‘Why, Lord, why?’ The moment the music stopped

Re’im: This was the moment the music stopped and the world changed forever. At 6.29am on the dusty brown dirt as the sun began to rise and rockets appeared in the dawn sky above southern Israel. A celebration of friendship, love and liberation that became a scene of carnage. A music festival that turned into a killing field, and now, a memorial site.

A year on from that day, family and friends of the 364 people who died at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, have gathered here in the pre-dawn darkness to remember their loved ones. At the exact moment the final song – a pounding bass-heavy trance track – played 12 months ago, it again fills the air. As the loudspeakers go silent, you can hear the sobs of grieving mothers and the thud of Israeli artillery being fired in Gaza, just five kilometres away. A reminder of how violent this patch of earth remains.

On the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack, Rachel Moshe mourns her son Oz Ezra at his shrine at the site of the Nova music festival.Credit: Kate Geraghty

This was the deadliest place to be on the deadliest day for civilians in Israeli history, when Hamas militants stormed across the border on paragliders, motorcycles and trucks and started spraying bullets everywhere.

The terror group apparently had no idea the festival was happening when they planned their attack, but they took advantage of the crowd of thousands of confused, and in some cases intoxicated, partygoers they found. Forty hostages were also kidnapped and taken over the border, with 18 remaining there until today. Israelis celebrated in June when the Israel Defence Forces pulled off a rescue mission at a refugee camp in Gaza that safely returned four kidnapped festival attendees. They included Noa Argamani, 26, who became world-famous after being filmed when she was abducted from the music festival on a motorcycle.

Among those in the crowd paying tribute is Moti Harlev, who came to mourn his daughter Hila Keilin. The divorced mother of four had turned 41 two days earlier and came to the Nova festival to celebrate the occasion. After arriving at 5am, Keilin managed to escape from the festival grounds in her car, but was murdered 20 kilometres away. Now her father visits the memorial site every fortnight to keep her memory alive.

“This place is a modern Holocaust,” Harlev says, holding back tears as his grandchildren stand beside him, looking at photos of a mother they will never be able to hug again.

“I am the son of Holocaust survivors, and now I’m living in the Holocaust of the present.”

Harlev points towards a eucalyptus tree he planted nearby in his daughter’s honour. Gum trees flourish here in the Negev Desert, just as they do in Australia, a country he used to regularly visit in his defence industry job. Nearby, a group of young people gaze admiringly at a tribute to their friend. He died with eight bullet holes in his body after trying to shield his girlfriend from attack. Despite his efforts, she died from a single bullet wound.

You knew it before you arrive, but feel it in your gut as you look around at row after row of photo tributes. Just how young most of the people here were – in their 20s and 30s mostly. So full of potential, so full of hope when their lives were brutally snuffed out.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog is here to pay respects, but it is a low-key occasion. After a heated debate about how to mark the first anniversary, the Israelis most affected by the attacks largely opted for small, and in some cases private, commemorations to remember the estimated 1200 people who died in total that day.

A nearby ceremony at Kfar Aza, a kibbutz near the Gaza border where about 60 people were killed on October 7, was disrupted when attendees were forced to scamper to bomb shelters as air raid sirens rang out. Outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s home in Jerusalem, a group of hostage families has gathered to demand he strike another ceasefire deal with Hamas so that their loved ones can hopefully return home.

As she tends to the tributes to her late son Oz Ezra and his girlfriend at the Nova site, Rachel Moshe hugs and pats their photos as if they are living and breathing. She howls in pain as if she has been stabbed in the chest, wailing: “Why, Lord, why?” Grief can be as painful as any wound. And yet somehow she has to go on, to live another day without the young man she brought into this world and loved so much.

As the sun rises in the sky, a man nearby, perhaps, offers a clue. “You only have one life,” his white T-shirt reads. “Just f---ing do it.”

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