The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Survivors carry a heavy burden back to site of festival massacre
In the dappled sunlight, Gal Dalal steps across the uneven ground where his brother was kidnapped by Hamas gunmen. He crouches beneath a rope slung between the trees before standing upright next to a campaign poster of his sibling bearing the words, “Too many days in Hamas captivity – release him home!”
It has been three months since Mr Dalal, 29, fled Hamas when they overran the Supernova music festival next to kibbutz Re’im. As he returns for the first time, the air is warm and filled with the smell of eucalyptus. But there is an unavoidable heaviness here.
“When I came here today, it was like there was a weight on my chest,” he said. “I can feel what happened here. I did not think that I would feel it so physically, but I do.”
Mr Dalal, from Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, managed to escape Hamas’s Oct 7 attack, running for eight hours before Israeli security forces found him. But his 22-year-old brother, Guy, was taken to Gaza, around five kilometres away.
The grass has grown and wildflowers have spread among the trees at the Supernova site, where militants killed 364 people and took another 140 hostage.
Since then, the bodies of those murdered, the burnt-out cars of people who tried to flee and the debris of the ransacked festival have been removed from the area. Memorials have sprung up in their place. In a clearing, families of the victims have created small shrines: candles in tins and plastic fizzy drinks bottles, white stones, olive branches.
War is not far away. The Israel Defense Forces is bombarding Gaza from positions nearby and artillery fire booms through the air every minute or so. Drones buzz overhead.
Mr Dalal wants to retrace the steps he took to flee this place – to see how it will feel to walk again on the path that took him to safety. But he does not know where it was.
“It’s here somewhere – I’m not really sure because this place seems different,” he said, wearing a black T-shirt with a photograph of his brother on it. He looks around, trying to get his bearings.
“I think it was there – there’s a valley where you can go down to a lower level,” Mr Dalal continued, pointing towards a patch of green dotted with fruit trees. “I think it was there. I also want to see how this place looks now, because I know it changed a little bit because of the green. It was burnt, and then it re-grew.”
He is not alone in returning to the festival site. Standing calmly in front of journalists at the site of his kidnap, Itay Regev recounts how he was taken from the music festival with his sister Maya and friends. At least one of them remains captive in Gaza.
“It was very important for me to be here today and share it from the bottom of my heart,” said 18-year-old Mr Regev, who was released alongside his sister during a week-long Gaza ceasefire in late November.
“I was in captivity for 54 days and every day there is like forever,” he said.
“The conditions there are very hard to survive. The hostages cannot stay there for one more second – they all have to return home now.” A hundred and thirty-six people are still being held captive by Palestinian factions in Gaza and their families are determined that they will return home alive.
Several of the relatives of hostages taken from the festival site had never been to Re’im before. But they decided to visit to remind the world of the fate of their loved ones – and to come to terms with what happened.
Yarden Gonen, 30, a nurse, sits among the trees on a patio chair. Her sister Romi, 23, was shot and then kidnapped from the site on Oct 7. She had wanted to come in the first weeks after the massacre, but hesitated. “I don’t know why I didn’t do it until now,” she said. “I think I was a bit afraid because it’s so beautiful, and you cannot understand how something so horrible happened here.”
How does she feel, seeing the place where her sister was taken? “It feels confusing to be here,” she said, struggling to light her cigarette in the breeze. “I am happy to be here to see here, to see where this took place, but I had flashbacks, as if I had been there.”
The families of hostages want a plan from the Israeli government for the return of their loved ones, and also greater international pressure brought to bear on Hamas through countries with influence, including Qatar; the nation hosts Hamas’s political wing and was instrumental in the deal that resulted in 100 hostages, including Mr Regev, being released.
As the day continues, more people arrive at the site to pay their respects to those who were killed there. Arriving in buses and desert buggies, they gather alongside the small memorials, reading the lists of names.
A reservist translates a Hebrew poem on a sign hammered into the soil. “There are flowers whose melody is endless.” For survivors and families of the hostages, it is hard to move on from this place.