Nova Festival attack survivors struggle with lingering trauma and diminishing mental health care

The aftermath of the October 7 terror attack at the Nova music festival in southern Israel is still haunting the survivors. During a recent parliamentary hearing in Israel, one survivor, Guy Ben-Shimon, revealed that nearly 50 survivors had since taken their own lives due to the trauma they experienced during the attack. Despite these alarming revelations, Israel’s Health Ministry has refuted these claims and stated that the number of suicides among the festival survivors is unknown.

Regardless of the veracity of Shimon’s statement, the issue of survivors’ mental state cannot be ignored, and the survivors need support and care even now, more than half a year later, as the post-traumatic stress keeps haunting them.

The Media Line spoke with some of the survivors of the Nova festival to hear their heart-wrenching stories and to the National Resilience Center director, Reut Lev, to gain an in-depth understanding of the situation.

According to Lev, experts see that most of the survivors are still experiencing trauma.

“Survivors are still feeling it and not recovering. We are doing a lot of things to take care of them and their families, and there is a lot of treatment going on—talk therapy, art therapy, music therapy, and group therapy. We’re trying to offer a wide variety of interventions, and of course, working with the families is extremely important,” she said.

Lev explained that the survivors had witnessed extremely difficult things, and living through such events would take a much longer time to recover from.

“It’s not going to be a short-term intervention, which is why we are also offering other techniques, retreats, and working with families,” she said.

Nova survivors speak on needing long-term mental health assistance 

Lev emphasized that the Israeli government and the health care system must consider long-term treatments.

“We need more sessions with survivors than we thought we would at the beginning. A lot of them are still reluctant to leave their homes, so they have not even begun therapy. We need to find a way to help them. The whole process will take a long time,” she admitted.

It is known that many of the victims left Israel in an attempt to escape the trauma they had experienced. Although we tried to contact some of these people, they refused to talk. However, other survivors of the Nova festival bravely described their experience.

Twenty-six-year-old Bar Aharoni started to leave the festival at 6:50 a.m. on Oct. 7, after hearing the rockets launched into Israel from Gaza. Trying to get through the crowd, she got lost but reached her friend and got into the car.

“We got on the road and started driving towards Kibbutz Be’eri. We saw many cars in front of us, which looked like a police checkpoint. We opened the window to see what was happening and realized it was not a police checkpoint. It was a group of terrorists,” she shared with The Media Line.

Aharoni recalled that while trying to escape, the group made a U-turn and drove for a while but couldn’t find their way out. During the chaos, Aharoni’s face was injured.

“I remember having blood all over my clothes. I can recall that my friends, Shan and Ravin, got out of the vehicle. I was also trying to get out, but when I opened the door, I saw a terrorist running and shooting. I panicked, closed the door, and tried to get out from the other side, but my leg got tangled in one of our bags. Shan came and helped me get out, and then we managed to make it to the shelter,” she said.

Aharoni explained that the shelter was full of people, so she and her friends had to stand close to the entrance, hoping they would survive.

“Everyone inside was hysterical, people were shouting. We heard the explosions and gunshots, noises of war, we saw terrorists and soldiers. It felt like a horror movie. We thought we would die,” Aharoni said.

Aharoni spent about an hour and a half at the shelter, and this is when she and her friends saw a car full of wounded soldiers who were evacuating.

“After we saw another vehicle of soldiers. They told everyone who was wounded to come and drive after them. We were very lucky to get out of the shelter because it was a ticking time bomb,” she recalled. Soon after they left, the shelter was attacked by terrorists.

Aharoni and her friends managed to get out but had to stop at a gas station near Sa’ad.

“Inside the station, everything was full of blood, and there were many more injured people from the party. The station worker helped me with my injury. I called my parents for the first time to tell them where I was; until then, they didn’t know,” she said.

At the same time, 31-year-old Rafael Birman from Brazil was hiding behind another bunker with his five friends. A few moments before, the group managed to get to their car and were trying to drive north, but after a minute of driving, they saw a green car coming in the other direction.

“We saw a girl, full of blood, screaming, and everyone was shocked. The cars behind me started doing U-turns. It was hard to understand what was happening; we were trying to drive, and then I saw one of our windows exploding, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, they are shooting at us,’“ he said.

Birman told everyone to leave the car and fall on the ground. That is when they saw an IDF car stopping next to them and Israeli soldiers starting a fight.

“I thought I would die. I was waiting for the bullets to get inside my body. It doesn’t feel like reality. Then we heard the bomb exploding near us, and everything became slow, just like in the movies,” he shared.

Birman recalled that the next thing he remembers is one of the soldiers screaming to them: “If you don’t get out of here, you’re going to die!”

“Across the road, we saw a bunker, so we ran there, but it was too packed with people, so we had to stay behind it,” he said.

Birman said that he can perfectly remember bodies in the streets, people full of blood, crying and desperately trying to call their loved ones. He also shared that one of the wounded soldiers was put by his side behind the bunker.

“He was a kid, around 19 years old, and he was bleeding. You’d think you’d know what to say at such a moment, but you don’t.”

