The parents of the survivors of the Nova Festival massacre remember every moment of the terrible Saturday of October 7. They remember how they tried to help amidst their helplessness, what they said in the dramatic phone calls, what they kept inside, and above all – how much they worried. Some of them started the car and raced south and others pointed from a distance, gave instructions and tried to convey security – all this while they themselves were filled with terror and worry.
In these difficult moments every decision was fateful. Life and death were sometimes decided by choosing whether to turn right or left, whether to hide or run. The concerned parents took part in these difficult decisions until, in some cases, the connection with the children at the party was completely severed.
We talked to three parents, to hear the story of the massacre from their perspective. What was going through their minds? How did they try to help? And how did they manage to convey confidence to the boy or girl who is wondering about their lives, while they, the parents themselves, are also filled with terrible worry?
“Starting to receive videos”
Eti Yifrah Zarihan, Noa Yifrah’s mother, woke up early like every Saturday for her morning run. “I didn’t have the feeling that something bad was happening,” she recalls. “The night before, the girl said she was going to a festival in the south. Noa is very responsible, and I had no doubt that everything was fine.”
Even after hearing the alarms, Etty, like most of us, still didn’t attach much importance to it. The concern for Noa began when the videos of the horror from the south started running on the networks. “I finished running at eight o’clock,” she recalls. “We went to our traditional cafe and there we start receiving videos on WhatsApp. I called Noa.”
As soon as Eti heard her daughter talking about terrorists, Eti immediately tried to think of what could be done. “She actually sent me the location, and I see she’s in the middle of nowhere,” she says. “There isn’t even this purple line of the location to reach her. You see that she is there in the middle of some area, and you don’t understand where.”
What goes through your mind?
“Wow, I hear ‘terrorists’ and you don’t understand yet that really…”, Eti hesitates and then repeats her thoughts: “Okay, terrorists, surely the army will come now. We are the strongest army in the world. It’s a matter of a few minutes, and we’ll eliminate them and it’s all over,” she describes. “And it didn’t happen. Another minute passes and another hour and another hour.”
Eti’s daughter, Noa Yafarah, and her friend Oded Abergel, the late, who was murdered in the massacre
“Before that, I call an acquaintance, a friend, a very senior officer in the army. Someone who is even very close to the Chief of Staff, to that extent,” Etti repeats. “I am not in daily contact with her, but who takes stock at such a moment? I don’t care, I know her, and she is a very nice woman. I called her and told her there are terrorists in the south. My daughter is at a party, and there are about two thousand helpless children with her, they are running, afraid of terrorists. They hear gunshots and they hear missiles. Help me, what are we doing?’ She says ‘I’m going south, I’ll talk to you on the way’. An hour passes and I start texting her, really long, and every text she sends me ‘The army is on the way, the security forces are there, the army is on the way’. And I tell her, ‘No one is found. There is no one there, they are alone'”.
“I don’t really know what’s going on,” Eti continues to describe. “When I call Noa again, she tells me, ‘Mom, stop, don’t come. Don’t worry, the army is here.’ And there was some kind of one armed policeman there, and that was it, there was no one else who could help them.”
“I drove, I didn’t think I would get out of it alive”
“I realized there wasn’t much to do, and they were there alone,” Etti recalls. “I just started the car. I’ve never had a trip like this in my life. You don’t think about anything, you’re driving, empty roads, I reached a speed of 180, something I never imagined, and I’m thinking about the worst things. I say, ‘Okay, there I have one more girl at home, married, with two grandchildren.’ I knew I was leaving, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I have to do it.”
“The danger of the trip is also crazy,” Etti adds. “There is no stopping at the traffic lights. There are also missiles above my head, I see burned fields. I reach Ofakim, and there the police stop me, ‘You can’t pass.’ All the electricity ran out. And now I’m in trouble, what do we do? I went to Be’er Sheva, my girl with all her courage and strength of spirit managed to run, for about five or six hours, and they reached some area, and a guy named Assaf Davidian picked her up from there. He made exiles for all the children , brought them to the youth club in Patish. The poor man actually lost his daughter, she was murdered, but he did the great mitzvah and saved many children.”
