When the Music Stopped

The night of 6–7 October · Near Kibbutz Re'im

In open ground near Kibbutz Re'im, about five kilometres from the fence, the Nova festival was under way that night. Thousands of young men and women – about three and a half thousand, by most estimates – had come from all over the country with blankets, water and everything you need for a whole night. They had come to dance until their legs could no longer feel the bass.

Neon lights flickered in the dark. Hands raised, eyes closed. It wasn't just a party. It was a celebration of being alive, of the moment, of a community that believed music connects people.

They didn't know they were dancing on the edge of the abyss.

As the sky began to brighten into orange and pink, at exactly 06:29, it was scored with white lines. Rockets. Barrage after barrage. Interceptions overhead. Some of the dancers were used to sirens, but this was something else. Too heavy. Too long.

Within minutes the police ordered the party shut down. Officers and security staff began steering everyone towards the exit, towards Route 232. The car park became a jam of thousands of cars trying to leave at once. Many still thought it was a rocket round, that within an hour they would be on their way home.

Then someone shouted: "Terrorists! They're shooting at us!"

07:00 · Route 232

Around a hundred gunmen reached the festival area, in pick-ups and on motorbikes. According to the IDF's investigations, they didn't know about the festival in advance. They came across it on their way. And when they saw thousands of young people fleeing, they turned towards them.

They shot at anyone who moved. Route 232, the only road out, became a trap: they stood at the junctions and fired at the cars, and those who managed to swerve past got stuck behind cars that were no longer moving. People ran into the fields, into the nearby woods, into an orchard, anywhere that looked like cover. Barefoot, confused, unable to understand how, in a few minutes, the most beautiful night of their lives had turned into the end of the world.

They sent messages. They called. They begged. WhatsApp filled with locations, with "Tell my mum I love her." Help came late. The system wasn't ready for anything like this, and it got nowhere in time.

Civilians got there first. People from the nearby moshavim, from Patish and around, drove their own cars out to the fields again and again, picked young people out of the bushes and the ditches, and brought them back alive.

The Re'im West shelter

Along the roads stood concrete shelters – small bunkers built to protect against rockets. Now dozens of young people who had fled the party crowded into them. Later they would be called "the shelters of death".

In the shelter near the Re'im junction some twenty-five people were crammed together. Hot, airless, on top of one another, trying not to breathe too loudly.

The gunmen arrived and began throwing grenades inside.

Aner Shapira, a soldier in the Nahal reconnaissance unit who had come to dance on leave, stood in the doorway. A grenade was thrown in, and he picked it up and threw it back out. And another. And another. Seven grenades. The eighth exploded in his hand.

Beside him stood his friend Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was also throwing grenades back out. He was badly wounded, lost his hand, and was taken to Gaza.

At least seven of the people in the shelter survived. Afterwards they talked about the young man who stood in the doorway, and of all the words they had, they chose only one: hero.

The end of the night

That morning 378 people were murdered in the festival area: 344 civilians, and thirty-four members of the security forces, among them 16 police officers who fought to get them out. Forty-four were abducted.

Later, testimony was gathered, and a report by the UN special representative found reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence had also been committed that morning, at the festival and along the roads. There are things that don't need to be described to be known. And there are things that must not be forgotten.

The massacre at Nova wasn't only mass death. It was the end of an innocence. A whole generation that was celebrating life and ran into total horror. The day the music stopped, the lights went out, and the world changed.

That morning · Nir Oz

At Kibbutz Nir Oz, about two kilometres from the fence, they came early.

Small houses, lawns, olive trees. They went from house to house, smashing windows, kicking in doors, setting homes on fire with people inside the safe rooms. In some places residents held on to the door handle with all their strength, praying that whoever was on the other side would give up. In a kibbutz of about four hundred people, almost one in four was murdered or abducted.

Among the missing were Carmela Dan, eighty, and her granddaughter Noya, twelve. Only weeks later did it become clear that they had been murdered.

The first troops reached the kibbutz after the last of the gunmen had already left.