After two weeks, Birman and his friends found the soldier in a hospital.

“He lost his leg, but he was good and alive,” said Birman.

“At some point, the IDF could take control over the area near our bunker, and soldiers told us to get into the car of someone that was around and go to a nearby city. So, we went to Netivot,” he explained.

Meanwhile, Gal Dalal, brother of 22-year-old hostage Guy Gilboa-Dalal, shared with The Media Line what happened to them on Oct. 7.

“My brother waited for the Nova festival for a couple of months. I always encouraged him to go to these kinds of festivals,” he shared.

Dalal explained that he arrived at the festival 15 minutes before the alarms.

“By the time I got in, it was 6.15 a.m. —that’s when the festival is at its peak,” he said.

Dalal went to leave his bag at the place where the group was camping while his brother was on the dance floor. That is when they heard the sirens and explosions.

“People started to panic, and the music stopped. We decided to get out of there. We got into different cars because my brother wanted to be with his friends so they wouldn’t feel like he left them,” explained Dalal.

Dalal and his friends couldn’t make their way out by car either, so they had to hide under trees. The brothers were constantly on the phone until people started running in Gal’s direction. He heard bullets and had to disconnect the call.

“After around 20 minutes of running, we found a better hiding place. I called my brother again, but he wasn’t answering anymore. I couldn’t stop calling him; that was one of the darkest moments I ever felt. I was helpless,” shared Dalal.

Around 2 p.m., Israeli forces were able to arrive at Dalal’s location and helped them get out.

“On our way out, we could see countless dead bodies and destroyed cars. That was awful. I didn’t even realize what I was seeing. All I could do was keep calling my brother,” he shared.

Dalal arrived at the police station and could finally talk to his father. That’s how he found out that Hamas released a hostage video of his brother, Guy, inside tunnels in Gaza.

“It was the worst thing I could hear. For two-and-a-half hours, everyone knew that my brother was kidnapped, but no one told me so I could focus on saving my own life. I still try to wrap my head around it. Knowing that he suffers, that he’s being subjected to physical, psychological, sexual abuse...,” he said.

Dalal explained that Nova is not just a party or a rave. It’s a gathering of different people from different cultures.

“There were more than 20 different nationalities. You could see Arabs and Jews dancing together, celebrating peace and love. People who go to these kinds of places are peaceful. We believe in coexistence. We don’t care about language or religion. Seeing people like that being tortured, massacred, and kidnapped and being used as a currency, it’s just unbelievable,” Dalal said.

Dalal shared that after Oct. 7, it took him a while to seek emotional help. He tried to go to the Nova community gathering but could only think about his brother, Guy.

“These places helped many people because they had somewhere to go. I think now we have this kind of thing only once a week, and it’s different. Now people who were at the festival are having the hardest time getting back to normal life,” he admitted.

Dalal explained the loneliness that the survivors are experiencing.

“No one around you understands. People try to give their sympathy, but no one can really know what you’ve been through. Even therapists don’t know how to act when they have someone who went through something like that,” he shared.

Dalal confirmed that he still needs to deal with what happened.

“I think that without getting a place that will support and understand what survivors have been going through, we might likely see more and more people becoming desperate,” he admitted.

Dalal doesn’t know anyone who committed suicide after the party, but he confirms that many of his friends find it hard to leave the house.

“Honestly, I do not doubt that some may end their life after experiencing such a horrible thing. I have a friend who was trying to get back to work. After a couple of days, she left work in the middle of the day and took a flight to Switzerland to ski alone. She couldn’t handle anything. She just wanted to get disconnected,” he added.

According to Dalal, the Israeli government could do more for the survivors.

“Nova survivors need financial support. We have to deal with a lot of payments, but we don’t have the strength to go and work. Other than that, I think that at the beginning, there were a lot of activities, but now most of them have stopped. Someone still needs to check on the survivors,” he said.

Similarly, Aharoni shared that her first two weeks after Oct. 7 were the hardest.

“I felt very stressed and had anxiety. I wasn’t even able to leave home. Everything was scary for me, every noise and every alarm brought me flashbacks from what happened,” she said.

Aharoni continues to live in Israel now.

“For me, after October 7, it is very hard to be away from my family,” she admitted.

“I feel I have a lot of work in front of me. I have to learn how to trust people and the world again and to be able to do the things I did before October 7. My friends are also doing their best to recover, but it takes time for all of us,” Aharoni said.

Birman shared that talking about his story is helpful for him; however, some of his friends who were at the Nova festival cannot do the same.

“They are still very traumatized. Two of them are back in Brazil. I always talk about everything to everyone. I think it’s more difficult for people who keep what happened to themselves,” he said.

During our first conversation, Birman told The Media Line that he did not experience any signs of PTSD.

“The only thing that I have noticed is that I lost the fear of death,” he said.

However, after a few days, despite being so brave in telling his story and working through his experience, Birman reached out to share that for the first time, more than six months after the tragedy, he had a nightmare.

“I had this dream where terrorists were everywhere shooting people on the streets, and we kept running and hiding, but they were endless. It made me feel really anxious and faded for some time,” he explained.