OCTOBER 7 – Hila and Na’ama: Israel and diaspora be united
In Rome, two Nova festival survivors tell their story

“My name is Hila, I am 26 years old. On October 7, I had a shift at the Nova festival from 11:30 p.m. to 8:30 a.m.” Thus began the testimony of two Israeli girls who survived the slaughter perpetrated at the music festival near Kibbutz Re’im. An event organized to correspond with the last days of the Jewish New Year holidays, which ended with the death of 364 staff and participants following the attack unleashed by Hamas on southern Israel. Hila and Na’ama recounted how they emerged from that pogrom Sunday night in Rome, at the Pitigliani cultural center, during an event organized with the support of the World Zionist Organization and the intergenerational Zionist association Brit Am, among others. On stage, moderating the two young women’s speeches were Italian-American journalist Anselma Dell’Olio and Silvia Mosseri for Brit Am.
Hila is convinced that it was the manager of the festival organization to save her life. When the missile alert started, he kept her in the rave party area for an hour. For the rest of the time Hila always ran, first by car and then on foot, then back in her car, desperately looking for a way out among the rows of cars of young people fleeing the horror. On her night march Hila encountered “a policeman bleeding from the mouth, people screaming, a girl in an ambulance shouting that she could no longer feel her legs, people hiding behind cars machine-gunned by bullets. I see a girl wounded in her legs but her friends help her, I keep running. I hide in a hollow in the ground. I see my friend Bar. I call her, we run together to the east, to Ofakim as the police told us.”
Then a big blackout. Hila has repressed the horror of what she saw but remembers the sounds of the massacre: the terrorists’ laughter and shouts of “Allahu akhbar.” “We ran for over five hours, drinking dirty water. We arrived at kibbutz Patish. From there to Beer Sheva and from Beer Sheva to Tel Aviv.” In the evening Hila arrived home. She was not hurt but she was in shock. My story is a “good” story, she said. The shock, however, continued. For in the evening “I get videos of friends who have been kidnapped, and videos of my friends who are gone. I have lost six friends; three others are among the hostages in Gaza. One is my friend Noa Argamani, and we all know what they do to women my age. Another is her boyfriend Avinadav. Then there is Alexander Lobanaov, the manager who saved my life and whose wife had a baby two months ago.”

Naama’s testimony

“At 6:30 a.m. there was so much traffic we didn’t know where to go. We hear gunshots. One guy tells us to run and we all go in different directions. I went back into the middle of the rave. Someone pushed me into a garbage can where I hid with about 30 people for six hours. At noon a girl moves a leg: I tell her to be quiet, but a terrorist hears us, opens the dumpster and shoots.” Na’ama takes four AK bullets moving through her now scarred body. “I realize I am dying and with my left hand I call my mom to say goodbye. Then I send my location to the Nova organization’s Whatsapp group.” She remains hidden under the trash. Hours later her friend Ron and another manager, injured, hoist her out by laying her on the ground. “Ron was later kidnapped and is still in Gaza. I’m lying on the ground and I see two terrorists trying to shoot an Rpg but the soldier there kills them.”
Meanwhile, a paramedic stops the bleeding in her left leg but not in her right leg. “An ambulance arrives but has no medicine, then a second, then a third. I arrived at the hospital at 3:30 p.m. but I had lost half of my blood. I lost consciousness and had surgery. I was in bed for two months. I have big scars that hurt, pressing on my nerve endings. They don’t let me sleep. I lost five friends.”
Today Hila and Na’ama are doing physical and mental rehabilitation. Talking helps, they say, and once a week they meet with other former employees of Nova, which has now become a self-help foundation. “Among ourselves, we don’t need to talk but we take courage.”
Hila can no longer study “because when I sit down, I get panic attacks. I cannot even work.” And although she is the traumatized one, she adds, “We Israelis want you Diaspora Jews not to feel alone: we are with you.” Then she resumes, “I used to always go shopping in the Arab village of Kfar Qassem, but now when I hear Arabic being spoken, I get terrified. I went to talk to the doctor about it, but he was not there because he had been recalled as a reservist: in his place was an Arab doctor who was kind. They don’t all want to kill us, I know. But I am still afraid.”
Na’ama sees it no differently. “I cannot work, I am in too much pain and I think all the time about my friends. Before October 7 I had Arab friends: today I had a coffee in Rome, I heard Arabic spoken and I had a panic attack.” And if Hila says she is afraid of everything, “driving, the desert, hearing people talk Arabic,” but wants to stay in Israel, Na’ama explains that she cannot imagine “raising children in a country where they can come back home with four bullets in their bellies because they went dancing.”
At the end of the meeting, Hila and Na’ama answered questions from representatives of Jewish youth movements. “Beware of social media,” they warned. “Did you know that social censors pro-Israel content?”