Noa survived, but her close friends were murdered at the party. “Only later did we realize that she was in an inferno,” testifies her mother, Etti. “And another day goes by, and another day, and you want to know what’s going through her mind. But she closed in on herself. With me, anyway, and with her father too, she didn’t talk about it, but I was comforted by the fact that she sat with her friends for long hours, and she talked.” .
Eti says that since then Noa has had trouble recovering from the trauma. “She’s a 25-year-old girl, and every day when she leaves the house I ask her to do a placement for me. She’s a very independent girl, and yet,” shares Eti. “And it’s to receive photos from her visiting friends at the cemetery. She writes me ‘I’m visiting friends’, and she takes pictures of their graves.”
Noa Yifrah and her friends at the Nova Festival
“It’s a moment when all the blood leaves the body”
Like me, Ofra, the mother of Shoham Guetta who survived the massacre at the Nova festival, realized on Saturday morning that he was in danger. “Saturday morning, a holiday,” she recalls. “Michael, my husband, already went to the synagogue and at six thirty the alarm went off. We go down to the hospital and Shoham was not in bed, and I say to his little brother, ‘Where is Shoham?’ He tells me ‘Mom, Shoham went to a party’. I didn’t even know he went to the party. So I said ‘OK, I’ll call him’. I call him and he answers, he tells me ‘Mom, I can’t talk to you’. I tell him ‘why can’t you talk to me?’ He tells me ‘Mom, they are shooting at us. There are shots here, there is something here.’ And I tell him, ‘No, wait, it’s not gunshots, Shoham, it’s missiles.'”
“I video-called him on WhatsApp to see him,” Ofra continues to recount, “and I found him really prostrate under the stage. It’s a moment like this where all the blood drains from the body. You think ‘this can’t be’ and it lands on you with a boom. And that deep fear when you realize that there is Danger to life, and helplessness.”
“I said, ‘Well, hang up, I’ll come to my senses,'” she continues to tell. “He’s hiding, he couldn’t speak either, because at some point they were shot under the stages and then they scattered everywhere. They were three friends from Ashkelon and they scattered everywhere. One ran to the chemical toilet and by a great miracle he was saved. Shoham and his friend Raz ran and hid in some A conversation. Truly, they had a great miracle.”
Shoham Guetta, who survived the massacre at the party, recorded himself hiding in the bush
Ofra recounts the moments of terror she experienced when she realized what was happening to her son: “First of all I was terribly afraid, but my Shoham is a fighter and I believed in him,” she emphasizes. “I constantly felt that I needed to send him strength, that he would be fine. At some point he also called someone so that he could give us a point of reference. Just like that, we opened a kind of HML inside the house without being able to communicate with him, at 12, 11:30 That’s how the relationship disappears.”
“The hours pass and the fear and terror on television, and the pictures we hear circulating, and the telegram and everything around, these are terrible moments,” she testifies. “And on the other hand, you have to be strong to tell them, ‘It will be okay, he will come out.’
What did you say to him?
“At some point he sent us pictures, and in the picture he gave us a kiss and said ‘Mom, I don’t know if we’ll get out of here’. Like in the movies,” replies Ofra. “He also told us, ‘Take care of yourselves, I heard that there are also terrorists in Ashkelon.’ I didn’t scare him, I didn’t cry to him on the phone. I just told him, ‘God will protect you, hide, do what you can,’ and with that I cut off the connection until he came back.”
The smoke that rose from the direction of the party was bad
“We see one and pray”
“At some point he called and whispered, and then I told him, ‘Don’t call, don’t talk, hide. Do what you know how to do,'” Ofra continues to recount. “We were even afraid to call, we just sent messages. You see one V and you just pray. I didn’t want to scare even more. I was afraid he would even answer my phone, because I knew, I understood the danger from the first time he whispered. I was afraid to stress him even more, even though I was very Stressed. I didn’t want to convey our fear to him, I didn’t want something to let him lose his strength. He sent us one picture, inside, shirtless in the bushes.”
