Friday May 24 2024: Jerusalem Post: Nova Festival attack survivors struggle with lingering trauma and diminishing mental health care.
In the aftermath of the terror attack at the Nova music festival, survivors and experts call for sustained mental health care and support.
The aftermath of the October 7 terror attack at the Nova music festival in southern Israel is still haunting the survivors. During a recent parliamentary hearing in Israel, one survivor, Guy Ben-Shimon, revealed that nearly 50 survivors had since taken their own lives due to the trauma they experienced during the attack.
The issue of survivors’ mental state cannot be ignored, and the survivors need support and care even now, more than half a year later, as the post-traumatic stress keeps haunting them.
Israel's news service, the Media Line spoke with some of the survivors of the Nova festival to hear their heart-wrenching stories and to the National Resilience Center director, Reut Lev, to gain an in-depth understanding of the situation. According to Lev, experts see that most of the survivors are still experiencing trauma.
“Survivors are still feeling it and not recovering. We are doing a lot of things to take care of them and their families, and there is a lot of treatment going on—talk therapy, art therapy, music therapy, and group therapy. We’re trying to offer a wide variety of interventions, and of course, working with the families is extremely important,” she said.
Lev explained that the survivors had witnessed extremely difficult things, and living through such events would take a much longer time to recover from. “It’s not going to be a short-term intervention, which is why we are also offering other techniques, retreats, and working with families,” she said.
Lev emphasized that the Israeli government and the health care system must consider long-term treatments. “We need more sessions with survivors than we thought we would at the beginning. A lot of them are still reluctant to leave their homes, so they have not even begun therapy. We need to find a way to help them. The whole process will take a long time,” she admitted.
It is known that many of the victims left Israel in an attempt to escape the trauma they had experienced. Although we tried to contact some of these people, they refused to talk. However, other survivors of the Nova festival bravely described their experience.
Twenty-six-year-old Bar Aharoni started to leave the festival at 6:50 a.m. on Oct. 7, after hearing the rockets launched into Israel from Gaza. Trying to get through the crowd, she got lost but reached her friend and got into the car.
“We got on the road and started driving towards Kibbutz Be’eri. We saw many cars in front of us, which looked like a police checkpoint. We opened the window to see what was happening and realized it was not a police checkpoint. It was a group of terrorists,” she shared with The Media Line.
Aharoni recalled that while trying to escape, the group made a U-turn and drove for a while but couldn’t find their way out. During the chaos, Aharoni’s face was injured.
“I remember having blood all over my clothes. I can recall that my friends, Shan and Ravin, got out of the vehicle. I was also trying to get out, but when I opened the door, I saw a terrorist running and shooting. I panicked, closed the door, and tried to get out from the other side, but my leg got tangled in one of our bags. Shan came and helped me get out, and then we managed to make it to the shelter,” she said.
Aharoni explained that the shelter was full of people, so she and her friends had to stand close to the entrance, hoping they would survive.
“Everyone inside was hysterical, people were shouting. We heard the explosions and gunshots, noises of war, we saw terrorists and soldiers. It felt like a horror movie. We thought we would die,” Aharoni said.
Aharoni spent about an hour and a half at the shelter, and this is when she and her friends saw a car full of wounded soldiers who were evacuating.
“After we saw another vehicle of soldiers. They told everyone who was wounded to come and drive after them. We were very lucky to get out of the shelter because it was a ticking time bomb,” she recalled. Soon after they left, the shelter was attacked by terrorists.
Aharoni and her friends managed to get out but had to stop at a gas station near Sa’ad.
“Inside the station, everything was full of blood, and there were many more injured people from the party. The station worker helped me with my injury. I called my parents for the first time to tell them where I was; until then, they didn’t know,” she said.
Martin Blackham Israel First TV Program www.israelfirst.org