The Nova festival
October 7, 2023
On the morning of 7 October 2023, during the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, Hamas's military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, attacked the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, the Nova festival, an open-air trance music festival near kibbutz Re'im in the Eshkol Regional Council, about five kilometres from the Gaza border. It was one part of the wider assault on southern Israel that day. 378 people were killed at the festival or close to it, 344 civilians and 34 security personnel, and 44 were taken hostage. It was the deadliest single site of the 7 October attacks and the deadliest attack on a concert ever recorded.
The festival had begun the evening before, 6 October, as a weekend gathering at the end of Sukkot. The organisers had moved it to this site only two days earlier. There were several stages, camping, food and bars, and about 3,500 people, most of them young Israelis in their twenties and thirties from across the country. Police and security were present. It was billed as a celebration of friends, love and infinite freedom. Investigations later concluded that the attackers most likely did not know the festival was there; they appear to have turned toward it after seeing the crowd on the way to other targets.
At about 6:30 a.m. a rocket barrage began, covering the infiltration, and the sirens sounded. Around 6:35 the senior police commander on duty, Deputy Superintendent Nivi Ohana, ordered the event shut down and the crowd sent out along Route 232, a decision that let most of those there begin to leave. By about 7:00 people were being directed out. Many who fled north or south along the highway ran into fire from gunmen who had taken the junctions and set ambushes. Police opened a dirt track east through the fields, and thousands escaped toward Patish on foot or by car. Dozens of cars were left behind along Route 232 and on the grounds.
The main attacking force, more than a hundred men of the 1st and 3rd companies of Hamas's Nuseirat Battalion in pickup trucks and on motorcycles, had been heading for Netivot. Seeing the festival, they turned. By about 8:00 to 8:20 they were fighting police at a roadblock near the site with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. An Israeli tank that arrived under heavy fire, most of its crew already killed or wounded, slowed them for a time before it was forced to pull back south. As the perimeter collapsed, the gunmen entered the grounds at around 9:00 to 9:15. They set up a command post, shot people who had stayed or come back, and hunted those hiding in bushes, orchards, portable toilets, dumpsters and under structures. An ambulance where about twenty people had taken shelter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and most inside were killed. Hostages were seized on the highway and on the grounds. Rape and mutilation are documented in survivor testimony, by emergency responders and by later investigations, and the attackers spread video of the killings and abductions.
At about 9:50 the main force withdrew toward Be'eri to join other units. A second wave of armed and unarmed men from Gaza reached the site around 10:20 and looted the dead. The first large Israeli reinforcements, from the Givati Brigade among others, arrived after 11:30, fought the remaining attackers and had cleared the area by about 3:00 p.m. Around twenty of the attackers were killed in the fighting at the festival.
Of the 378 killed, 171 died on the festival grounds or the stretch of Route 232 beside them; the rest were killed or taken farther away across the Gaza envelope as they fled. The 34 security personnel included off-duty soldiers who had come to dance, police officers, many of them killed fighting, and two Shin Bet agents. Among the dead were the festival's organisers Osher and Michael Vaknin, journalists, and people of many nationalities. The 44 hostages were Israelis and dual nationals; releases, rescues and the recovery of remains went on over the months and years that followed, until the last living hostage of the war came home in October 2025 and the last remains were recovered soon after.
The Nova festival was the largest killing of civilians at any single site on 7 October, carried out while the nearby kibbutzim, among them Be'eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz and Holit, were under attack at the same time. Early counts varied, from at least 260 bodies recovered from the grounds to 364 in November 2023, before the final toll of 378 was established. What happened there has been recorded in survivor testimony, military inquiries, criminal investigations, films and memorial exhibitions.
