‘I was on the ground praying to God’
A year on, Oct 7 survivor Mazal Tazazo recounts events at the Nova music festival during Hamas’ attack on Israel in 2023
“I have nightmares every day; it was as if I was killed, and today I have to be reborn,” Mazal Tazazo tells Kathimerini. On October 7, 2023, she was with her friends at the Nova music festival in Israel when the terrorists attacked. She pretended to be dead as Hamas men were killing anyone in their path nearby. Her friends Danielle Cohen and Yohai-Ben Zecharia were among the 364 victims of the festival, while she managed to survive with severe physical injuries. A year later, Mazal recalls the wild images that unfolded in the festival’s surroundings in an interview that halted several times due to the emotional strain.
On October 6, Mazal visited the Nova music festival with her friends Danielle and Yohai. Under the theme “friendship, love, and infinite freedom,” the festival was held in the Negev Desert, a distance of 5 km from the Gaza-Israel border. As Mazal recounts, “I had participated in the Nova festival three times before, so we bought the tickets three months before the event.”
“The party was amazing and the night was beautiful because we were like a family. The last video I shot was at 6.20 in the morning and then I went to my tent to get my sunglasses. At that moment I hear the sirens going off and I see people crying. However, I was more relaxed because I live in the town of Netivot near Gaza and I was saying it was only rockets. Nothing foreshadowed what happened.”
At the moment of the first rockets, hundreds of Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israeli territory toward the kibbutzim of Kfar Aza, Beeri and Re’im, while armed terrorists parachuted in near the festival at 6.30 a.m.
“The security guard came with some other guys and they told us we should leave, get our stuff and go home. Suddenly we hear the sounds of rockets being fired, and the music has stopped.
“Around 7.20 we start driving from the festival road to the main road, but we get stuck in traffic. At that moment we start hearing gunshots and we wonder, ‘What is going on?’ We do not understand what has happened and we try to get through the traffic jam. We move the car sideways and try to get through the trees. However, the car got stuck because there were big potholes and it could not move.”
“The shots are getting closer and closer,” Mazal continues, “and we start to see police officers shooting and getting closer and closer and we still do not understand what is happening. We hear the police officers getting closer and screaming at each other and the shooting continues to the left. We are still stuck in the side street of the festival and the shots can be heard on the main street.
“We hid behind the car until we realized that all the cars in front of us were abandoned and people were running away because they saw the terrorists. We need time before we realize that something is really happening and that we need to get out of this place, abandon the car and run down the street in the hope that there are more police officers.
“So, we abandon our car and run towards the main road and we realize we are being shot at. The terrorists are coming from all sides; we duck and crawl between the cars. They kept shooting at us from all directions and we hid in the bushes that were on the side of the road. At that moment we begin to hear the voices of the Arabs approaching and they continue to shoot, we are afraid.”
‘I am afraid to be in this world where there is madness. And all this for what? Because I am an Israeli and a Jew?
The knock on the head
“In the bushes, Danielle and Yohai covered their bodies and I did the same, but I did not feel safe in that position and I turned my body to protect my head so my face was facing the ground. After a few seconds, the terrorists come. They shout in English, ‘Get up, get up!’ and one of them takes the back of his gun and bashes me in the head. Everything goes black, they even hit my arm and now I am unconscious.
“After a while my consciousness comes back, I keep pretending to be dead and I feel someone stretching my legs and start to tie me with ropes to something. Right now, I do not know what to do. All I know is that I have to pretend I am dead and they start talking to each other in Arabic. One of them comes over to me and grabs my face, I try not to move, he looks at me to see if I am dead and sees me in my white shirt with the blood from my head. He probably assumed I was dead and left me on the ground. They left the ropes that had tied me up and left.
“I was badly beaten,” Mazal stresses, noting that “my head was open and I was sure I was going to die. I did not understand what was happening, I was on the ground praying to God. I was losing consciousness.
“I wake up after two hours, at about 11.30 and the first thing I do is call my friend Danielle. I call out, ‘Danielle, Danielle,’ and she does not answer. I pick up her head and I see that she is dead. I look to my right and see Yohai next to me, also dead. I do not understand what is going on… I only know that I am alone and I am talking to God, asking him to please stop this illusion. The shooting doesn’t stop and I feel someone coming towards me again. I am sure it is a terrorist and he started looking at my body and I pretend I am not breathing.
“After 15 minutes I feel that there is someone hiding in the bushes further away who is not a terrorist,” Mazal recalls and testifies: “I shake my head carefully and I see a 22-year-old girl who was at the Nova festival and lost her friends. She looked to see if I had my phone on me and at first, she couldn’t find it because I had fallen on it. She was sure I was dead and she saw that they killed my friend Yohai. She finally finds the phone and sends a WhatsApp message with our location.
“While she was talking on the phone, I felt something was happening and I looked around and saw fire. The terrorists had set the bushes on fire and were burning everything. The fire started coming from the sides towards us and it started scaring me more than the terrorists on the road. I say to the girl, ‘I am coming out.’ I see an abandoned car and I run, I do not think about it, I saw the fire and I would rather take a bullet than be burned alive and I ran…
“I open the back door of the car, get in and sit on the floor with my hands on my head like a ball so I can’t be seen through the windows. I find a blanket and cover myself up. I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me, only that there are cars burning and explosions. The terrorists keep shooting, sometimes closer and sometimes further away. And suddenly an angel opens the front door. His name is Itai and he was at the festival like me, hiding in the bushes.
“The girl I had found in the bushes would not come out; she was afraid of the terrorists and was burned a little by the fire that had now reached us. However, the moment the terrorists started to move away from that spot, she also came out and they took me, we found their car and went to a safe place.
“I must tell you that all the people hiding in the bushes died. I saw people shot, probably friends, because they were sitting side by side and they were covered in blood.
“At 3 p.m. we spoke to someone on the phone and they told us how to get to the hospital safely. As we were moving, we saw bodies in the street. I do not know how we managed to get out of that place and I cannot explain how I am here today, only God knows.
“At the hospital, they operated on me and I am waiting to have another surgery but it is nothing because my friend (Yohai) was found after a week burnt to death.”
A year after the horrors of October 7, Mazal describes the most difficult moment as seeing her friend Yohai dead. “I have nightmares every day,” she explains emotionally. “I think about them all day and it gets harder when it gets dark.”
“They killed me that day and today I have to be reborn and start all over again,” she adds, noting: “I am afraid to be in this world where there is madness. And all this for what? Because I am an Israeli and a Jew? There were Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and people from outside the country at the party and [the terrorists] only wanted us to suffer.”
Today, with more than 100 prisoners in Gaza, Mazal is appealing to the international community. “I do not understand how we are negotiating for human life as if we are negotiating for money or land,” she stresses, adding with indignation: “We are struggling to bring our people back and you have to be with us because we are also people who are stepping on this land and right now in Gaza two baby children are being held captive and some people are coming out and telling the world that we are doing genocide while we are informing them before we attack to evacuate their areas. On the contrary, no one informed me before they killed my friends.”
