Nearly one month on from the massacre of festival-goers in Re’im in southern Israel by Hamas militants, survivor Aliza Samuel left her home for the first time and returned with CNN to the place where she witnessed the murders of four of her friends.
She walked carefully through debris left strewn across the ground, picking up a bracelet before coming across some small clay trinkets that had been handmade during the Nova Music Festival.
More than 260 bodies were found at the site in the aftermath of the assault on October 7, one of the deadliest of the Hamas attacks, which killed at least 1,400 people in Israel.
Samuel recalls the moment she was jolted awake soon after sunrise by the sound of Hamas rockets flying toward them from Gaza. She said she immediately woke her friend, and they fled their tent to try to find a concrete shelter.
Many of the other festival goers were asleep or still dancing, and either didn’t hear the alarm, or ignored it, she said.
But Samuel and her friend didn’t want to take any chances, so they started running. As they sought cover, they suddenly spotted Hamas fighters appearing in the skies above them on paragliders, shooting at people from the air as they came in to land.
Panicking, the pair sprinted across the open farmland surrounding the festival site and dived into a ditch behind a line of large trees. Samuel worked on trying to calm her friend down, clamping her hand over her mouth to stop her screaming, as they began to realize what was unfolding. Others were also hiding behind the trees, “trying not to breathe,” she said.
“I saw Hamas take a bunch of people and went to their commander, and asked if to kill them or to take them,” she said. “And once they were dead, they didn’t stop, they just kept shooting them, and you just saw the body just jump and jump from the bullets, after they were dead.”
After hiding in the ditch for hours, Samuel and her friend eventually saw army vehicles arrive and decided to make a run for it – stepping through “pools of blood” to escape. Finally, they found some Israeli soldiers who helped them get to safety.
Later, she learned that another male friend at the festival had also been found dead – shot in the leg and then later beheaded at a nearby kibbutz.
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