Nadav Hanan was at the smaller of the dance stages at the Nova dance festival in southern Israel when Hamas attacked.
It was the beginning of an extended nightmare for the 27-year-old that saw him zigzag more than 15 miles of rough ground barefoot, surviving seven ambushes by Hamas attackers along the route to safety.
“It was after 6am. It was the peak of the party,” Hanan recalled in a bar in the Israeli city of Rehovot last month. “A lot of people time their drugs to kick in for sunrise at these parties. It should be one of the best moments.
“The people at the main stage couldn’t see what was happening but we had a clear view of Gaza. We could see Iron Dome [the Israeli anti-missile defence system] working. I knew the party was over.”
Hanan’s story of escape is one of the most detailed to emerge from the festival, where as many as 360 young Israelis were murdered on 7 October.
“After we saw the rockets, my girlfriend and my mum, who had heard the alarms, called and told me to come home.” He headed with friends to where their cars were parked, only to find that roads out of the festival site had become blocked with traffic.
“We were at a T-junction,” he said. “There was a policeman preventing people going left but wouldn’t tell us why. I was still naive at this point, thinking that it was because of the rockets.”
In reality, Hamas fighters were ambushing cars on the roads around the festival site, forcing drivers to turn back.
“We were thinking about going right, which takes you south, when we saw another car approaching from that direction on the wrong side of the road,” he said. “There were two guys, really frightened. They told us they had got as far as a gas station where they were shot at. It was hard to believe. I served as a combat soldier in this area. If terrorists had come through, I was thinking, it would be half an hour then it would be over.”
Sensing something very wrong, Hanan and a friend decided to abandon their car and flee on foot across the fields.
But rapidly the horror was overtaking them. An ambulance came past from the south with a young woman inside who had been shot in the leg. Then a golf cart belonging to the festival welfare team passed, carrying another wounded person.
“The person in the back was really wobbly,” Hanan said. “Struggling to sit up if they weren’t supported. I could see three circles of blood that I knew were bullet holes.”
Moments later, Hanan heard the first gunshots close by. He took his bag and ran. “There was a wadi [riverbed] ahead of us with lots of people in it. I was wearing Birkenstocks but I couldn’t run in them so I took them off.”
Shielded on one side by trees and with a sandy bank on the other, the wadi was wide enough at its narrowest point for two people to walk together.
“One of my friends was looking back,” Hanan said. “He could see three or four [Hamas operatives] above us on the top of the wadi. He was trying to whisper but his voice was getting louder and louder: ‘I see them! I see them!’
“By then we know there were Hamas below us as well, so we clambered over a 4 metre-high bank. By this stage I already had three thorns in my feet.”
Reaching an agricultural road, Hanan and his friends began moving towards some trees in the distance, again hearing shots fired in their direction. “At this point I can’t remember everything. It’s like it got deleted. We changed direction but were being shot at again. That’s when I realised: they were everywhere.”
Other people fleeing shouted snatches of information: Hamas is in all directions, some have used gliders, some are wearing police uniforms, no one should be trusted.
Hanan said he recalled thinking: “It’s a circle of death. And it’s getting smaller and smaller.”
On reaching a road where moving cars were visible, Hanan suggested to his friends that they walk back towards the festival site to where they had parked. “I thought for a moment,” he said. “Then I was like – no, no, no!
“There was a couple walking on the road. They were exhausted and struggling to keep going. The guy was trying to wave down cars begging them to take his girlfriend. But no one was stopping.”
He paused for a moment. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look of desperation in his eyes.”
By now some in Hanan’s group suggested they should hide. “I said: ‘No, it’s waiting for mercy.’ I wanted to keep on walking.”
Ahead of them was a large ploughed field. The furrows slowed progress. Again Hamas fighters appeared, this time on two motorbikes. They dismounted to fire on the large group trying to cross the field.
“You could hear the bullets whistling and hitting the sand,” Hanan said. “I had a physical sensation that I had this giant target on my back that was getting bigger. I could hear screams but I thought, if I look back I’m dead.”
At this point in Hanan’s escape his phone rang. His reserve commander was calling him up for duty. Explaining he was already in the area, Hanan asked for help. The commander said he could not help and wished him luck.
At last beyond the field there was a solitary soldier with a walkie-talkie who directed Hanan and the group he was with to some farm buildings. “We’d been running for three hours by now. We’d run out of water and there at least was some agricultural water. It was not good to drink but it was something to put in the bottle and sip.”
Pausing to rest for a moment, the group considered hiding in a barn or in the muck of the cow shed. But a young woman shortly came running past, telling them to get out because something big was coming.
Loud booms echoed across the fields behind them. An Israeli helicopter appeared to engage Hamas on the ground.
Finally, a decision was made. The group would walk to a community called Patish, although two phone calls to the police station there revealed that fighting was going on there. An officer who spoke to Hanan asked him not to call again.
The group decided to try for Patish anyway, in the hope Israel’s security forces would have dealt with Hamas before they arrived.
“Finally we made it to the road,” Hanan said. “There were farm pickups with trailers attached. We got into one of them, maybe 40 of us all on top of each other.”
The pickups took the festivalgoers to safety. It was four in the afternoon. They had been running for almost 10 hours.
Three months on, Hanan said his ordeal was far from over. If he allows his gaze to settle for too long, he experiences flashbacks. Noises as simple as the thrumming of fingers on a table sound like gunfire. “Whenever I am in traffic now I find myself calculating how many cars are ahead of me and asking why are they stopping,” he said. “[I wonder] is it an attack?”
Therapy that began two days after 7 October had helped, he said, as had the provision of retreats for the Nova survivors at a hotel in Cyprus.
How does he feel about the Hamas attackers who did this to him? “I believe in peace,” he said. “I believe we’re not that different. My grandparents came from Arab countries. I have Arab friends. We eat the same food and use the same curses.
“Its an abomination. No one mentally stable could do this. There’s no excuse. I think they had the choice [to say no when they were ordered to do this]. They took the other choice. They decided let’s kill as many as we can, to make us despair and to fuck us up.”