It happened in dozens of places that morning: in Be'eri, in Kfar Aza, in Nahal Oz, in Sderot, in Ofakim, in Kissufim, in Nir Yitzhak. Thousands of gunmen broke through the fence in dozens of places, by sea, by land and by air, and crowds from Gaza poured in after them. About 1,200 people were murdered in a single day – the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. 251 were taken to Gaza, from babies to the elderly.

Afternoon · Nahal Oz outpost

Natalie sat in the corner of a wrecked building, behind an overturned table, her rifle across her knees. Her face was black with smoke, her uniform stained with blood that wasn't hers.

"I'm still here," she whispered. Just to hear a voice.

She heard footsteps outside. Voices. Someone shouted in Arabic, and someone laughed. She bit her lip until she tasted blood, and pressed the rifle to her chest. She imagined hands dragging her out, a camera, a dirt track towards the fence. She would not go with them. That much she knew.

And she thought of Roni. Of the song Roni sang to her at night. Of the back door, and of Roni not coming out of it.

And then, for no reason, of Maya. Her friend from Instagram, who lived in Nirim, right up against the fence, and who at sixteen used to tell her about sirens the way people talk about the weather. Nirim was further south, on the same fence. Natalie didn't dare light up her screen to write to her. Only three days later, from a hotel at the Dead Sea, would a two-word message arrive from her: "I'm here."

The footsteps moved away. She stayed in the dark, waiting, knowing that this day had changed everything.

Before evening she heard Hebrew. "Anyone here? IDF! Is anyone here?" At first she couldn't answer. Her voice wouldn't come. And then it did.

Evening · Athens

Alex sat frozen on the sofa in the little flat. The television screamed reports that sounded like the soundtrack to the end of the world. Black smoke. Burnt houses. A newsreader with a choked voice reporting kibbutz after kibbutz.

Then, in a group of friends from the stands, a photo went up: an Eviatar Banai record, riddled with bullets, lying on a floor among broken glass. Nobody knew exactly where it was from. It wasn't just another thing thrown down. It was a sign.

Omer Hermesh rose up before him, the friend from the red stand, the kid from Kfar Aza. The one who played Eviatar Banai on every away trip, who sang with him until their voices gave out, and who always said, on endless nights: "Alex, the music will protect us." About Kfar Aza the newsreader couldn't finish a sentence. Suddenly the record looked like a silent gravestone.

His hands shook as he dialled. No answer. Only silence. And the silence was worse than any gunfire.

Then Nuni. Yaron "Nuni" Shai, another one from the stands, with the smile and the scarf and the line he repeated after every defeat: "If it doesn't hurt, it isn't Hapoel." Nuni was serving at Kerem Shalom, and the reports from there spoke of fighting. Alex wrote to him. The message wasn't read.

And then the hardest blow of all: Natalie. Contact with her had been cut since the morning. Her outpost, Nahal Oz, appeared on every list of places that had fallen. He saw her in his mind's eye, hiding, hearing footsteps, her eyes fixed on him through the screen, as if asking where he was.

Alex sank to his knees. The tears burned like tar. A scream broke out of him, torn from his chest:

"Omer! Nuni! Natalie! Live! Live!"

Emily held him from behind and said nothing. The little room in Athens filled with the echo of despair. And not knowing was worse than anything.

That night, slowly, things began to come clear.

Close to midnight the phone buzzed. Irina. At first he couldn't make out what she was saying, because she was crying and laughing in the same breath, in Russian and in Hebrew.

"She's alive, Alex. She's alive. She called from someone else's phone. Three words: 'Mum, I'm alive.'"

Alex slid down the wall to the floor. For the first time since the morning, he breathed all the way out.

Only later, among dozens of messages he hadn't read, did he see one that had been waiting for him since midday. Mehran.

"I'm sorry. We are not them."

He read it three times. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. What do you answer to that, on a day like this? He didn't know. He didn't answer.

Before dawn he booked a seat on the first flight to Israel he could find. In December he hadn't booked. This time he didn't think twice. Emily sat on the edge of the bed and watched him pack his old army bag. She didn't ask.

What had happened to Omer and to Nuni, he didn't know yet. The days to come would bring that.