“One of the things I said to Shoham on the phone, now I remember, was, ‘Atonement for you, please, don’t be a hero. Don’t be a hero,'” adds Ofra. “Shoham is big and I told him, ‘Now you can’t be a hero, you’re in the bushes, don’t look for weapons. Don’t look for anything. Hide, be quiet.’ Because we understood that no one could do anything about them. I told him, ‘Lower your profile, stay where you are.’
Shoham ran out of battery and for many hours lost contact with him. He was finally rescued by the army in the evening and taken to Ofakim. Two days after the party he was already called up for reserve service in a combat unit.
The road of death in Ra’i, after the massacre at the Nova festival
“I went to get my daughter”
Nitzan Ezra escaped from the Nova festival and hid in a shelter that turned into a death trap. From there, among the bodies and the smoke, she was able to contact her family. “We went in to confirm a murder, they throw grenades at us, they throw Molotov cocktails,” she wrote to her brother Amit, from the inferno. When her father, Muti, realized that his daughter was in trouble, he and his son Amit immediately left their house in Bat Hefer to save her. Moti and Amit Ezra were among the first civilians to arrive at Otef, they joined a military force, and succeeded in rescuing Nitzan. In their rescue operation, they managed to rescue about 30 more partygoers.
“When you know that one of your children is in need, you realize that it’s either you get him back as a gift, or you actually lose him. Then everything suddenly disappears, and you focus on only one goal – how to bring your daughter home,” he says confidently. “Nothing interested me.”
“One of the concerns I had during this journey was my son Amit who was with me. This is where I had the problem,” Moti shares. “He was with me and he didn’t agree to come down, and as a result of that I was filled with a crazy fear of losing him, my daughter and myself. I mean, we’re losing three here,” Muti recalls. “I was really excited, I understood what I was doing, but full of worry, and my concern for Nitzan transferred to Amit, and why? Because Amit, I see him, he is with me, he is not in distress. Only Nitzan is in distress. It was very, very hard for me to give up also Amit, because when we arrived we saw what was happening and realized that it was Sodom and Gomorrah what was happening there. People killed and thrown away and dying and burned and cut and amputated.”
“You see everything,” he continues. “And you say, ‘Look, I’m going in another 100 meters, and I’m going in another 100 meters’ and you see shots being fired and it’s crazy and shouting, jumping, and you see terrorists thrown on the floor and you say ‘Lord of the world, what am I doing now?’ Nitzan inside, Nitzan is kind of 50% life, and Amit is 100% life. And he insists that he doesn’t want to get out of my car. He just says ‘Dad, me and you until the end, you’re not coming back – I’m not coming back’. I mean, we were one for the other.”
Muti had no doubt for a moment that he would do anything to save his daughter. “You live for them, you breathe for them, you talk for them, you do everything for them,” he declares. “First of all they are, then it’s you, when you’re a father. My children are the first degree in my life.”
She called from the shelter in the midst of the massacre. Nitzan Ezra
“I said ‘hide under the bodies'”
“The first time I was able to talk to Nitzan, it was when I told her to hide under the bodies,” testifies Moti. Despite the terror that gripped him, he managed to convey composure to the bud who was on the other end of the conversation. “I’ve been through a lot in my life, including in the military,” he explains. “I’m 53 years old, I’ve been through terrorist attacks, I’ve been through shooting attacks, several charges in my military service. I’ve done all kinds of things, I mean, I knew what it was like to be in focus. I was in the emergency room for many years, almost 17 years. I lived in an enclave inside the territories. I mean , I knew how to look at these things. We did a lot of exercises in the army and in training. I knew what I was doing and I understood what I was doing.”
Moti Ezra and his son Amit
To what extent today, with all the time that has passed, does it still accompany you?
“Every day. Almost every day I look behind me. What does it mean that I look behind me? I look to see that no one is walking behind me, for example, I feel that I am in some situation where this is going to happen again.”
“My concern has always been them first – my children, my wife, my house”, Moti tries to put his mental state in a wider context at the end. “Because when you have security in your home, the whole world dwarfs you.”
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