It’s taken a while to be allowed into the festival site, for a couple of reasons.
One, it’s a closed military zone - you need to be escorted there. But mainly because so many young people are still missing. Even though they recovered over 260 bodies, teams are here searching the ground for any traces of people. Jewellery, clothes, DNA - they’re still trying to identify the people who were killed here.
On the 7th October, at 6:30am Hamas militants attacked a music festival in southern Israel. Young Israelis; Christians, Jews and Arabs were killed. These were kids who were just partying, blowing off steam. They weren’t political. They were here because they were celebrating. Having been blowing off a lot of steam at festivals myself this summer, it’s hard not to relate to that.
We know at 6:30am people would have been building to the peak of the party. The sun is coming up. It was a beautiful morning, just like today. When the rockets started some people registered the threat, others didn’t. But the rockets weren’t the threat, it was the Hamas militants coming in by foot and air. They were literally flying into the festival site to murder people that had no idea what was about to happen.
Standing here now, where people were dancing, looking over to the border of Gaza which is about 5 km away, hearing explosions around us, it’s hard to understand how a festival was allowed to happen here.
Of course I’m a complete outsider with hindsight but this space is vast and just so open. There was no place to run and take cover from the rockets and there’s also no place to hide either. It's a huge open space, I can’t even begin to imagine people who were potentially at the peak of their happiness dancing at 6:30am who turned around to see a complete nightmare.
The idea of being in your happy and safe space and having to deal with that horror is something I don't know how people who survived the attack will ever move on from.