Israel.

The attack would trigger an Israeli military response that has caused a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza that has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians so far, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run enclave. Israeli airstrikes in Gaza are still ongoing.

The first sign people at the Nova Festival had that something was wrong were lights from a barrage of rocket fire.

“I look up and I see the largest — the most rockets I’ve ever seen in my life. And I want to remind you guys, I was on the border of Gaza in other wars, so I’ve seen rockets going over my head, but I’ve never seen it at this volume,” Halley said

The group ran back to their car and began driving towards the festival entrance they had used to come in. They soon got stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“There was nowhere to move. Everyone was panicking. Rockets were exploding over our heads. We didn’t understand if we’re safe or we’re not safe, we just knew we had to get out of there. And all of a sudden some guy screams to us: ‘There’s another entrance over there.’ So we, the second he said that, we turn around our car and we start driving the other way.”

The group made it to the main road and turned right to return to Be’er Shiva, where they had been staying the last couple days. Many others turned left, toward Tel Aviv.

“All the people that took a left hit the terrorists, and a lot of them didn’t make it out,” Halley said.

The group drove for a few minutes, with rockets whizzing overhead, until they passed a small, roadside shelter. A makeshift structure to protect members of the public who might be caught driving during rocket attacks, it didn’t have a door that closed, just a wall that blocked the entrance from flying debris.

The group pulled over and ran inside to find the shelter already crowded. People continued to squeeze in, including Aner Shapira and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, until a final group of three entered and said they had fled terrorists shooting at their car.

“And at that point, my heart jumped a beat, and I realized that something bad is about to happen,” Halley said. “I remember a few seconds after that happened, we heard cars pull up, a group of people jump out screaming in Arabic, and they started firing at the entrance.”

Halley said everyone in the shelter was trying to call for help — phoning the police, the army — but no matter who they spoke with, they couldn’t get anyone to come to their rescue.

“I’m talking to them, and telling them they’re shooting at us and they’re going to try to kidnap us or kill us, and we’re not getting any reactions,” Halley said.

Then his phone was blasted out of his hand, and he realized the terrorists were throwing grenades into the shelter.

Shapira, who had entered earlier with Goldberg-Polin, immediately jumped into action, picking the live grenades up off the floor and throwing them back out through the shelter entrance.

“He was focused. He understood that he had a mission and he wasn’t willing to do anything else but stay there. He wasn’t looking to hide or to get away or anything. All he was looking for was to fight, to stay alive,” Halley said.

The grenades kept coming. Shapira caught and threw back around eight until, “at one point, there was a really big explosion, and I flew back. Someone flew on me, and when I finally got up, I remember Aner wasn’t standing anymore. He wasn’t with us. Hersh lost his hand up to, I think, right under his elbow,” Halley said.

The attackers threw more grenades, and Halley says he took up the job of throwing them back until they threw in two at once, and one of them exploded. He was knocked unconscious, eventually waking up to see a masked attacker walking over him inside 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 opening and he was smiling, like it was a game that they won, and I was able to keep my eyes open for a second before I passed back out,” Halley said.

The attackers started taking hostages, including Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American who was among six hostages killed in September shortly before Israeli forces found them. Goldberg-Polin’s body was found in a tunnel beneath the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

In the shelter, Halley had survived the grenade blast.

“They checked if I was still alive. I don’t know how I remember this because I was out. I was 100% out. I remember I was trying to open my eyes to see what was happening and I just couldn’t, and they just passed me over,” he said.

The attackers sprayed the remaining bodies with bullets, and when Halley woke up, they’d left the shelter.

“I realized that I was sitting in a pile of bodies, and I think we were seven survivors. There were another two or three people that were critically injured. They were trying to be as quiet as possible, because they knew that if they made noise, the terrorists might just walk in and throw another grenade and we wouldn’t be able to do anything. And this haunts me till this day,” Halley said. “They couldn’t be quiet anymore, and they started screaming, because they had gun bullet wounds or shrapnel from the grenades… At some point, they just stopped screaming, and I’m almost sure that they passed away at that moment or they passed away a little bit after that, and from that moment on, we were there for another six hours.”

Halley and the others were eventually found by the father of a festival-goer who’d gotten a frantic phone call from his son from inside the shelter. Upon receiving the call, he grabbed a pistol and drove to the scene.

He managed to call in some army support, and Halley was eventually put into a jeep and driven toward Be’er Shiva.

“I remember seeing on the side of the road — I don’t even know how many, but so many cars just, that looked shot up. A lot of the cars had passengers in it that you could see that they were dead,” Halley said.

Of the more than 3,000 people who went to the Nova Music Festival, 364 were murdered and 44 others were taken as hostages back into Gaza. Hundreds more were wounded, and thousands are still receiving psychological counseling. Some have taken their own lives.

Halley is among the survivors left 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 headaches from the explosions and from passing out, I think. Dizziness, nausea, I lose my balance, I think, because of my eardrums. My hearing was damaged. Obviously, sleeping is all of a sudden a lot tougher,” he said. “I still do have shrapnel  in most of my body. I can still feel, at times, my skin burning.”

Halley said he tries to avoid things that trigger memories about the attack.

“I haven’t really listened to trance music ever since the 7th of October, and I’m not really willing to listen to it today either,” he said. “One day, I hope that I will be able to go back to parties and dance again and enjoy myself the way I used to.”

Halley is one of several festival-goers who told their stories of survival in “We Will Dance Again,” a See It Now Studios documentary. Stream it now on Paramount+.