‘These people were sick’: Visiting survivors plead for October 7 not to be forgotten

Mazal Tazazo would not be alive today unless she had played dead.

On October 7 last year, the 34-year-old was partying with friends at the Nova music festival in southern Israel, about five kilometres from the border with Gaza. “The night was amazing: love, peace, everybody smiling,” the architecture graduate remembers. “Arabs, Jews, Christians, black, white.”

October 7 attack survivors Mazal Tazazo and Remo Salman El-Hozayel are visiting Australia to tell their stories.Credit: Kate Geraghty

About 6.30am, the sound of trance music was replaced by gunshots and rocket fire as Hamas militants streamed into the festival site and began firing at the partygoers. As bullets flew everywhere, one of the militants hit Tazazo in the back of her head with a rifle. She felt her legs being bound together with rope, and blood pooling around her torso. She thought she may never again see her son, then aged nine. “I knew I needed to play dead, so I held my breath,” she says. One of the terrorists approached her, decided she was dead and untied the rope.

After losing and then regaining consciousness, she ran to a nearby car, curling up in a ball on the back seat until the violence subsided. Her friends, Danielle and Yochai, were not so lucky. Both were among the estimated 364 festival attendees who died that day. A friend of a friend with whom she was dancing at the festival died after being taken into Gaza as a hostage. Her body remains there.

“These people were really, really sick,” Tazazo says of the militants who killed her friends. She massages her temples with her long acrylic nails as she talks, grasping for words to describe the horror.

Tazazo is in Sydney this week on a visit organised by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. “I want the world to remember what happened on October 7,” she says, when asked why she has made the trip. The fact some people deny female partygoers were raped and mutilated that day – or see it as a justified act of resistance – drives her mad.

Mazal Tazazo on the day of the October 7 attacks at the Nova music festival in southern Israel.

She also wants to clear up misconceptions she often hears about her country. “Many people don’t understand that not only white Jews live in Israel,” says Tazazo, an Ethiopian-Israeli Jew whose parents migrated to Israel in the 1980s.

Accompanying Tazazo is Remo Salman El-Hozayel, a Muslim Bedouin Israeli police officer. He was at the festival to provide security. El-Hozayel arrived for his shift eight minutes before the massacre started. He says it was just him and about 35 fellow cops against about 350 fighters, including from Hamas’ Nukhba special forces unit. The police officers carried pistols; the Hamas fighters were armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.

After he found himself separated from his colleagues, El-Hozayel ran to a black car. Remarkably, the door was unlocked and the key in the ignition. He spent the morning ferrying survivors from the festival grounds to a nearby greenhouse he used as a safe zone.

“I would fight and rescue, fight and rescue,” he says. His wife called him in tears, begging him to come home because his three children were waiting. He stayed at the festival site, telling her “I have a mission to do”.

“None of us can ever forget that terrible day, it will stay with us forever,” says El-Hozayel, who has been hailed as a hero in Israel for his efforts to keep people alive.

“The terrorists didn’t care if you were Muslim, Christian, Jew — they wanted to kill as many people as they could, kidnap as many people as they could, and cause as much destruction as they could.”

The eight months that followed have brought more bloodshed. Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, and left Israel increasingly isolated on the international stage as it defends itself against genocide charges at the International Court of Justice.

October 7 attack survivor Mazal Tazazo holds a pendant given to her by a fellow survivor of the Nova festival massacre.Credit: Kate Geraghty

A rare good news story for Israelis came earlier this month when the Israel Defence Forces pulled off a rescue mission that returned four hostages to Israel. Among them was Noa Argamani, 26, who became world-famous after being filmed when she was abducted from the Nova festival on a motorcycle.

While others have questioned the human cost of the rescue – Gazan health officials say 274 Palestinians died during the operation – Tazazo says she was happy to see her compatriots brought home alive.

She has little hope, however, of a ceasefire deal that would lead to the release of an estimated 120 remaining hostages. Hamas this month rejected a comprehensive ceasefire offer outlined by US President Joe Biden and backed by the United Nations Security Council.

“I believe [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is really happy that the world is against us right now,” Tazazo says. “He doesn’t care about the civilians. He knows that once he releases the hostages, he loses his power.”

Before October 7, she liked to imagine the day Israeli and Palestinian leaders would strike a peace agreement, allowing civilians to travel back and forth safely over the Gaza border. That hopeful vision now feels like fantasy, overwhelmed by her fear that the world is beginning to forget the brutal violence committed by Hamas.

Around her neck she wears a metal chain, given to her by a fellow Nova festival survivor. “We will dance again,” it reads.

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