Natalie Sanandaji fled death at the hands of gunmen multiple times.
Early in October, Jews in Israel were dancing and singing—from synagogues celebrating Simchat Torah, the Jewish festival commemorating the completion of the weekly readings of the Torah—to attendees at the Nova Music Festival.
That was until Hamas launched terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 culminating in the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Natalie Sanandaji was a survivor of the Nova Music Festival, a rave that turned into a nightmare.
The festival took place near Kibbutz Re’im, located in the Negev in southern Israel.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Ms. Sanandaji, 28, said she travels to Israel annually as her mother is Israeli. But she had never been there during wartime.
She was there for a friend’s wedding during the summer but stayed longer for the fall Jewish holidays and the music festival.
Ms. Sanandaji is a fan of psychedelic trance music and a month in advance decided to attend the festival, which she said had thousands of young people and was “supposed to be one of our best nights in Israel.”
She went with three Israeli friends and was the only American in the group. They “were all really excited,” she said.
Ms. Sanandaji met their friends, girls who befriended her.
“It was just such a good energy and such a happy energy and such a loving energy,” she said.
“Nobody could imagine where the night was gonna go. Nobody could have imagined the horror that was coming,” she continued.
“It drives me insane thinking back to the moments before everything happened, and how happy everyone was to be together and how much fun we were having.
“And it’s just things went completely in the opposite direction. It really drives me crazy thinking about it.”
Ms. Sanandaji said that things went south when there were a few rockets overhead.
While sporadic rocket fire is the norm in the area where the festival was, she and her friends eventually realized it was more than just a handful of them. Festival security instructed attendees to get into their cars and evacuate.
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